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Many of Jenks' works remain unpublished and indeed this composition was found again in 1994 in Columbia College and performed first by The Charleston Symphony Orchestra.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.

Showmen

I am so happy to say that I finally have permission to use some of the photographs of the band!

I'm still in the process of gaining permission for one or two of the best ones; and unfortunately I can't get permission for my personal favourite photograph which is very clear, but obviously understandable as the collections at Avery are still largely unprocessed.

Most of the ones I have are undated, and nearly all come from the Charleston Jazz Initiative collections in the College of Charleston (including the one below).

So here is just a taster of one image of the the Jenkins Orphanage Band from the Anglo-American Exposition during 1914...

As is seen here, the conductor was usually always a small boy who often performed tricks such as cartwheels whilst the band played. The band were taught to be great showmen and knew how to attract an audience!

King George V was so impressed with the band that he requested a private concert while they were in London, but unfortunately this had to be called off after Great Britain declared war on Germany.

Piecing the story together

I'm spending some time sorting through my notes and have come across a few things I wrote down which I wanted to share here.

Firstly a snippet from a 1989 newspaper article; the Charleston Messenger on Saturday 7th May reported about the new industrial buildings on Jenkins' farm ''where criminals and little vicious boys can be put to work for themselves and be made to earn their own bread by the sweat of their brow... it makes one feel that God is conducting the whole affairs of the Jenkins Orphanage'' - sadly a view reflected by many white people at the time, and ironic that the Reverend Jenkins himself was such a religious man and strove so hard to give these children a better chance in life than the hand they'd been dealt.

Jenkins was a very humble man and thanked 'good white and colored citizens, one and all' for their help in his achievements in the orphanage. One thing I came across in several different articles/reports was his concern for children's lungs and their health: he thought, and was probably correct, that children learning wind and brass instruments would strengthen their lungs and so make them less susceptible to lung-related illness.
'I promised God when I started out to build an orphanage that I would give the boys and girls plenty of corn bread and molasses, and other things whenever I could, and make them work for a living.' (Charleston Sunday News and Courier, May 16th, 1926). Nobody can deny that he achieved these promises. In 1895 the orphanage was damaged in a storm and Jenkins took some band members North to raise funds for repairs - he said 'I felt that I had rather die than return to Charleston without the money to cancel the debt.' (John Chilton, A Jazz Nursery: The Story of the Jenkins' Orphanage Bands).

If anyone has a Time magazine subscription, there is a great article on Daniel Jenkins here from August 26th, 1935 - http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,748914,00.html

I don't unfortunately so can't read it again, but I was able to read a photocopy of the article in the Avery research center in Charleston.

In the same year the Times article was written, an Associated Press sports writer called Edward J Nell wrote an article which again paints a clear picture of the orphans. He said 'a negro jazz band rolled up to Max Baer's camp at Speculator the other day and insisted on serenading him... there were fifteen of the funniest looking darkies you ever saw. They were from the Jenkins Colored Orphan asylum in Charleston, South Carolina... the truck was coming apart and the wheels were falling off... the negros played their hearts out. They were very happy.' - another stereotypical, mildly but probably unintentionally racist account written by a white man which portrays the poor conditions the orphans live in, but also the way they had been brought up by Jenkins to be grateful for what they had.

Chilton described Daniel Jenkins as a very striking man over six feet tall with a blue-black complexion.  He called the children his 'black lambs' which has been used in many articles and references to the orphans.

Jenkins' life was not an easy one, as anyone might imagine. He was arrested in London in 1895 for creating a spectacle of himself by bringing over an all-black orphan band to play in the streets, and was accused of illegally exploiting children. (Sometimes these old laws surprise me how they could arrest a man for 'exploitation' and yet not too long before kept slaves themselves. The age-old irony.) His wife Lena Jenkins was very ill by the time a new secretary, Eloise Harleston, came to travel with the band as a secretary and publicist: a scandal was created when Eloise became pregnant with Jenkins' baby. She had to move to the UK to have the baby, a little girl named Olive. Eloise and Daniel married in 1912 after his wife Lena passed away. The band were also stranded in England for several months in 1914 when the first world war broke out and travel in and out of England was temporarily halted. Jenkins ended up lending some money to some fellow Americans who could not get home either as they were not allowed to use their foreign paper money until wartime relations settled.

