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    How Ella Jenkins Revolutionized Children’s Music

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    Over seven decades, she brought a world of genres and ideas to songs for the young. On her centennial, what she would really like to do is perform again.When Ella Jenkins began recording young people’s music in the 1950s and ’60s, her albums featured tracks that many of that era’s parents and teachers would probably never have dreamed of playing for children: a love chant from North Africa. A Mexican hand-clapping song. A Maori Indian battle chant. And even “Another Man Done Gone,” an American chain-gang lament whose lyrics she changed, turning it into a freedom cry.“She found this way of introducing children to sometimes very difficult topics and material, but with a kind of gentleness,” said Gayle Wald, a professor of American studies at George Washington University and the author of a forthcoming biography of Jenkins. “She never lied to them. She certainly never talked down to them.”Jenkins’s unorthodox approach became a huge success: She is the best-selling individual artist in the history of Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, surpassing even such stalwarts of the label as Woody Guthrie and her friend Pete Seeger. A champion of diversity long before the term became popular, Jenkins helped revolutionize music for the young, purposefully encouraging Black children.Jenkins at a Grammy ceremony where she received a special honor.R. Diamond/WireImageIn addition to introducing global material, which she often recorded with children’s choruses, she wrote original, interactive compositions like “You’ll Sing a Song and I’ll Sing a Song,” now part of the Library of Congress’s National Recording Registry.“Before Ella, very few people actually composed for children,” Wald said in a video interview.You might think that Jenkins, who will celebrate her 100th birthday on Tuesday, would now want to relax and savor her many accolades, among them lifetime achievement awards from both the Grammys and ASCAP, the music licensing agency, as well as a designation as a National Endowment for the Arts Heritage Fellow. But in a brief telephone conversation from her home in an assisted-living center in Chicago, she seemed unconcerned with plans for her centenary in the city, which include a Tuesday morning celebration with young students from the Old Town School of Folk Music, and a showcase on Wednesday with performances by children from Kids on the Move Summer Camp.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      How Do You Capture Four Decades of Hip-Hop? Very Broadly.

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      “The Smithsonian Anthology of Hip-Hop and Rap,” a 129-song boxed set, has a very challenging (and maybe impossible) goal: pinning down a constantly evolving genre.In 1990, hip-hop was in the throes of an identity crisis. That summer, MC Hammer released “U Can’t Touch This,” his flashy, breakout single that, thanks to the flamboyant fashion and quick footwork in its video, became a pop music phenomenon. Hot on its heels a few months later was Vanilla Ice’s “Ice Ice Baby,” which sampled “Under Pressure” by Queen and David Bowie and became the first hip-hop single to top the Billboard Hot 100.While wildly popular in the pop mainstream, both songs were — in differing but related ways — derided in hip-hop, kept at arm’s length. Rap music, then still barely over a decade old, had only just begun to reckon with attention from outside the genre’s walls. These hits — including one from a white rapper, no less — were different, nigh unprecedented phenomena.And yet here they are, back to back in the middle of Disc 5 of “The Smithsonian Anthology of Hip-Hop and Rap,” a 129-song collection and boxed set due out Aug. 20 that acts as a foundation, primer and master narrative of the genre’s growth from 1979 to 2013. They come right after “The Humpty Dance” by Digital Underground and “Me So Horny” by 2 Live Crew — different sorts of breakouts by bug-eyed humorists from opposite ends of the country — and just before Brand Nubian’s strident “All for One,” which arrives like a mean sentry striving to restore order.In 2021, with hip-hop the dominant musical force in popular culture globally, there’s little to debate: MC Hammer and Vanilla Ice’s blockbuster songs are eruptions and intrusions that in retrospect sound inevitable. Hip-hop long ago reconciled with its pop ambitions, and then became the very core of pop music itself. Along the way, it became a very wide tent.MC Hammer’s 1990 smash “U Can’t Touch This” was a conundrum for rap at the time of its release. Today, it has a place in hip-hop history.Tim Roney/Getty ImagesTo properly anthologize the genre in full is to reckon with its contradictions, its competing narratives and its inconsistencies. By this measure, the “Anthology” is an impressive work of scholarship, design and logistics. It is, of course, unavoidably flawed too, the point of departure for a shadow collection of exclusions, alternate histories and near-misses.Released on Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, the “Anthology” is part of the African American Legacy Recordings series, co-produced with the National Museum of African American History and Culture. To select the songs, an advisory committee of around 40 artists, industry figures, journalists and academics compiled an overarching list of approximately 900 options. From there, a 10-person executive committee met in November 2014 to winnow it down. Some adjustments were later made for logistical reasons. (In 2017, the Smithsonian raised around $370,000 via Kickstarter to help fund production, research and licensing for the box.)