Claire Gaudiani in 2007. During her tenure as president of Connecticut College, its endowment grew fivefold, its national profile soared, and applications for admission rose significantly.Credit...Andrea Mohin/The New York Times
Claire Gaudiani, who as president of Connecticut College sought to implement a sweeping vision of redeveloping the college’s host city, New London, which led to a landmark Supreme Court case on eminent domain — and to a faculty revolt that helped force her resignation after 13 years — died on Oct. 16 in Manhattan. She was 79.
Her son, D. Graham Burnett, said the cause of her death, in a hospital, was leukemia.
During Ms. Gaudiani’s tenure as the hard-charging president of Connecticut College, a small liberal arts school, its endowment grew fivefold, its national profile soared, and applications for admission rose significantly.
Like many college presidents, she wanted to build bridges between her wealthy campus on a hill and its beleaguered hometown.
Unlike most college presidents, she actively donned a second hat, becoming chief executive of the New London Development Corporation, a quasi-public entity that used taxpayer money to revitalize the city, one of the poorest in Connecticut.
A scholar of 17th-century French literature, Ms. Gaudiani possessed a charismatic personality and a decisive style that would have been at home in a corporate suite. She lured the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer to build a $294 million research campus on the site of a burned-down linoleum factory in New London. She then sought to bulldoze a decaying neighborhood to make way for a hotel, condominiums and an “urban village” for office workers.
Most homeowners willingly sold. But when a handful in the Fort Trumbull neighborhood resisted, the development corporation moved to seize their properties using the power of eminent domain.
Several sued, including Susette Kelo, a nurse who wanted to stay in the cute pink Victorian she had renovated, which had a view of the Thames River.
The Supreme Court, in Kelo v. City of New London, ruled in 2005 that it was permissible for the city to seize private homes for use by a private developer under the “takings clause” of the Fifth Amendment.
The decision was a legal landmark, though it set off a prairie fire of resistance across the nation and the ideological spectrum. More than 40 states revised their eminent domain laws to protect the rights of property owners.
The case inspired a book, “Little Pink House” (2009), by Jeff Benedict, and a 2017 movie of the same name, starring Catherine Keener, that portrayed Ms. Kelo as a citizen activist in the mold of Erin Brockovich. Reviewing the book in The New York Times, Dahlia Lithwick noted that it cast Ms. Gaudiani, hyperbolically, as a “Cruella de Vil” character.
The standoff between Ms. Gaudiani and the Fort Trumbull holdouts drew national attention. Ms. Gaudiani defended herself as a champion of social justice, willing, as she put it, to leave “skin on the sidewalk” to better people’s lives. Clearing dilapidated housing for new development, she said, would raise tax revenues for New London schools and hospitals.
“You are building economic assets in a city that has no options,” she told The Hartford Courant in 2001. The newspaper noted her “fiery zeal” for redevelopment.
She envisioned turning struggling New London into a “hip little city” — a phrase that sounded like a declaration of class warfare to her opponents. After stepping down under pressure from Connecticut College in 2001, she received $898,410 in compensation for the year, including severance pay, the highest of any private college president in the country. She left the development group soon after.
Then, in 2009, as its tax abatements ran out, Pfizer ended up abandoning the city. The Fort Trumbull neighborhood, much of it leveled, sat mostly undeveloped for more than 20 years.
Ms. Kelo said that both she and Ms. Gaudiani had been “pawns” of the city’s political leaders in the 1990s.
“Myself and my Fort Trumbull neighbors, we have not forgiven or forgotten what the City of New London did to us,’’ she said in a text message. “We simply have learned to live our lives around the tragedy.”
Damon Hemmerdinger, who worked under Ms. Gaudiani at the New London Development Corporation, said in an email that the revitalization of Fort Trumbull came to a halt because of the lengthy litigation and a limit on the State of Connecticut’s funding. “Claire,” he added, “was deeply committed to creating economic opportunity for New Londoners.”
Well before the Supreme Court sided with the developers, Ms. Gaudiani faced a backlash from Connecticut College’s faculty and students.