And then there were scandals within the bands themselves: one member was imprisoned in 1919 after stabbing another man in the neck. Some very touching stories from the orphanage have been told by John Dowling, who had his hat spat in by a white man when he offered it round for collections. He remembered ''Now, we were schooled in every way and geared up for anything that might happen. I can remember the tears coming in my eyes as I tried not to cry. But I took my handkerchief, wiped out my hat, and turned to walk away. The man reached out and tugged my coat. When I turned around he put five dollars in the hat.''

I've found so many more of these stories and memories that give glimpses into the lives of these orphans, and of the music they they charmed so many hearts with.

'Born perhaps of the dire conditions in which they found themselves in, the orphans' music was infused with a kind of soulfulness that was not lost of the casual listener.' (The Jenkins Orphanage Bands Viewers Guide). 

As I continue my research, I will write another post soon on the music the band played, their influences, and how they in turn have had a largely unacknowledged impact on the development of Jazz music in the rest of the US and the world.

'The flash and dash'

Hi!

I'm currently posting from our hotel in Birmingham, Alabama. Things are going good here in the US, we're just getting into the travelling life and now only have a week left which is sad. I knew that I wouldn't want to come back! We still have 8 days; today and tomorrow in Birmingham, 5 in New Orleans, and nearly three days back with our family friends in Washington D.C to finish off the trip.
I last posted after we'd been in Richmond on our first day, and a lot has happened since then, I'm not the best at posting regularly... Richmond's Civil War Museum at Historic Tredegar Iron Works was wonderful, and made me very excited for studying my civil war module in September. We also paddled in the James river where British America was first founded: we walked along a pipeline underneath a traintrack over the river to find a sandy cove and some rocks where many people were sunbathing. It was supposedly an official trail, but it makes you wonder when you looked down at the river and realised that if someone fell off, as there were no railings, there is no way they'd get back onto the pipe which is a few feet above water level! Public safety in America doesn't seem to be #1 priority; last night leaving Charleston I asked the Greyhound bus driver where the seatbelts were, who just laughed and replied ''Watchyou want seatbelt's for? You plannin' on fallin' down or somethin'?'' !

 The James River

Williamsburg was our next point of call, me and Joseph both agree it was one of the highlights of our holiday. The whole town is set in the 1770s in the midst of the American revolution, with all the staff dressed up in colonial period costumes and the shops set in the past.

We saw a fife and drum procession, an actor as Thomas Jefferson read out part of the Declaration of Independence (he held out his arm to me in a photo, such a gentleman), saw General George Washington ride in on his horse to give us an update on the revolutionary war, and watched colonial infantry fire cannons and muskets. It was a really special experience, and very different to living history museums I've been to in the UK such as Beamish.

An unpleasant 22 1/2 hour journey with a wait from 3am-8:15am in Fayetville, NC bus station, brought us to Charleston, which is a gorgeous southern city set right on the coast and surrounded by sea islands. Every street is lined with palmetto trees, the state symbol of South Carolina, and the houses along the harbour and old cobbled streets have huge French balconies and shutters. It reminded me a lot of New Orleans' French Quarter, where we will be in a few days. Charleston was of course the main focus of my research, and it certainly delivered. We managed to get out on the harbor and visit Mount Pleasant across the bay, and go to a few museums including the Confederate Museum, where the daughters of the Confederacy have collected a staggering amount of civil war memorabilia, the old Exchange and dungeon where prisoners and traitors to the crown were kept during the revolutionary war (there we learnt of Charleston's own 'tea party', overlooked in the shadow of Boston's), and the Old Slave Mart museum, the largest indoor site in the area where slaves were bought and sold.

The College of Charleston were extremely accommodating to me and actually gave Joseph and I four nights in one of their guest houses on campus, giving me easy access to their libraries, and they covered the costs for us, which was wonderful of them. The dean of the college libraries John White was my contact there, given to me from Ben Houston, a US history lecturer at my University. I met with John whilst doing my research and he's a great guy, we're very grateful to him and the College for the beautiful accommodation. We also got a ride in a police car because it was raining, from the public safety office where we picked the keys up, to our guest house, which was an experience! That's southern hospitality for you.

Me on the water taxi.

