The Winnsboro Easter Rock Ensemble, under the direction of Hattie Addison Burkhalter, maintains a rare women-led African American traditional spiritual ritual, rooted in both Christian worship and West African ring shout tradition.
Internationally renowned kunqu (Chinese opera) singer
Catalon represents the rich tradition of home singing, in sharp contrast to Creole zydeco and Cajun dance hall music, which until recently was performed almost exclusively by men.
Renowned Hawaiian music icon
Through more than 50 years of groundbreaking efforts, Ella Jenkins, aptly nicknamed the “First Lady of Children’s Music,” laid the groundwork for the field of children’s music and inspired generations of children’s music leaders who have followed in her footsteps.
Jenkins was born to an African-American working class family in St. Louis, Missouri, on August 6, 1924. Her family moved to Chicago and Jenkins grew up on the city’s South Side, moving frequently to get to a more “uptown” neighborhood. Her family and neighborhood life provided the basis of her musical education—each move allowed Jenkins to experience the rhythms, rhymes, and games in each new neighborhood, which could be different even if only a few blocks apart. She was fascinated by her Uncle Flood, who played the harmonica, and alongside him she would tease out rhythms on oatmeal boxes, wastebaskets, and cooking pots. “I was naturally rhythmic,” she stated, “and would try to copy my uncle’s sounds by whistling. But my mother did not like it, saying good women and young girls did not whistle.” Yet it was her mother who took her to the music store to purchase her first harmonica. Her brother taught her songs he learned at summer camps.
After graduating college in San Francisco, Jenkins returned to Chicago and worked in community centers and for the YWCA where she began to create songs for children. Performing on the streets led to an appearance in 1956 on the early children’s television program Totem Club, on WTTW Channel 11, which led to This is Rhythm, her own full segment on the show. Odetta and Big Bill Broonzy made guest appearances. Since then she has been a self-employed full-time musician, traveling the world to share her music with children and to learn from them their own cultural songs and stories.
Jenkins’ work draws on African-American call and response singing—she cites Cab Calloway as an early influence. Her re-popularization of game songs from her youth like “Miss Mary Mack” and “One Potato, Two Potato” couples basic chants and movement rescued from the folklore of American play, game songs, and ring chants. Her original songs, like “Stop and Go” and “Play Your Instruments,” are direct results of her absorption of those traditions.
Her first recording, Call and Response, released in 1957 on Moses Asch’s Folkways Records (now Smithsonian Folkways Recordings) has never been out of print and remains a bestseller. Her discography currently lists 40 releases. In 1990 Jenkins received the Pioneer in Early Television Citation from the National Museum of American History. She is also the recipient of lifetime achievement awards from the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (1999) and the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences (2004). In 2009 she received a United States Artists Fellowship. Jenkins is one of only 12 persons to be recognized as a Legacy Honoree of the Smithsonian Center for Folklife & Cultural Heritage.
American Piedmont blues guitarist and singer
Fatima Kuinova was born on December 28, 1920, in Samarkand, Tajikistan, in Soviet Central Asia, one of 10 children. She grew up speaking Russian, but her cultural life was rooted in Bukharan Jewish traditions. Though her father, cantor of the local Bukharan Jewish synagogue, died when she was six years old, she credits him with her earliest and deepest musical influence. She began singing as a child and started vocal studies when she was 14, performing as a teenager in school choirs and at festivals in Dushanbe, the capital. She sang on Soviet radio as early as 1941.
Because of the widespread discrimination against Jews under Stalin, she took the name Kuinova to hide her true identity. Her Jewish name was Cohen, and throughout her life she has retained the Kuinova. She even sang for Stalin himself, but he probably didn’t know she was Jewish.
During World War II she sang for soldiers throughout Central Asia and in war zones. In 1948 she was named Honored Artist of the Soviet Union. In 1949 she began studying shashmaqam, the traditional music of her region. She worked with both Muslim and Jewish musicians. Kuinova explains that the texts, many of which date from the fifteenth century and deal with mystical love, are as important as the melodies.