Her take-charge style irritated professors, who felt left out of the decision-making process about college affairs. Students protested the school’s efforts to bulldoze longtime city residents’ homes. Ms. Kelo joined one protest on campus.
In May 2000, three-fourths of the college’s tenured professors signed a petition calling for Ms. Gaudiani’s resignation.
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Ms. Gaudiani stood with Duncan N. Dayton, the chairman of the Connecticut College board, when she announced in 2000 that she would be stepping down as president.Credit...Carla M. Cataldi/Associated Press
“Faculty members and townspeople are both upset about her highhanded management style,” a history professor, Michael A. Burlingame, told The Chronicle of Higher Education at the time.
In October 2000, Ms. Gaudiani announced that she would step down at the end of the academic year. She said her choice was unrelated to the faculty uprising, but Mr. Benedict, in “Little Pink House,” maintained that it clearly was.
Claire Lynn Gaudiani was born on Nov. 10, 1944, in Venice, Fla., the eldest of six children of Vera (Rossano) Gaudiani and Vincent Gaudiani Jr. Her father was a fighter pilot in World War II who later went to work as an executive for RCA. Her mother managed the household.
Ms. Gaudiani earned a B.A. in French language and literature from Connecticut College in 1966 and a master’s and Ph.D. from Indiana University.
She met David Burnett when they were both graduate students; they married in 1968. He became a dean at the University of Pennsylvania and an executive with Pfizer.
Besides their son, she is survived by her husband; their daughter, Maria Burnett; five grandchildren; her mother; a sister, Linda Gaudiani; and two brothers, Vincent and Michael.
Ms. Gaudiani was the acting associate director of the Joseph H. Lauder Institute at the University of Pennsylvania, a program for management and international studies, before becoming president of Connecticut College in 1988, at 43. She was the first woman and the first alumna to head the school.
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Ms. Gaudiani at her inauguration as president of Connecticut College in 1988. She was the first woman and the first alumna to head the school.Credit...John Horton/Courtesy the Linda Lear Center for Special Collections and Archives, Connecticut College
Under her leadership, the college’s endowment grew to almost $166 million from $32 million. She raised the funds for 26 endowed professorships, and during her tenure the college spent $60 million on new construction and building upgrades.
After stepping down, Ms. Gaudiani published a book about philanthropy, “The Greater Good” (2003), and, with her husband, “Daughters of the Declaration: How Women Social Entrepreneurs Built the American Dream” (2011).
She was a longtime board member of the Henry Luce Foundation and taught, beginning in 2007, at New York University’s George H. Heyman Jr. Program for Philanthropy and Fundraising.
In 2001, Ms. Gaudiani told The Hartford Courant that being a college president was like having “a 6-week-old who stayed 6 weeks old.”
“They want to eat all the time, they want to be in your arms, they don’t want to sleep,” she explained. “And anytime they’re quiet for five minutes and you start to do something, they wake up or they need to be changed or fed. Being a college president, the way I tried to do it, was like having a permanent 6-week-old.”
Ella Louise Jenkins (August 6, 1924 – November 9, 2024) was an American singer-songwriter and centenarian. Called "The First Lady of the Children's Folk Song", she was a leading performer of folk and children's music.[1][2] Her album, Multicultural Children's Songs (1995), has long been the most popular Smithsonian Folkways release. She appeared on numerous children's television programs and in 2004, she received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award.[3][4] According to culture writer Mark Guarino, "across her 67-year career, Jenkins firmly established the genre of children's music as a serious endeavor — not just for artists to pursue but also for the recording industry to embrace and promote."[5]
A Life of Song: The Story of Ella Jenkins. The First Lady of Children's Music was published by Gloo Books on February 1, 2024[6]. The book is about the life of Ella Jenkins, who used music to fight racism and unite people. It is the first kids picture book published about the life of Ella Jenkins. Author Ty-Juana Taylor notes "Ms. Jenkins has used music as a tool to bridge and unite people across the world, especially in highly divisive times of the U.S. Civil Rights era."[7] Ella and the city of Chicago celebrated her 100th birthday and the books release On Sunday, August 4th, 2024 at her namesake Ella Jenkins Park in the Old Town Triangle neighborhood, 333 W. Wisconsin Ave., from 12:30 p.m. to 2:30 p.m.[8] The book is illustrated by Jade Johnson.
