Multicultural Children's Songs
Long before Raffi ever picked up a guitar, Ella Jenkins was pioneering the field of children's music. Her example of short, well-played folk songs that neither talked over kids' heads nor condescended to them remains the model for children's-music performers everywhere. Long before "multicultural" became a buzzword in educational and arts circles, Jenkins was drawing her material from Europe, Africa, Asia, Latin America, and her own African American neighborhood in South Chicago. She celebrates her 40th anniversary as a professional entertainer with the anthology,Multicultural Children's Songs, which collects 23 songs from a dozen different Folkways albums onto a single CD. She is the Pete Seeger of children's music, and this is a good introduction to her work.--Geoffrey Himes