“I’m envious of what the rock world does,” said Chuck D of Public Enemy, a member of the executive committee, referring to how rock ’n’ roll consistently takes stock of, and celebrates, its own history. “I was interested and jump-started this idea because I got tired of us not being treated like the royalty that the genre is.” (Chuck D said he abstained from the actual final vote — “I ran out of the room.”)Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power” and “Bring the Noise” are both included in the “Anthology.”Jack Mitchell; The National Museum of African American History and CultureDwandalyn R. Reece, the museum’s associate director for curatorial affairs and curator of music and performing arts, said she expects, but would love to avoid, the inevitable. “I know people will look at the anthology as a canon, but that was not our intention,” she said. “This is a story, not the definitive story. What I hope for the anthology is that it starts a dialogue.”Whether or not it constitutes a canon — “I eschew the concept of canon,” said Cheryl L. Keyes, the chair of U.C.L.A.’s department of African American Studies and a member of the executive committee — the collection is a tour led with intention through hip-hop’s many phases, regions and ideologies.The producer 9th Wonder, also a member of the executive committee, framed the conversation around selection in terms of standards, which is to say, “songs supposed to be known by the next generation coming up,” he explained. “We’re basically creating a foundation for something that doesn’t exist. It exists in barbershops, it exists in your house with your friends, but on paper and concrete, a lot of stuff really doesn’t exist.”Beginning in the late 1970s, “The Smithsonian Anthology” takes in hip-hop’s earliest recordings (Sugarhill Gang, the Treacherous Three, Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five, etc.). It covers party music (Sir Mix-A-Lot, Ludacris, Lil Jon & the East Side Boyz) and gangster rap (Geto Boys, Schoolly-D, Ice-T). There’s a sprinkling of white rappers — Beastie Boys, Vanilla Ice, House of Pain, Eminem, Macklemore.The “Anthology” does a sturdy job of capturing the history of women in hip-hop — too often in the past considered primarily in relationship to men — from the Sequence and Salt-N-Pepa to Lil’ Kim and Foxy Brown all the way up to Missy Elliott, Lauryn Hill and Nicki Minaj. “They are fully represented and represented in the most respectable way,” Keyes said. “They’re not there to tantalize the male fancy.”The “Anthology” gives space to the phenomenon that was Vanilla Ice.Mick Hutson/Redferns, via Getty ImagesAnd career artists like Lil’ Kim get their due.Gie Knaeps/Getty ImagesIt’s reassuring to see early tracks by the Port Arthur, Texas, duo UGK (“Pocket Full of Stones”) and the Memphis duo Eightball & MJG (“Comin’ Out Hard”) alongside their temporal peers from New York — too often the history of Southern rap has been told out of step with, and siloed off from, the rest of the genre. And it’s striking to reflect on how thoroughly some innovations, edgy in their day, are either forgotten, or so completely absorbed into the genre — take, say, the melodic lightness of Nelly on “Country Grammar (Hot [Expletive])” — as to be unremarkable.The collection stops in 2013 — the final song is by Drake, in his way the harbinger of a new era. But it’s also a convenient moment to put a cap on reflection. Hip-hop is now almost fully decentralized; the genre is splintered sonically and thematically. Perhaps most tellingly, hip-hop is actually more tolerant now: more understanding of its intra-genre quarrels, more available to different participants, more open to sonic invention and revision. It’s hard to police a genre’s borders when the genre is the whole world.So the “Anthology” captures hip-hop in its period of birth, its myriad growth spurts, its tugs of war, and finally, its full expansion into pop music. To quarrel over whether hip-hop should be given institutional treatment now would be quaint — in just 40 years, it has become bedrock. A collection like this — a position statement like this — is a relic of an era in which hip-hop had to fight to be taken seriously by institutions, whether they were museums, political bodies, technology companies or other creative industries.Perhaps the most old-fashioned idea about the “Anthology” is its format — a heavy physical box, loaded with images and essays, and nine CDs in an era where CD players are increasingly rare. A less imaginative approach could have begun and ended with, say, a curated playlist on Spotify or Apple Music (in those environments, at least, no licensing fees would be required).To select the songs, an advisory committee of around 40 artists, industry figures, journalists and academics compiled an overarching list of approximately 900 options. A 10-person executive committee winnowed it down further.Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesThe heft is intentional, though. “We want the next generation to learn about it, but we want them to learn about it the way we want them to learn about it,” 9th Wonder said.But it comes with liabilities, as well. Some songs picked by the committee weren’t able to be licensed for inclusion on the set. There are no songs with Jay-Z as the lead artist — he only appears as a guest on Foxy Brown’s “I’ll Be.” Gaps like that underscore the inherent incompleteness of any project of this scale, which triggers an endless shoulda-coulda exercise: Is the best representation of Lil Wayne truly his grotesque Robin Thicke collaboration “Tie My Hands”? Cypress Hill’s “Insane in the Brain” over “How I Could Just Kill a Man”? Some artists (Nicki Minaj, Outkast, Eminem) are represented by their most pop-oriented successes, at times leaving more meaningful work behind.“When it comes to putting hip-hop in the canon, you’re damned if you’re do, you’re damned if you don’t,” 9th Wonder added.Proportionately, and perhaps inevitably, the “Anthology” is perhaps overindexed on the genre’s earliest years. Hip-hop grew widely in the 1990s and 2000s, making it harder to capture in a small sampling of songs. The ninth and most contemporary disc skews more issues-oriented than perhaps the genre itself was in that time span — of all the groupings, it feels the most prescriptive.The “Anthology” does a solid job of capturing the history of women in hip-hop — too often in the past considered primarily in relationship to men — including Missy Elliott.Myrna Suarez/ImageDirect, via Getty ImagesAnd there are the parts of hip-hop’s recorded legacy that fall outside of the scope of this project. There are no recordings of live jams or battles from the late 1970s or early 1980s, no tracks from the crucial mixtapes of the 1990s. That the project ends in the early 2010s means that it doesn’t have to reckon with a genre that has splintered widely across the internet, with plenty of micromovements leaving barely any physical trail at all.Finally, there is also the tricky dance of assembling history with the benefit of new knowledge. “Planet Rock,” by Afrika Bambaataa & the Soulsonic Force, is undoubtedly a foundational track of the genre. But in the mid-2010s, Bambaataa was accused of child sexual abuse by multiple men. The “Anthology” also includes “Get Like Me,” a David Banner song that features the singer Chris Brown, who in 2009 pleaded guilty to assaulting Rihanna.“We’re not the judge and the jury,” Keyes said. “There’s always personal drama in people’s lives, but it really has nothing to do with their art.”That tension underscores one still-developing difference between how historical narratives can be told by institutions with the benefit of temporal distance and a wide lens and how they are written online, in real time.For that reason, among others, the “Anthology” already feels ancient. The internet is both ahistoric and also full of looking-back lists. The assessments that take place there are finicky and ever-mutating. There is hardly ever a long view, and histories are never stable.Hip-hop thrives in this space. It moves quickly and nonlinearly. It can be made casually and on the cheap, and disseminated widely. It is iterative, taking elements established elsewhere and stacking its innovations atop them, rarely staying still for long. There are slivers of the genre that aren’t in conversation with each other, which might not even be recognizable as related if heard side by side.That’s a direct result, though, of the debates — now reconciled — captured on the “Anthology.” Pop ambition? Accepted. Melodic flexibility? Encouraged. Widespread regional participation? Demanded. Now that the quarreling is mostly settled, where the genre will go is boundless. Forty years from now, it will be bigger than any one box can hold. More

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      Barbara Dane’s Life of Defiance and Song

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyBarbara Dane’s Life of Defiance and SongThe 93-year-old musician and co-founder of the political label Paredon Records looks back on a history of resistance.Barbara Dane’s Paredon Records turned 50 last year, and is the subject of a new “digital exhibition” by Smithsonian Folkways.Credit…Aubrey Trinnaman for The New York TimesFeb. 10, 2021Barbara Dane keeps a copy of her four-inch-thick F.B.I. file in a binder in the living room of her Oakland home. One night in late December, the 93-year-old singer and activist’s daughter, Nina Menendez, was leafing through it and noticed a page she hadn’t spotted before: a Los Angeles Times clipping from a 1972 concert at the Ash Grove. Dane was the headliner that evening, where she first encountered the soulful folk band Yellow Pearl, whose music she would go on to release through her then-nascent record label, Paredon Records.The file doubles as a testament to Dane’s work as an opposition artist for the better part of a century. The earliest entries are from when she was 18, spearheading a chapter of Pete Seeger’s labor-music organization People’s Songs in her native Detroit, and singing on picket lines to protest racial inequality and to support unions.