Jenkins was born into an African American family in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1924, and grew up in predominantly lower-middle-class neighborhoods in the south side of Chicago.[9] Growing up in a family of Christian Scientists with eclectic musical tastes, she benefited from her rich musical surroundings although she received no formal musical training.[10] Her uncle, Floyd Johnson, introduced her to the harmonica and the blues of such renowned musicians as T-Bone Walker, Memphis Slim, Little Brother Montgomery and Big Bill Broonzy. Her family frequently moved around the south side and, as she moved to different neighborhoods, she learned new children's rhythms, rhymes and games.[11] Gospel music became a part of her soundscape as neighborhood churches broadcast their services onto the street.[1] She also enjoyed tap dancing lessons at the local theater and was able to go to the Regal Theater to see such performers as Cab Calloway, Count Basie, and Peg Leg Bates. Cab Calloway is the person who she credits with getting her interested in call and response singing.[12][13]
While attending Woodrow Wilson Junior College, she became interested in the music of other cultures through her Mexican, Cuban and Puerto Rican friends.[11] In 1951, she earned a Bachelor of Arts in Sociology with minors in Child Psychology and Recreation from San Francisco State University.[1] Here, she picked up songs of the Jewish culture from her roommates. Upon graduating, she returned to Chicago in 1951 where she began her career.[10]
On November 9, 2024, Jenkins died at an assisted living facility in Chicago; she was 100.[9][14]
In Chicago, Jenkins began writing songs for children while volunteering in recreation centers.[1] She subsequently was hired as a Teenage Program Director for the YWCA in 1952. While working at the YWCA, she was invited to perform on the Chicago public television show, The Totem Club. She was soon offered a regular job as the host of its Thursday program, which she entitled This is Rhythm. She invited guests from diverse cultures to share their music's rhythms on her show.[11]
You Sing a Song and I'll Sing a Song (1966)
In 1956, Jenkins decided to become a full-time musician. She began her career as a children's musician touring school assemblies in the United States, often sleeping in a different place each night and encountering racial discrimination.[2] As she performed in more varied venues, she began to write music about her experiences. Later that year Jenkins met American folklorist, educator and record producer Kenneth S. Goldstein at the Gate of Horn folk music club in Chicago. Goldstein recommended that she bring a demo tape to Moses Asch, the founder of Folkways Records.[10] Asch was receptive to her music and in 1957, her first album, Call-And-Response: Rhythmic Group Singing, was released by Folkways. Since then, Folkways Records and, more recently, Smithsonian Folkways Recordings have released 39 albums, including the popular You'll Sing a Song and I'll Sing a Song. Her 1995 album Multicultural Children's Songs is the most popular Smithsonian Folkways release to date. She has not only been an important force in children's lives, but in the lives of parents and fellow music educators as well. She has participated in many conferences on music education, and has offered workshops for music educators, parents, and caregivers all over the world.[citation needed]
As a performer and educator, Jenkins has traveled extensively, performing her songs on all seven continents (even Antarctica). As she travels, she not only shares her music and experiences but also learns about the cultures of the people she is visiting, taking with her musical traditions and languages that she then shares with her audiences. She has also made television appearances on shows including NBC's Today Show, CNN's Showbiz Today, and PBS programs such as Barney & Friends, Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, The Me Too Show, Look at Me, and in films shown on Sesame Street. She performed at America's Reunion on the Mall in 1993, America's Millennium Celebration in 2000, and at Smithsonian's 150th Birthday Party on the Mall in Washington, DC in 1996. In collaboration with the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, she has acted as a U.S. delegate to Hong Kong, the People's Republic of China, and the former Soviet Union.[1]
Jenkins' favorite people are children. She sees them as genuine, down to earth people who should be listened to and recognized as having much to offer. Fellow music educator Patricia Sheehan Campbell lauds her as "a pioneer in her early and continuing realization that children have something to sing about, that the essence of who they are may be expressed through song, and that much of what they need to know of their language, heritage, and current cultural concepts may be communicated to them through song".[16] Through her songs, she hopes to develop greater intercultural understanding and rhythmic-consciousness, and to help people discover the joy of singing and communicating through active participation in songs.
