Composers
Edmund Thornton Jenkins
1894 - 1926About
Edmund Thornton Jenkins was a native Charlestonian and his composition Charlestonia is one of the greatest musical tributes to his vibrant hometown. It is perhaps surprising that part of the piece premiered in 1919 in London and received its only complete performance in Jenkins’s short lifetime in Brussels, Belgium. Charlestonia finally debuted here in the Holy City in October 1996 when the CSO, under the baton of the late David Stahl, presented the American premiere as part of the broader “Edmund Jenkins Homecoming Month” festivities proclaimed by former Charleston Mayor Joseph P. Riley Jr. By all accounts, Jenkins had a complicated relationship with his home city, which he visited infrequently after moving to Europe. Jenkins chose to commemorate Charleston in much of his music, but consistently found the freedom and opportunities to create outside of the Jim Crow South. Jenkins was the son of a prominent Charlestonian, Reverend Daniel Jenkins, who ran the Jenkins Orphanage from 1892 until his death in 1937. At that time the orphanage occupied the Old Marine Hospital on Franklin Street and often had more than 500 young men and women in its care at any given time. From the founding, Reverend Jenkins saw music as a salvific force for good and encouraged local citizens to donate any unused instruments for children to play. That first year, the orphanage hired two local musicians to tutor a small band of 11 boys who would give impromptu performances on the street in hopes of soliciting small donations from passersby. Upon its founding, the Jenkins Orphanage Band became the only black instrumental group organized in South Carolina. By the turn of the 20th century, the Jenkins Orphanage Band was renowned up and down the East Coast. They played in inaugural parades for Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and William Taft. They appeared at the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1914. They toured the country extensively throughout the 1910s and 1920s, playing hundreds of shows from coast to coast as well as international engagements in Paris, Berlin, Rome, London, and Vienna. One of these overseas tours brought 20-year-old Edmund to London. By 1914, Jenkins had graduated from Morehouse College and was serving as Director of Bands for his father’s orphanage when he received an offer to remain in London as a student at the prestigious Royal Academy of Music. In London and eventually in Paris, the young composer began to find his voice through musical opportunities organized by British composer of African descent Samuel Coleridge-Taylor and through the political activism of the African Progress Union. But he never forgot the music of his youth in Charleston. Will Marion Cook, an African American composer and student of Antonin Dvořák, ran into Jenkins during a trip to Paris and wrote back to his father in Charleston: “Want to congratulate you on your son… with whom I had a most wonderful association while in Paris. He is possibly the best musician in the colored race, the very best instrumentalist in any race, and one of the most perfect Gentlemen I have ever had the pleasure of knowing.” Bio provided by the Charleston Symphony