Edmund Jenkins of South Carolina

Edmund Thornton Jenkins was born in Charleston, South Carolina, in April 1894, one of the eight children of Lena James Jenkins and her husband, the Reverend Daniel Joseph Jenkins. They had established the Orphan Aid Society in 1891, better known as the Jenkins Orphanage. As well as their own children, they took responsibility for over five hundred waifs and strays. Most were placed in a farm-reformatory in Ladson, near the city, where they grew vegetables and obtained a basic education. Others were lodged in the Old Marine Hospital on Franklin Street, Charleston, and there were taught to read and write, and in practical skills which, while destined to support them when independent adults, provided the orphanage with revenue. These included bread making, jobbing printing and a weekly newspaper (the Charleston Messenger), shoe repairs, laundry, and music making. Choirs, up to five bands, jubilee singers, and girl duos and trios brought attention to the orphanage through public performances, traveling to Florida, as well as to New York and elsewhere in the North. They gathered alms and practical support, and collected one quarter of the funds required to keep the institution solvent. The city eventually provided some money, reaching $1,000 a year in the 1910s—for the orphans were black, and city, county, and state were white-run and almost blind to the needs of the African Americans who made up half of the state's population at that time.

Skillfully negotiating between Charleston's powerful white elite and the extreme poverty of so many of his people, the Reverend Jenkins was an exemplary figure to the youngsters. Black-led churches had leading roles in Southern life, as did charitable Northerners who founded, funded, and taught at many of the region's black colleges and schools. The elite among the African Americans of Charleston attended Avery Institute, and had lessons in the Eurocentric tradition. Edmund Jenkins went to Avery, then to the Atlanta Baptist College in Georgia (later Morehouse College). Already able to play violin, piano, and trumpet, Jenkins came under the influence of music tutor Kemper Harreld and future author Benjamin Brawley when in Atlanta.

Harreld, whose wife Claudia taught German, classics, and piano in Atlanta, was fully conversant with European art music. Born in 1885 in Muncie, Indiana, he had moved to Atlanta in 1911 to head the music department. Edmund Jenkins was his favorite pupil. Historians have investigated African-American music with an emphasis on jazz and blues and as a consequence the contributions and values of musical people like the Harrelds have been overlooked. In their house were violins, cellos, a viola, and a piano as well as much sheet music. The college had many instruments, and its president John Hope had two sons who played the clarinet and the trombone. Harreld and other residents of black Atlanta gave music lessons privately. Claudia's brother Lucien White was the music critic of the well-respected New York Age (Green 1990, 179-181).

Among the works that were part of the Harrelds' collection as well as that of the college orchestra (which Harreld conducted and included Jenkins on violin), were the works of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor. Born in London in 1875, the son of a Sierra Leonean doctor, Coleridge-Taylor's fame started when he was at the Royal College of Music in the 1890s, and his choral work Song of Hiawatha (1897-1900) entered the repertory of singing groups all over the English-speaking world. Harreld, when living in Chicago, met and worked with him during a 1906 tour, and his creations were included in programs performed by several of Harreld's Atlanta concert and choral groups (Green 1990, 193; McGinty 2001, 221).

This understanding of orchestral music, the several instruments that he had mastered, and his experience in helping with the orphanage bands formed Edmund Jenkins, who traveled to England in May 1914. He was a member of the orphanage band, employed to entertain at the Anglo-American Exposition in London. It was so successful that the contract was extended until the end of the exhibition—a four month period (Green 1982; Green 1991).

The Harrelds reached England in August 1914 for their vacation to Germany (where Kemper Harreld took lessons from Siegfried Eberhardt in Berlin) ended with the outbreak of war at the beginning of that month. From neutral Holland they reached London, where they visited Coleridge-Taylor's widow and attended a service at Westminster Abbey. In the congregation were brothers Edward and Jacob Patrick, members of the orphanage band—billed as the "Famous Piccaninny Band" [sic] in poses with seventeen instrumentalists featured in a set of photographs issued on six commercial postcards. The Harrelds visited the exhibition on September 1. As Edmund Jenkins had mailed a postcard from London reporting his arrival, this may not have been the first contact the old friends made that summer in London.

The Exposition closed, and the band sailed from Liverpool on September 5 (Rye 1987, 138). Jenkins's name is listed but crossed through on that ship's register but he had in fact registered at the Royal Academy of Music in London on September 14 and paid further fees on September 23. He remained there for seven years.

The Royal Academy of Music was chaired by Sir Alexander Campbell Mackenzie, who was very keen on the works of Liszt. Jenkins studied composition with Wagner enthusiast Frederick Corder, clarinet with Edward Augarde, and the piano as well as French. His clarinet playing was good enough for him to sit in the student orchestra when a concert was given in mid-December, 1914; it included an item by Coleridge-Taylor. In February 1915 he attended a concert by the Royal Choral Society, the program consisting of music of Coleridge-Taylor (Green 1982, 46-48).

It seems that his French was good enough to require no more than one semester's tuition. His singing won him a bronze medal around May 1915. He and Augarde were in a student orchestral concert on February 26, 1915. Under the baton of Sir Alexander Mackenzie, Jenkins was in the orchestra on June 29: the program included works by Handel, Franck, Meyerbeer, Saint-Saens, and Coleridge-Taylor. At this time Jenkins was awarded an orchestral scholarship that paid basic tuition fees (Green 1982, 47).

He had other sources of income, playing, as so many music students did, in the pit bands of theaters. His abilities and status as a scholar at the Royal Academy of Music would have been excellent qualifications, but there was also the effect of the war, which took so many men into the forces (and regiments needed bandsmen) and removed many of the German instrumentalists who had long worked in British musical circles.