Shashmaqam is related to, but recognizably different from, Persian, Ottoman, and Arabic court music. Kuinova’s repertoire reflects the multifaceted role that Bukharan Jewish singers fill in Central Asia, playing music for a wide range of functions. They were among the most distinguished musicians in the courts of the Muslim emirs and khans who ruled the region prior to its incorporation into the Soviet Union. The Bukhara emirate was taken over by the Soviet Union in 1920 and became part of the republics of Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. In the Soviet period, traditional singers worked alongside Uzbek and Tajik musicians in radio station ensembles, music schools, and concert halls. They also provided music for a variety of ceremonial and ritual occasions in the Jewish community and for the majority Moslem population. Since the 1920s, when the musical tradition was first documented by Soviet ethnomusicologists, it has been transcribed and taught from one generation to the next.
In some ways similar to the Indian raga, maqam (as it is known among Arabic, Turkish, and Central Asian Jewish peoples) or dastgah (among Persians) is based on a system of modal scales with associated melodic themes, rhythmic modes, and extensive improvisation. Although the similarities of principles and musical practice suggest the connectedness of a great tradition shared by Ottomans, Arabs, Persians, and others, the particulars of regional and local practice vary significantly, and there are many distinctive localized styles.
For 27 years, Kuinova belonged to an ensemble of women rebab (vertical violin) players. She toured widely with her ensemble to Kiev, Leningrad (St. Petersburg), and Moscow, within the former Soviet Union, and abroad to Europe, Afghanistan, and Iran, where she sang for the late shah.
She immigrated to the United States from Tajikistan in 1980 to join relatives who were already settled in New York. There, she soon became a well-established member of the Bukharan Jewish musical community. Kuinova first worked in a trio or quartet in which her vocal line was accompanied by two or more doire — the Central Asian frame drum, or tar, a plucked-string instrument of the region — and this ensemble has become a focal point of the growing Bukharan Jewish community centered in Queens and Brooklyn.
In New York, Kuinova performs for a variety of social occasions and concert events, and she is in demand among Moslem emigrés as well as in her own community. In 1986, her shashmaqam ensemble was invited to perform in the Salute to Immigrant Cultures at the Statue of Liberty Centennial.
Eva Ybarra, the “Queen of the Accordion,” is one of only a few professional women accordionists in conjunto music. Conjunto originated in the late 19th century in working-class communities along Texas-Mexico border, and is distinct to that region. Using the accordion as the lead instrument, conjunto bands perform dance music based on Mexican and Czech-German folk forms such as the polka, mazurka, schottishe, waltz, and huapango. As the leader of Eva Ybarra y Su Conjunto, Ybarra has specialized in writing and composing original conjunto music while also exploring non-standard chord progressions, advancing the art form’s evolution.
Born on San Antonio’s westside, Ybarra was one of nine children in a musical family. She took piano lessons on her mother’s encouragement while her father also urged her to take up the accordion at age four. She taught herself by listening to the radio, old LPs, and her older brother. “I started by listening to the radio, and I learnt by ear, copying what I heard. But I didn’t want to copy anyone, I wanted my own style,” Ybarra told journalist Amanda Lozano in 2015. By age six, Ybarra’s parents were taking her to perform in venues around San Antonio.
When she was 14 years old, Ybarra was discovered while performing with her brother, Pedro, and received a record deal with Rosina Records in San Marcos, Texas. Since that first big break, she has performed and recorded many albums with her band, Eva Ybarra y Su Conjunto. In the 1990s, awareness of her stature in conjunto music grew with several notable recordings which showcased her original songs and virtuosity. Among these albums are 1993’s A Mi San Antonio (For My San Antonio), and 1996’s Romance Inolvidable (Unforgettable Romance), both released by Rounder Records.
Besides being a professional musician, Ybarra is also a music educator. In 1997, she was the artist-in-residence at the University of Washington, where she taught accordion, bajo sexto, and guitarron. She has been an accordion instructor at Palo Alto College’s (San Antonio) conjunto program. Currently, she fosters the development of other conjunto accordion players by teaching at the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center’s music education program in San Antonio. In 2016, she participated as a master teaching artist in Texas Folklife’s Apprenticeship Program.
Ybarra is in the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center Conjunto Hall of Fame (San Antonio, inducted 2003), the Tejano R.O.O.T.S Hall of Fame (Alice, Texas, inducted 2008), the Univision Salon de Fama (San Antonio, inducted 2008), and the Tejano Conjunto Music Hall of Fame and Museum (San Benito, Texas, inducted 2009). In 2015 she received the South Texas Conjunto Association Lifetime Achievement Award.
American folk and blues musician
Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield was the first African American opera singer who became popular in the United States and Europe.