But most of the time was spent inside the College of Charleston's Addlestone library which houses the special collections, and the collections of South Carolina's History Society. I was able to find some wonderful information on the Jenkins orphanage band, including some amazing pamphlets written about the band that I could not get access to anywhere else. I have not had time to digest all the information that I found as that will be a job for when I get back to the UK as I work on my poster for my scholarship. I also spent some time in the Avery research center for African American history and culture (http://avery.cofc.edu/).
There me and Joseph met with the amazing Dr Karen Chandler who has done so much work and research on Jazz music in the area, and on the Jenkins orphanage band. Together with Jack McCray, sadly now passed, she set up the Charleston Jazz Initiative which both aims to uncover the incredible history of Jazz music in Charleston, as well as researching into the lives on the musicians who came from there and the fantastic careers some of them went on to have. Some of you reading might know trumpet player Cladys 'Jabbo' Smith, a talent rival to Louis Armstrong, or Cat Anderson who played in Duke Ellington's orchestra, both of whom were taught music at the Jenkins orphanage. The Avery center contained all of the original documents from the orphanage, including bills, receipts transactions and financial information, administration files, donations and funding records, records of every child to ever attend the orphanage, and Reverend Daniel Jenkins' death certificate. And of course, I found many wonderful photographs which I was able to photocopy (I've only put one in here of Daniel Jenkins, not sure yet about copyright for the others.)

Something very touching I read through were folders and folders of handwritten and type-written letters from mothers, family members and friends of orphans in the care of Jenkins. Some wrote asking if their child could attend and what the procedure was for admittance, as they had heard of how good the musical education provided at the school was. Some children who went there were not orphans.
I read in the records that in 1947, the average cost of feeding a child was $1.44 a day, or $43.23 a month. Daniel Jenkins himself said ''I promised God when I started out to build an orphanage that I would give the boys and girls plenty of corn bread and molasses, and other things whenever I could, and make them work for an honest living.'' A devoutly religious man, he made all children go to church on a Sunday no matter what. Sarah Finley Dowling, matron of the orphanage for over 50 years, wrote of them ''it would have done your heart good to see the children on Sunday going to church.' Sometimes the boys went to church wearing girls shoes or coats, 'they did take up a lot of room but they had a special place in that church... They went to church and they tried; they did what they were told to do.''

Reading these personal accounts, holding the documents in my hand, seeing Reverend Daniel Jenkin's personal replies to some of the mothers who inquired after places for their children, seeing photographs of the children dressed up in their uniforms and smiling for the camera because Jenkins had a vision that gave so many destitute children a home and a way of living, made the band come alive more than ever.

A few days ago I visited the original orphanage building on Franklin Street. Today the area around is quite run down. One of the first things you notice about the building is that it is situated right next door to the now derelict and quite spooky-looking town jail. I'd read the day before that the poor children could hear prisoners moaning and shouting at night.

The plaque outside the orphanage building.

Me outside the orphanage, 20 Franklin street, August 2015.


These children's story is a very important one and I am so excited to further research it.

Another quote from Sarah Finley Dowling perhaps sums up best how I feel even though I wasn't even there, though I can close my eyes and hear their music.

''The music lessons, the practice sessions, the beat of the drums, the shining horns, the colorful uniforms, the flash and dash, the excitement of those marching bands exist only in the reminiscences of those in whose lives they played such a memorable part.''

Setting forth

(The tune to sing in your head for this blog post is 'Setting Forth' by Eddie Vedder.)

Hi! I'm Emily Needle, a second year undergraduate student reading History at Newcastle University in England, and I have a particular interest in American History​. I found my love for it at GCSE (aged 15) when studying a course on the American West. Cowboys and Indians and all the other stereotypical stuff. And no other area of History has ever been as exciting to me since. 

I'm really fortunate to have been awarded a vacation scholarship from my University which gives me a grant of money to carry out some research on a project I have designed myself. So I guess I just made this blog to document my trip. I will be in America for 5 weeks, or 37 days, (9th July - 15th August 2015) and my very wonderful other half Joseph is going with me to keep me in check, and for us to be able to have a holiday at the same time!

My research project utilizes the Jenkins Orphanage Band from Charleston (South Carolina) as a case study to explore some of the bigger questions surrounding the development and dissemination of Jazz in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century United States. I will (hopefully) examine the ethnic and economic profile of Jazz audiences in an attempt to assess the reception of Jazz, and the extent to which Jazz, developed in the segregated environment of the ‘Jim Crow’ South, was able to cross class and racial divisions among national audiences.

