Ella Jenkins, First Lady of Children's Music, Passes Away at 100 Years Old

Chicago, IL – First Lady of Children’s Music Ella Jenkins (born August 6, 1924) passed away peacefully on Saturday, November 9, 2024, at the Harbors at the Admiral at the Lake in Chicago. She was 100 years old.

Known for her deceptively simple “call and response” chants and songs, Jenkins revolutionized children’s music in the United States. For nearly 70 years she was a prolific performer, composer, and recording artist, producing 39 albums on the Folkways Records and Smithsonian Folkways Recordings labels that have charmed, educated, and empowered generations of listeners. Drawing on her own history of civil rights activism in the 1940s and 1950s, Jenkins used music as a tool of social activism. Through songs and rhythms that extolled values of antiracism, cultural pluralism, and environmentalism, she drew people together, challenging them to listen deeply to one another.  

Jenkins’ notable albums include Call-and-Response Rhythmic Group Singing (1957), African American Folk Rhythms (aka Negro Folk Rhythms, from 1960), You’ll Sing a Song and I’ll Sing a Song (1966), A Long Time to Freedom (1970), Multicultural Children’s Songs (1995), and Ella Jenkins: A Life in Song (2011). Her well-known songs include “You’ll Sing a Song and I’ll Sing a Song,” “Did You Feed My Cow?” and “Miss Mary Mack.” 

For her creative work and service to children, Jenkins received dozens of accolades, including a 2004 Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award and a 1999 lifetime achievement award from the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP). In 2007, the title song of her 1966 album You’ll Sing a Song and I’ll Sing a Song was inducted into the Library of Congress’s National Recording Registry. Her version of “Wade in the Water” (from the 1960 LP African American Folk Rhythms) was incorporated into Alvin Ailey’s modern dance classic Revelations. In 2017, she was named a National Heritage Fellow by the National Endowment for the Arts.

Jenkins had a worldwide audience but was particularly beloved in Chicago, where she got her start in the early 1950s as a “rhythm specialist” and Teen Program Director for the South Parkway YWCA. For decades she performed and taught at Old Town School of Folk Music and, beginning in 1968, the annual Ravinia Music Festival. She was a favorite of Fred Rogers, appearing on Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood eight times between 1974 and 1992.

Born in 1924 in Saint Louis, Missouri, Jenkins grew up on the South Side of Chicago. She attended Herman Felsenthal Elementary School and DuSable High School. She earned a BA in sociology from San Francisco State College, after doing coursework at Chicago’s Woodrow Wilson Junior College and Roosevelt College. She was predeceased by her brother Thomas Jenkins, a pioneering African American urban planner, and survived by Bernadelle Richter, her longtime companion and manager of more than 60 years.