Music: Jenkins Bands

The end of the War between the States (or the War of the Rebellion) brought freedom to tall, blue-black Daniel Joseph Jenkins, born a slave in 1861 and soon orphaned. Turned off a plantation near Charleston, S. C., he said: “I took God for my guide. I got a job on a farm and got two pounds of meat and a quart of black molasses a week to live on.” One day he came upon half a dozen shoeless, shivering pickaninnies huddled by a railroad track. He gave them his last dollar.

Daniel Jenkins became a Baptist minister. Soon Minister Jenkins preached a sermon on “The Harvest Is Great but the Labor ers Are Few.” persuaded his congregation to help him found an orphanage for poor black moppets. That was in 1891. Daniel Jenkins proceeded to rid Charleston of its roaming, thieving “Wild Children.” In two buildings in the city, in farms and schools outside it, he has cared for as many as 536 orphans at a time, today has some 300 in his charge. Of the thousands of Negroes turned out of the Jenkins Orphanage at 14, he claims that less than ten have ended up in jail. Grizzled, black-garbed and oiling at 74, Daniel Jenkins is Charleston’s No. 1 Negro citizen, prosperous enough to have been touched for a loan by a white Charlestonian stranded in London in the early days of the World War. The fame & fortune of the Jenkins Orphanage, however, did not come from piety alone. Taking a leaf from Booker T. Washington, who successfully raised money through his Tuskegee Singers. Daniel Jenkins began early to exploit small Negroes playing band music.

Having on his hands a number of undernourished, rickety and tuberculous youngsters. Jenkins optimistically decided “My children’s lungs would get strong by blowing wind instruments.” He obtained some battered horns, organized a band which he sent North in 1893 to play on street corners for whatever passersby would give. So successful was the Jenkins Band that it has never since missed a trip. In 1905 it played in President Theodore Roosevelt’s inaugural parade. It appeared at the St. Louis Exposition, the Anglo-American Exposition in London. It has toured the V. S. from coast to coast, played in Paris, Berlin, Rome, London, Vienna. Dividing into sections as the orphans grew older and learned to play better, the Jenkins Band once had live units simultaneously on tour. Today its 125 players, aged 10 to 18, earn from $75,000 to $100,000 a year for the Orphanage. Once girls & boys played together in the bands but, says Daniel Jenkins, “They got too fresh and I had to separate them.” Now the girls play in their own bands or sing to the boys’ accompaniment. Each band-section is chaperoned and guided by a ministerial graduate of the Orphanage. Boys wear dark blue uniforms, girls simple print dresses.

In winter. Jenkins bands play in schools, churches, halls throughout the South and West. In summer they head North. This year 65 of the 125 bandsters were chosen, divided into Bands No. 1 and No. 2. Last week Band No. 1, with 21-year-old Freddy Bennett as leader, played in Providence, R. I., moved on to Hartford, Conn. Under the guidance of William Blake, who has been with the Orphanage for 38 years, Band No. 2 had been at Saratoga, N. Y. where the horseracing season opened early this month (TIME, Aug. 12). Day & night at the race track, at baseball games and on the spa’s Broadway the hard-working youngsters played spirituals, sweet ballads and hot arrangements of tunes like Dinah and Sweet Sue on their rusty cornets, trombones, French horns, drums. Bystanders were especially taken with Band No. 2’s impish 12-year-old leader who juggled his baton, shimmied vigorously.

Rich old Rev. Daniel Joseph Jenkins, in his institution’s Northern headquarters in New York’s Harlem, scrutinized detailed weekly reports of his bands’ doings. Collections in Saratoga, even with five youngsters passing hats and wheedling coins from bystanders, were good only when someone with a kind heart produced a windfall. Last week Daniel Jenkins sent Band No. 2 back to Charleston, where Band No. 1 would rejoin it, playing its way southward by way of Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, Richmond and Durham. Daniel Jenkins also is soon returning South. “I ain’t got long to stay here,” he cackles. “But I’ll carry on till Jesus calls me home.”