“I knew I was a singer for life, but where I would aim it didn’t come forward until then,” Dane said. “I saw, ‘Oh, you can use your voice to move people.’”Speaking with the eloquent conviction and blunt resolve of a woman who never compromised, Dane called the F.B.I. file a waste of tax dollars. Bundled in a winter coat and beret during a recent video interview, she was more eager to show off the wood-carved Cubadisco statuette (the Cuban equivalent of a Grammy) she was awarded in 2017 to honor her early efforts disseminating the political music known as nueva trova in the United States through her label.A supercut of Dane’s audacious career as a musician — which, since the late 1950s and 1960s has encompassed jazz, folk and the blues — would include the mother of three appearing on a televised bandstand alongside Louis Armstrong and singing “Solidarity Forever,” her favorite song, onstage with Seeger supporting striking coal miners. Her ethos was anticapitalist and adaptable: She wove progressive politics into her sole album for Capitol, “On My Way” from 1961, and later brought raw rock ’n’ roll verve to the protest doo-wop of her 1966 Folkways album with the Chambers Brothers. She performed in Mississippi church basements during Freedom Summer and with antiwar G. I.s in coffee houses.Dane learned early on that her outspokenness and politics meant commercial success would evade her. (Bob Dylan’s manager Albert Grossman told her to call him when she “got her priorities straight.”) She started Paredon for the explicit purpose of providing a platform to music born of freedom struggles around the world that wasn’t beholden to the whims of the marketplace.Paredon has often been considered an aside in Dane’s story, but is receiving more attention now: The label turned 50 last year, and is the subject of a new “digital exhibition” by Smithsonian Folkways, the nonprofit record label of the Smithsonian Institution, where it has been housed for three decades. Co-founded by Dane and her husband Irwin Silber, a founder and longtime editor of Sing Out! magazine who died in 2010, Paredon was a people’s label through and through, releasing music produced by liberation movements in Vietnam, Palestine, Angola, Haiti, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Greece, Uruguay, Mexico, the United States and beyond.“I saw that whenever the movement in a particular country was strong, there was an emerging music to go with it,” Dane said. “It struck me that this stuff needed to be heard in the voices of the people who wrote the songs.”Taken together, the 50 albums that Paredon released from 1970 to 1985 form a staggering archive of art and dissent, of resilience and sung histories within histories. The music reflects civil rights, women’s rights and anticolonial movements, and illustrates the interconnectedness of these revolutions. Dane had been a venue owner, concert booker, radio D.J., television host and writer. With Paredon, she became a folklorist of resistance.“Paredon didn’t put out music about politics. They put out music of politics,” said Josh MacPhee, the author of “An Encyclopedia of Political Record Labels” and a founder of the Brooklyn-based Interference Archive, which chronicles the cultural production of social movements. “These are not artists commenting on political issues. These were sounds that were produced by people in motion trying to transform their lives.”Dane, center, at an anti-war demonstration in San Francisco in 1964.Credit…Erik WeberWith leftist politics at their core and deep roots in activism, Dane and Silber built trust among like-minded artists. “Anything I was going to issue was from somebody who had been on the front lines somewhere,” Dane said. Each Paredon release included an extensive booklet with contextualizing essays, photographs, translations of lyrics, and information about how to connect with or help the movement.The catalog included musicians steeped in social movements at home, like Bernice Johnson Reagon — a founding member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s Freedom Singers, and later of the a cappella ensemble Sweet Honey in the Rock — whose solo album, “Give Your Hands to Struggle” from 1975, was filled with rhapsodic self-harmonizing. It also included the Covered Wagon Musicians, a group of subversive active-duty Air Force men who sang out from their Idaho base, “We say no to your war!”“I was nervous — I had no experience recording,” said the Argentine musician and educator Suni Paz, who had been living in the U.S. for about eight years when Dane asked her to record for Paredon. “Brotando del Silencio — Breaking Out of the Silence,” in 1973, became Paz’s first album, before which, “I was not heard at all. Barbara Dane gave me complete and total freedom. She said, sing whatever you want. I was going to sing anything political that I had in my brain, in my heart, in my soul.”Nobuko Miyamoto of Yellow Pearl, the group of Asian-American activists Dane discovered when they shared a bill in 1972, said her band was unlikely to have recorded for another label. “Barbara had just done an album called ‘I Hate the Capitalist System,’ and that convinced us this was the right record company,” Miyamoto said, referring to Dane’s 1973 collection with bold cover art.The album Yellow Pearl released on Paredon was the poetic and groundbreaking “A Grain of Sand: Music for the Struggle by Asians in America,” which included anthems like “We Are the Children” and “Free the Land,” featuring backing vocals from Mutulu Shakur (his stepson, Tupac Shakur, sang along to “A Grain of Sand” as a child, according to Smithsonian Folkways Magazine). It was recorded in two and a half days at a small New York studio and that no-frills spontaneity brings the music alive still.“Barbara was a pretty brave soul to offer to do this,” Miyamoto said. “And because of that, our music was preserved. So I was very grateful. If it weren’t for her, that music really would have been lost.”