Edmund Thornton Jenkins’ Birthday

Colour of Music Festival honors the legacy of Edmund Thornton Jenkins on his birthday.

Edmund Thornton Jenkins was born on April 9, 1894 in Charleston, the son of the Reverend Daniel Jenkins and Lena James. He attended the Avery Normal Institute in Charleston and studied at Atlanta Baptist College (now Morehouse College) from 1908 to 1914. He studied music privately in Charleston with teachers associated with his father’s Jenkins Orphanage Bands, and continued his classical music studies in Atlanta. In 1914 the Jenkins Orphanage Band visited England to play at the Anglo-American Exposition, with Edmund as assistant conductor. He remained in London and enrolled at the Royal Academy of Music (1914–1921). There he won almost every prize or scholarship for which he was eligible and became a sub-professor of clarinet from 1918 to 1921.

In 1925 Jenkins founded his own publishing company, Anglo-Continental-American Music Press. In July his orchestral composition American Folk Rhapsody: ‘Charlestonia’ was performed at the Kursaal in Ostende, Belgium. This folk rhapsody is also based on the “Brer Rabbit” tune, combining classical orchestration with jazz inflections.

Jenkins died in a Paris hospital on September 12, 1926, possibly from appendicitis complicated by tuberculosis. His music remained unknown until seventy years after his death, when the Charleston Symphony performed an arrangement of the American premiere of Charlestonia on October 4, 1996. The Colour of Music Festival orchestra debuted his original composition in November 2022 in Sacramento, California.