Fugitive Civil Rights Pedagogy: The Life and Music of Ella Jenkins

October 22, 2025

By Gayle F. Wald

In 1957, Ella Jenkins, a self-described “rhythm specialist” from the South Side of Chicago, traveled to New York City to meet Moe Asch, the famously irascible head of Folkways Records. She was carrying a demo disk titled “Call and Response Rhythmic Group Singing.” It consisted of four short tracks on which Jenkins, playing the conga drum, led Chicago middle-schoolers through simple chants.

Asch was protective of the Folkways imprimatur. Just a few years later, in 1961, he would turn away another Midwesterner, a scruffy young Woody Guthrie-wannabe named Bob Dylan. But in Jenkins’ work Asch immediately recognized something that could serve his vision of Folkways as a purveyor of substantive—not treacly or condescending—children’s music. Her songs were intentionally simple and “unpolished,” incorporating the voices of untrained child singers. They drew on African American folk music, including play songs and work songs. And counter to the music taught to children in most U.S. schools at the time, they emphasized rhythm over melody. One song, “Tah-boo,” consisted entirely of made-up words, drawing listeners’ attention to the pleasures of sounds and rhythms in and of themselves.

Before Jenkins left Asch’s office, she had signed a contract with Folkways, launching her career as the first professional U.S. “children’s musician.” In future years, she would become Folkways’ best-selling artist. Her music would be heard and performed in schools and libraries. It would turn up in Alvin Ailey’s famous modern dance Revelations, and received a warm reception on Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.  And it would draw into her orbit an extraordinary range of twentieth-century luminaries, from musicians including Big Bill Broonzy, Pete Seeger, and Odetta to political figures including civil rights activist Bayard Rustin and Chicago mayor Harold Washington.

I didn’t grow up with the music of Ella Jenkins. But when I eventually discovered “Tah-boo,” in 2016, and subsequently met Jenkins, then 92 and living in a Chicago memory-care facility, I immediately sensed the significance of her life and work. Because children’s music lacks the cultural cachet of other popular recordings, Jenkins was simultaneously beloved and discounted, admired and undervalued. Hundreds of newspaper articles had been published about her, but few had anything to say about how she had revolutionized children’s music, entwining performance, education, and grassroots activism.

In my new biography This Is Rhythm: Ella Jenkins, Children’s Music, and the Long Civil Rights Movement, I use the phrase “fugitive civil rights pedagogy” to describe Jenkins’ approach to children’s music. She envisioned songs as tools, a means rather than an end. And her work was “fugitive” in the sense that it introduced young audiences to Black history and to the ideals of the Black freedom movement with little fanfare but profound intention. Her 1957 Folkways debut, Call-and-Response Rhythmic Group Singing,contained a spare arrangement of the haunting chain-gang song “Another Man Done Gone,” first recorded by the Alabama singer Vera Hall in the 1940s. The song referenced forms of punishment that consigned twentieth-century Black men, women, and children to lives that materially recalled enslavement. Importantly, it also celebrated escape from the chain gang, using tambourine sounds to sonically evoke jubilee.

And yet: You don’t show up to meet a person for the first time and leave that encounter as their biographer. My relationship with Ella Jenkins took time and required trust and care, especially because cognitive decline rendered her emotionally and physically vulnerable. As a white Jewish woman who came of age in the 1970s, I did not share Jenkins’ life experiences as a Black woman growing up in the era of segregation, but over time she opened up to me nonetheless. Her willingness to share both her personal archive and her memories—happy, sad, and otherwise—made it possible for me to portray her as complex, multi-faceted, and deeply human.

At times, capturing the sheer richness of Jenkins’ story felt like a challenge. She is the only Black woman to have received lifetime achievement awards for performance (a lifetime Grammy) and publishing (a lifetime award from ASCAP, an association representing songwriters). Her career crossed media forms, and included pioneering stints as a Chicago TV host and a radio deejay. At a key turning-point in her career, she turned down the legendary music manager Albert Grossman’s offer to make her a commercial star. (He moved on to others, including Dylan.) She spent more than sixty years with a white female partner, living a “quiet” life that flouted regressive laws as well as social norms.

Ella Jenkins died at the age of 100 on August 6, 2024, while This Is Rhythm was in production, but I like to think that she would have been tickled to hold it in her hands. As a little girl she never would have imagined that someone would want to write a book about her.

Nor would she have imagined that in August 2025, the City of Chicago would dedicate a portion of North Mohawk Street, near the house where she lived for many decades, as “Ella Jenkins Street.” After a group of children pulled the string that unveiled the sign, the crowd that had gathered to celebrate her cheered and sang, and then walked the three blocks to Ella Jenkins Park, a nearby verdant oasis, for refreshments and more music. It was the kind of celebration that Jenkins—a singer whose simple songs fostered community while countering the erasure of African American and other histories—would have appreciated.

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