“I knew I was a singer for life, but where I would aim it didn’t come forward until then,” Dane said of her early days performing alongside Pete Seeger for workers’ rights. “I saw, ‘Oh, you can use your voice to move people.’”Credit…Aubrey Trinnaman for The New York TimesDANE GREW UP in Detroit during the Great Depression, the daughter of Arkansas natives. Her father owned a drugstore, where she and her mother worked, and as a child she bore witness to racism and poverty that she immediately identified as wrong. “You saw it all around you: how bad the system was treating its citizens,” she said. At 11, sitting under a tree, a neighborhood friend explained to her that there were three ways of organizing society: capitalism, socialism and communism. “From then on, I started looking around for the socialists — anyone who could tell me more,” she said, noting, too, her teenage affiliation with communism. “That search went on and on.” (And led to that F.B.I. file.)It wasn’t long before she was leading protests with songs like “Roll the Union On” and “We Shall Not Be Moved,” using techniques she had learned from an opera teacher. An early lesson in the power of saying “no” occurred when she was offered a tour with the bandleader Alvino Rey and turned it down: “Why would I want to stand in front of a band with a low-cut dress singing stupid words when I could be singing for workers who are on strike?,” she said. “It didn’t seem like a good bargain to me.”Dane with the Chambers Brothers at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965.Credit…Mark RothDefying a government ban, Dane’s travels in Cuba initially inspired her to found Paredon. In 1966, she was one of the first artists to tour post-revolutionary Cuba, and she returned to Havana a year later as part of an international meeting of artists called Encuentro Internacional de la Canción Protesta, where she met musicians from around the globe who were writing social-justice songs, like Cuba’s Carlos Puebla and Uruguay’s Daniel Viglietti.Back home, Dane told everyone, “I’m going to start a record label,’” she recalled. “I just kept saying that and saying that. ‘But I’m looking for the funding.’” A friend came through, connecting Dane with a “wayward millionaire” who sent her one check for $17,000 and said to not report back.The first release was “Cancion Protesta: Protest Song of Latin America,” which opened with a field recording of Fidel Castro invoking the power of art to “win people over” and “awaken emotions” recorded by Dane herself. Paredon also released spoken word albums featuring speeches and statements of Huey Newton, Che Guevara and Ho Chi Minh. Mostly, Dane continued to discover music “on the fly,” she said, as she traveled the world singing out against the Vietnam War. Material from Chile and Northern Ireland came to her in a clandestine fashion, by some artists who remained anonymous.The history of vernacular music in America is filled with mythic men — the ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax, the eccentric Folkways founder Moe Asch, the folk hero Seeger — and Dane evokes each of their restless, visionary spirits to some degree. “They’re all puzzle pieces to this very large story,” said Jeff Place, curator and senior archivist at Smithsonian Folkways, noting that Paredon’s releases were “mostly too political” for Asch at Folkways.“One must participate in the emerging struggle around them in order to make art that reflects it,” Dane said.Credit…Aubrey Trinnaman for The New York TimesDane certainly never held her tongue. If you see your country “making horrible mistakes, you have to speak up,” she said. “You’re colluding with it if you don’t speak up.”Dane and Silber didn’t profit off Paredon. They ran the label out of their apartment in Brooklyn’s Cobble Hill neighborhood and had no interest in turning it into a business. Silber had previously worked for Folkways, equipping him with the knowledge of how to keep the operation small, pressing a few hundred records at a time, and often using the same graphic designer, Ronald Clyne, known for his earthy minimalism.When Paredon became too unwieldy to remain an at-home endeavor, Dane and Silber soon ended it and moved back to California, where Dane refocused on her singing. “When I was 89, I made the record that I would liked to have made years earlier,” she said of her 2016 LP “Throw It Away,” a collaboration with the jazz pianist Tammy Hall. Dane is currently writing her memoir, and a film about her life, with the working title “The Nine Lives of Barbara Dane,” is in production.Place recalled his 1991 trip to Oakland to interview Dane and Silber and physically acquire the Paredon collection: “I got a rented van, put the entire Paredon collection in the back of it, and drove communist records across the whole country to D.C. and put them in the Smithsonian.”Reflecting on the label’s legacy now, Dane is hopeful it holds lessons for the era of Black Lives Matter and surging conversation about democratic socialism. “One must participate in the emerging struggle around them in order to make art that reflects it,” she said.“If you’re an artist, you’ve already got tools. If you don’t know what to write about, remember that truth and reality is what we’re after. You have to know reality to tell the truth about it. You got to get out and be a part of it.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More