Jenkins' repertoire includes nursery rhymes, holiday songs, bilingual songs, African-American folk songs, international songs, rhythmic chants, and original songs. Drawing from cultures all over the world, she sings in many languages, exposing her audiences to diverse cultures and promoting greater cultural awareness.
Through her style of call-and-response singing, Jenkins promotes group participation. Found in cultures worldwide, from Greece to the Middle East to West Africa, call-and-response singing involves a leader or leaders singing a phrase and the rest of the participants commenting or responding with another phrase.[17] Using this technique, she breaks the barrier between audience and performer, and turns everyone into a performer. By encouraging active participation, she promotes the development of a warm group feeling, cooperation among the participants, greater attentiveness, an enjoyment of singing, and a desire to sing. She also encourages children to lead songs, make up their own variations of songs, and experiment with fun and silly sounds. This allows children to think independently, develop leadership skills, and improvise, resulting in increased self-confidence.
In helping children discover music and participate in its creation, Jenkins provides them with a new tool of communication that they can use and enjoy for the rest of their lives.
Grammy Nomination for Best Musical Album for Children for Ella Jenkins and a Union of Friends (1999)
Award from the Music Educators National Conference "in appreciation of her support for music education and the National Association for Music Education" (2000)
Grammy Association Lifetime Achievement Award (2004)
Honorary Doctorate of Human Letters from the Erikson Institute (2004)
Inducted into the San Francisco State University Alumni Hall of Fame (2004)
Grammy Nomination for Best Musical Album for Children for Sharing Cultures with Ella Jenkins (2005)
Voted 2005 Chicagoan of the year by Chicago Magazine
1974: Nursery Rhymes: Rhyming & Remembering for Young Children & for Older Girls & Boys with Special Language Needs[39] (1990) Reissue of FW7660 from 1974. SFW45019 (LP, Cassette, CD).
1974: Jambo and Other Call and Response Songs and Chants[40] (1996) Reissue of FW7661 from 1974. SFW 45017 (LP, Cassette, CD).
1976: Growing Up With Ella Jenkins[41] (1990) Reissue of FW7662 from 1976. SFW45032 (LP, Cassette, CD).
1977: Songs, Rhythms And Chants for the Dance[29] (2000) Reissue of FW7000AB from 1977. SFW45004 (LP, Cassette, CD).
1979: Travellin' with Ella Jenkins: – A Bilingual Journey[42] (1989) Reissue of FW7640 from 1979. SFW45009 (LP, Cassette, CD).
1990: We Are America's Children[48] (1990) Reissue of FW7666. SFW45006 (LP, Cassette, CD).
1990: And One and Two[36] (1990) SFW45016 (LP, Cassette, CD).
1990: Nursery Rhymes: Rhyming & Remembering for Young Children & for Older Girls & Boys with Special Language Needs[39] (1990) SFW45019 (LP, Cassette, CD).
1990: Counting Games and Rhythms For the Little Ones[32] (1990) SFW45029 (LP, Cassette, CD).
1990: Call and Response[23] (1990) SFW45030 (LP, Cassette, CD).
1990: Seasons for Singing[35] (1990) SFW45031 (Cassette, CD).
1991: Live at the Smithsonian[49] (1991) SFW48001 (VHS, DVD).
1991: For the Family[50] (1991) SFW48002 (VHS, DVD).
1991: Little Johnny Brown with Ella Jenkins and Girls and Boys from "Uptown" ( Chicago)[38] (1991) SFW45026 (Cassette, CD).
1991: Rhythm and Game Songs for the Little Ones[28] (1991) SFW45027 (Cassette, CD).
1992: Come Dance by the Ocean[51] (1992) SFW45014 (LP, Cassette, CD).
1994: Play Your Instruments and Make a Pretty Sound[31] (1994) SFW45018 (LP, Cassette, CD).
1994: This is Rhythm[27] (1994) SFW45028 (LP, Cassette, CD).
