Charlestonia

It has been about 4 months since I posted on this blog so I thought I should make an update as I near the end of writing up all this research into a dissertation.

The video below is a recording of 'Charlestonia: A Folk Rhapsody', composed by Edmund Thornton Jenkins ('Jenks'), the son of Reverend Daniel Jenkins who began the Orphan Aid society.

It's well worth a listen and a watch, there are interesting photographs and sketches of nineteenth-century life in Charleston.

What is unique about this piece is that though George Gershwin is thought to have been the first composer to mix African-American folk influences within European classical music, Jenks can be heard doing this a few years before the famous Rhapsody in Blue was written.

Admittedly the above doesn't grip you quite as much as Rhapsody in Blue and lacks the glissando Clarinet entry at the beginning, but it is a marvellous piece of music in its own right. All the more interesting for its unique place in African-American history.


Many of Jenks' works remain unpublished and indeed this composition was found again in 1994 in Columbia College and performed first by The Charleston Symphony Orchestra. The above recording is by VocalEssence Ensemble/Philip Brunelle, in Minneapolis.

Image courtesy of John Chilton, A Jazz Nursery. 

Edmund Jenkins remained in London after the Anglo-American Exposition in 1914 which the band performed in. He considered many of the young musicians at his father's orphanage not serious enough and preferred the more favorable racial climate of Europe. Out of London's 8 million population, there were around 40,000 African-Americans: too small a number to segregate. 

He attended London's Royal Academy of Music for seven years, and became an esteemed Clarinetist and composer, winning prizes such as the Charles Lucas prize, Battison Haynes prize and the Ross scholarship.

Jenks died from appendicitis and pneumonia in 1926 at only 32 years old. His music has sadly been forgotten over time, but his legacies remain as strong as the Orphanage bands his father helped create.

The original program of the world premiere of Jenks' 'Charlestonia', performed in London's Wigmore Hall in December 1919.