(I may have copied and pasted some of that from my application...)
The title of my project is 'From Rags Through Race to Ragtime: The Jenkins Orphanage Band and American Audience Response to Jazz in Turn of the Century Charleston' - hence the blog title.

The band itself was formed in the 1890s and came out of an orphanage founded in Charleston in 1891 by Reverend Daniel Joseph Jenkins. He discovered some young black boys sleeping on the street who said they had no parents, and he took them home and gave them some food. This continued, with more and more boys from around the city coming for food, until he managed to purchase a warehouse and turned it into Jenkins Institute. To raise funds for the orphanage Jenkins asked for people to donate old instruments, and the boys began to play on the streets of Charleston. At first they played traditional American tunes that the people would know, but the influence of their ancestors and the African Gullah rhythms they had been taught naturally infused in the music as they played. This new sound was something the American people had not heard before, and they loved it. The popular dance 'The Charleston' originated in this city and came from an series of steps known to African-Americans as they danced to this new type of music which eventually became known as 'Jazz'. The band soon became so popular that they toured all round the US, and visited London and Paris. Musicians such as Jazz trumpeters William 'Cat' Anderson and Jabbo Smith were Jenkins orphanage alumni. The band disbanded in the 1980s. 

It is this band that forms the core of my research. So little is known or has been written about them and I feel it is so important for their story to be heard. As a musician myself and a lover of Jazz music, it seemed natural for me to combine my love of American history and music to discover the history of these orphan boys who captured so many hearts. The backdrop of the US South during this period is one of extreme racial tension and violence. The civil war ended in 1865 and slavery was deemed unconstitutional, and yet black people's lives were scarcely much better than their ancestors' had been. Laws against their freedom and citizenship were introduced and the increasingly segregated South became known as 'Jim Crow'. It fascinates me how the American public could love this band so much, and yet at the same time a few streets away white mobs were murdering black people for crimes such as simply living in the same area as them. Finding a newspaper from 1911 advertising a concert the Jenkins band were doing in New York, underneath an article about the first lynching in Pennsylvania the previous day, really put everything in perspective for me. 
Of course only a few weeks ago 9 people were shot in one of Charleston's oldest black churches, by a white man associated with beliefs about white supremacy. This hate and racial prejudice still continues. It is bizarre and wrong that in 2015 the subject I am researching as 'history' has been brought alive again in such a raw and painful way. 

I am travelling down the East Coast this summer to try and answer some of the questions I have about the connections between Jazz and race, and to hopefully enlighten other people too. This research will form the basis of my dissertation as I start my 3rd and final year of my undergraduate degree in September. For the vacation scholarship I have to produce an academic poster from my findings. I don't pretend to be an expert on music, or Jazz, but my boyfriend is studying music at the Royal Northern College of Music and knows a lot more than I do and so it will be so helpful to have him with me.

We will be visiting Washington D.C, New York City, Philadelphia (PA) , Richmond (VA), Williamsburg (VA), Charleston, Birmingham (Al) and New Orleans. 

I'm not sure how often I'll post, and there is a chance of course that I will find not much of interest. But I doubt that. Though there are no academic books I can find about Jazz music in Charleston and on the Jenkins Orphanage Band, I know the material is all there, waiting to be studied and collected. From the research I have been doing online in the last few weeks there is a mountain of information available. I will be visiting the Library of Congress, the archives in Birmingham, and in Charleston the Avery Research Centre, the Charleston Jazz Initiative, and the College of Charleston collections which includes the documents from the Jenkins Institute.

Everyone I have been in touch with about my research has shown such kindness and given me a lot of help and advice that I am very grateful for. I will be meeting some incredible people whilst in the US who are very high in their respective fields, and I am humbled to be starting out my research and following in their shoes as a mere undergraduate.

To anyone reading this who is a first or second year student at Newcastle University, I highly recommend that you look into the vacation scholarships and apply for one. It's a really incredible opportunity! And of course you decide yourself what you are going to study, so you can do it on anything.

If after my project, just a few more people are aware and appreciative of the impacts of Charleston on the history of Jazz music, and on race relations, then I'll be happy.

So please follow my blog to keep up-to-date with what me and Joseph are up to in the US! This project really means a lot to me as you can probably tell. And we are incredibly, incredibly excited for this trip!

Here, have a photo so you know what we look like!

Emily x