^ Jump up to:abcGoldsmith, Peter David (1998). Making people's music: Moe Asch and Folkways records. Washington, D.C: Smithsonian Institution Press. p. 278. ISBN978-1-56098-812-0.
^ Jump up to:abcElla Jenkins, interview with the author, May 10, 2007
^"Ella Jenkins". The History Makers. August 5, 2002. Retrieved January 4, 2024.
Ella Jenkins performing in Denver in 1981. “There is no one who has done more for young people in American musical history than Ella Jenkins,” Dan Zanes, a children’s musician, said.Credit...Denver Post — Getty Images
Ella Jenkins, a self-taught musician who defied her industry’s norms by recording and performing solely for children, and in doing so transformed a marginal and moralistic genre into a celebration of a diverse yet common humanity with songs like “You’ll Sing a Song and I’ll Sing a Song,” died on Saturday in Chicago. She was 100.
Her death was confirmed by John Smith, associate director at Smithsonian Folkways Recordings.
Ms. Jenkins had no formal musical training, but she had an innate sense of rhythm. “I was always humming or singing and la-la, lu-lu or something,” she once said.
She absorbed the everyday melodies of her childhood — the playground clapping games, the high school sports chants, the calls of a sidewalk watermelon vendor hawking his produce. As an adult, she paired such singsong rhythms with original compositions and sought not simply to amuse or distract children but also to teach them to respect themselves and others.
Against the sound of a kazoo, a harmonica, a variety of hand drums or, later, a baritone ukulele, Ms. Jenkins sang subtly instructive lyrics,as in “A Neighborhood Is a Friendly Place,” a song she wrote in 1976:
You can say hi To friends passing by A neighborhood is a friendly place.
You can say hello To people that you know A neighborhood is a friendly place.
Neighbors learn to share Neighbors learn to care A neighborhood is a friendly place.
For many parents and classroom teachers, Ms. Jenkins’s renditions of traditional nursery rhymes like “Miss Mary Mack” and “The Muffin Man” are authoritative.
Still, from the beginning of her career in the 1950s, she pronounced her signature to be call-and-response, in which she asked her charges to participate directly in the music-making, granting them an equal responsibility in a song’s success. She had seen Cab Calloway employ the technique in “Hi-De-Ho,” and for her, the animating idea, veiled in a playful to-and-fro, was that everything good in the world was born of collaboration.
In one of her most popular recordings, Ms. Jenkins sings out, “Did you feed my cow?” “Yes, ma’am!” a group of children trumpet back. The song continues:
Could you tell me how? Yes, ma’am! What did you feed her? Corn and hay! What did you feed her? Corn and hay!
As she repopularized time-honored children’s songs, she also gave the genre global scope. Before Ms. Jenkins, children’s music in the United States consisted primarily of simplified, often cartoonish renditions of classical music.
But her first album, released in 1957 with the unfussy title “Call-and-Response: Rhythmic Group Singing,” features West African and Arabic chants as well as one from an American chain gang, which students from the Howalton Day School, the first Black private school in Chicago, helped Ms. Jenkins perform:
There he goes Way across the field They’ll never catch him He’s gone.
Strains of racial justice pervade Ms. Jenkins’s music. As a young adult, she learned freedom songs at meetings of the Congress of Racial Equality, and she performed at the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s rally at Soldier Field in Chicago in 1964.
To commemorate the United States’ bicentennial in 1976, she released the album “We Are America’s Children.” Alongside a version of Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land,” the album includes a medley honoring Native Americans and the song “Black Children Was Born,” a salute to Harriet Tubman, Bessie Smith and other Black luminaries.
“I feel very strongly about making peace and love in the world,” Ms. Jenkins said.
Children sing on nearly all of Ms. Jenkins’s albums, and their mistakes were frequently left intact. A child’s premature clap on “Show Me,” from “Growing Up With Ella Jenkins” (1976), is followed, at the right moment, with a patient “Now clap.”
Ms. Jenkins released 39 albums,the last in 2017, and she spent her entire career with what is now Smithsonian Folkways Records. She was the label’s best-selling artist, and two of her albums — “You’ll Sing a Song and I’ll Sing a Song” (1966) and “Multicultural Children’s Songs” (1995) — were its top releases.
