Ella Jenkins

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.

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Eunice Williams Jones

While a stagecoach road was under construction from Hancock to Eagle River during the Civil War, African-American entrepreneurs Larkin J. and Eunice A. (Williams) Jones built a stagecoach inn or “half-way house” near the Houghton/Keweenaw County Line.

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Anna C Jones

While a stagecoach road was under construction from Hancock to Eagle River during the Civil War, African-American entrepreneurs Larkin J. and Eunice A. (Williams) Jones built a stagecoach inn or “half-way house” near the Houghton/Keweenaw County Line. On land they would buy from the St. Mary’s Canal Land Company, the couple began operations at their licensed hotel and saloon around 1863.

At least two published accounts relating the discovery of the Calumet Conglomerate include mentions of the Jones’ already active business. Richard Tregaskis related many years later that in 1863 he had,“started on horseback over a rough corduroy road, through dense, woods, cedar swamps and maplebrush, and stopped for a dinner at the Half-Way house, kept by a colored man named Jones.” Tregaskis then encountered the lode’s discoverers, and returned to the Half-Way house to borrow a pick and shovel in order to make a thorough examination. The Calumet Conglomerate would prove itself to be the Copper Country’s most profitable copper-bearing lode, although the exact circumstances of its “discovery” in the 1850s or 1860s has become obscured by time.

Eunice Jones passed away unexpectedly at the half-way house in 1864 at the age of 34. A few months later, Larkin Jones remarried to Anna Ward Covington. Anna was a widow of African descent who had been living in Houghton with her young daughter, Gertrude. Together, Larkin and Anna had another daughter, Hattie. Larkin worked as a barber according to census records, while Anna operated the inn.

The Jones’ marriage was in trouble by late 1870. Larkin left the household, and Anna advertised in nearby newspapers that lots for houses were for sale in the Village of Renova, a community forming on the Jones property. While most Keweenaw County mines saw fewer travelers following the Civil War, the Allouez and Kearsarge mines near the county line became active. Reflecting its business, the half-way house became a miners’ boarding house and saloon with Anna as its keeper.

Anna Ward Covington Jones maintained the house and its business licenses until her death in October of 1880 at about 42 years of age. The property then passed to her daughters, Gertrude and Hattie. Gertrude and her husband, John Phillips, moved into the boarding house, where they raised a family and continued its operation, expanding into other business efforts. Around 1910 the Phillips sold some of the original Jones land, which was subdivided. The new subdivision just south of the Houghton/Keweenaw county line gained the moniker of Phillipsville, best known by area drivers today for its former saloon and antique store emblazoned with the words “The Last Place on Earth.”

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Corinna Hinton

Corinna Hinton was an enslaved woman who bore several children with the Richmond slave trader Silas Omohundro and helped him run his business.

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Dr Carolyn Mazloomi

Regarded as the leading authority on African-American quilts and quiltmaking, Carolyn Mazloomi has fostered and promoted the perpetuation of this traditional art form through her organization the Women of Color Quilter’s Network (WCQN).

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