Ms. Jenkins’s work received two nominations for the Grammy Award for best musical album for children, in 2000 and 2005. (She lost in 2005 to a tribute album of her own work.) In 2004, she was awarded the Grammy for lifetime achievement.
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Ms. Jenkins in 2004 at the Grammys, where she received a lifetime achievement award. With her is Neil Portnow, the chairman and chief executive of the Recording Academy.Credit...R. Diamond/WireImage — Getty Images
“There is no one who has done more for young people in American musical history than Ella Jenkins,” the children’s musician Dan Zanes has said.
Gayle Wald, a scholar of African American studies at George Washington University, credits Ms. Jenkins’s success to the “democratic ethos” that her kaleidoscopic repertoire aimed to engender in children. “In the beautiful world her music conjures,” Ms. Wald wrote, “we respond to each other’s calls.”
Ella Louise Jenkins was born on Aug. 6, 1924, in St. Louis. Her father, Obadiah Jenkins, was a factory worker, and her mother, Annabelle Walker, was a domestic one.
Her parents’ marriage was short-lived, and at an early age Ella moved with her mother and her older brother, Thomas, to the South Side of Chicago.
Her family could not afford music lessons, so Ella practiced percussion on baking-soda cans and mimicked a kazoo by drawing a piece of paper across the teeth of a plastic comb. “If you knew a lot of tunes, you could make yourself sound pretty good,” she said.
At night, she sat on her living room floor and listened to her Uncle Floyd, whom she called Flood, play blues harmonica. She often cited those evenings as her deepest musical influence.
Ella’s mother rebuked her for whistling — “A whistling girl and a crowing hen will come to no good end,” she would say — but she also worked overtime cleaning houses in Chicago’s wealthy neighborhoods so that she could buy her daughter a harmonica. The day Ella received the gift, she left it in a taxi while on her way to show it to Uncle Flood. “I cried for days and months,” she said.
Ms. Jenkins struggled to find work as a young Black woman in the early 1940s in a still-segregated Chicago. She was eventually hired to package K-rations at a converted Wrigley’s gum factory, and later found a job at the University of Chicago, where she delivered classified mail to Enrico Fermi and other atomic scientists working on the Manhattan Project in the school’s metallurgical laboratory.
In 1948, she won the Chicagoland Women’s Table Tennis Championship. She was invited to join the national table tennis team but could not afford the associated costs.
After a friend told Ms. Jenkins that community college was free, save for the cost of textbooks, she enrolled in Woodrow Wilson Junior College in Chicago. In 1951, she earned a bachelor’s degree in sociology from San Francisco State University.
She returned to Chicago and became a program director for a South Side Y.W.C.A., where she led children in song. At night, she played the conga drum in open-mic hootenannies.
In 1956, a local television producer saw her performing for a group of children on the sidewalk and invited her to play on a Chicago public broadcasting program called “The Totem Club.” The appearance led to a regular segment for Ms. Jenkins, who named it “This Is Rhythm.”
Ms. Jenkins signed with Folkways that year, and after releasing “Call and Response” (1957), she began touring the country, and eventually the world, performing while collecting musical customs. Her travels led her to record a Maori battle chant, a Swahili counting song, a Mexican hand-clapping song and a Swiss yodeling song. Original compositions included “The World Is Big, the World Is Small.”
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Ms. Jenkins in 2014 posing for a portrait two days before her 90th birthday. “I feel very strongly about making peace and love in the world,” she once said.Credit...Spencer M. Green/Associated Press
Children will “discover that although some things are different, many things are the same,” Ms. Jenkins wrote in the liner notes to “Multicultural Children’s Songs.” “Almost everywhere people count, balloons pop and friends say ‘hello’ and ‘goodbye’ and ‘thank you.’”
She is survived by her longtime companion, Bernadelle Richter, who was also her manager.
Ms. Jenkins continued to perform into her 90s, often ending with her song “Shake Hands With Friends,” from 1976:
Shake hands with friends It’s time to go. And I hope I’ll see you another day.