There was an anti-German feeling in Britain, yet when Jenkins played his clarinet in a student concert in November 1915, he was the clarinetist in a quartet that played two works by Beethoven. He played in a quartet in February 1916 and again in May, as well as working alongside Augarde in the clarinet section in an orchestral concert at the end of June 1916. Jenkins was awarded a bronze medal for clarinet a few days later. He had also written an overture for a student drama production (Green 1982, 48-50). Jenkins had also progressed on the piano sufficiently to join his quartet colleague Arthur Sandford to present piano duets at the academy at the end of November. The weekly Musical News praised their performance (Green 1982, 53).

Another composition, a song, was praised by the Musical News on December 23—a review probably written by fellow student, violinist Winifred Small. The words were by Arthur Plowright, an English writer who lived in Jenkins's neighborhood in northwest London (Green 1982, 53-54). When the Musical News reviewed the student concert of March 27, 1917, and a second Jenkins-Plowright song, it referred to him as "a native of Africa" (Green 1982, 54). The academy files list more medals: bronze for the piano, silver for both the clarinet and for sight singing. And Jenkins had turned to the organ—writing a piece which was performed at a student concert at the Queen's Hall. His knowledge of this instrument seems to have been obtained in America, as tuition for organ lessons was not listed on his file at the Royal Academy of Music until the fourth year, starting in September.

Jenkins played the piano to Lucy Vincent's oboe at a July concert. He was sufficiently skilled to cease piano studies at this time. His studies were now devoted to composition, the clarinet, and the organ. He won a prize of books and music for his composition efforts; a piece he wrote for the violin was performed in March 1918. He had added studies in harmony and was awarded the Charles Lucas Prize. Yet again the orchestral scholarship was extended, into 1919. But he had ceased taking lessons on the clarinet—he was listed as the academy's clarinet tutor for three years from September 1918. He was awarded a certificate for his skills on the clarinet and for sight reading, and in early 1919 won the Battison Haynes prize for composition (Green 1982, 60-63).

Will Marion Cook and the Southern Syncopated Orchestra arrived in England that summer, and they were soon in contact with Jenkins. Exactly how they met is uncertain, but it is very likely that Cook had been in contact with Harreld (Lucien White at the New York Age is a probable link). Jenkins and a group of fellow students—not music students, but all from Africa or the West Indies—read a new London weekly, West Africa, that announced the orchestra's arrival in its issue of August 30, 1919.

The orchestra had arrived in mid-June, and contacts had been made by early July for a social gathering in central London on August 8 that included Jenkins, his London friends, and members of the orchestra (Green 1982, 72-75). The gathering had been organized by the Coterie of Friends, led by Jenkins, a law student from the Bahamas named Alfred Adderley, and a pharmacy student from Trinidad named Harold Piper. Law student Randall Lockhart, from the British West Indian island of Dominica, was a member and recalled the orchestra sixty years later: "They took London by storm and privately they were a hectic crowd, so that a good time was had by all" (Green 1982, 72).

The summer of 1919 was an exciting time in London. The peace treaties were being signed. There was a general feeling for novelty after more than four years of war. Citizens of the once-grand and now collapsing European empires of Germany, Russia, and Austro-Hungary were establishing or reviving nations (Czechoslovakia, Poland, Finland, Latvia), and women were being enfranchised. Africans and people of African descent also pressed for respect and liberty. Among the delegations that had come to London to plead for justice were groups from British Guiana (Britain's sole South American colony—now Guyana), South Africa, the Gold Coast (now Ghana), and Liberia. Members of those delegations attended that social evening on August 8, 1919.

Their presence suggests earlier connections between the young students in London and older people in their distant natal lands, and the capacity of Jenkins and his friends to seek out visitors. Their network was very broad, making it difficult for the modern reader to realize that the black population of London was small. In an immense city of some eight million, the black population numbered under 40,000. This meant that no black person was forced to reside in a ghetto, and shopping, worship, education, and other activities were never restricted to a blacks-only community. The absence of these American practices enabled visitors such as the Southern Syncopated Orchestra to move somewhat easily in British life (but did not remove them from insult and bigotry). Those born in Britain, and settlers like Jenkins, welcomed newcomers such as the delegates and the orchestra. They gave advice, too.

One of the orchestra's members, Arthur Briggs (trumpet), has claimed origins in Mississippi, Charleston, South Carolina, and Canada, and this writer had believed that Briggs, Charleston, and Jenkins were associated before the Syncopated Orchestra reached England. What is certain is that Briggs was a skilled musician, born and raised in Granada in the British West Indies, who first reached the United States in late 1917. If he took lessons from Francis Eugene Mikell, once a tutor at the Jenkins Orphanage, as has been claimed, the lessons would have taken place in New York in late 1918, for before then Mikell was in the army.

Briggs had joined with Cook to tour before his orchestra crossed the Atlantic. He recalled bad weather January to April 1919, that they reached Chicago, and that "business was awful, just awful" (Goddard 1979, 282-283). In this interview, which he told me was recorded without his permission, he is quoted as stating,

While I was in London I was introduced to this music professor at the Royal Academy [of Music]. I was introduced by a clarinet player by the name of Edmond [sic] Jenkins who was the son of the Jenkins that had the Charleston Orphanage Band. Well, his son was studying at Nether [sic] Hall, and he introduced me to this John Solomon. So Solomon gave me an appointment. He saw me in Brixton [south London]. . . . Anyway, I ended up taking two lessons a week for my technique. He taught me how to study and how to produce my tone without forcing it. I studied with him for two years. The first year I went almost twice a week. Then I went once a week, then once a month. He told me, "You don't have to come back anymore. You can come whenever you want. Just phone me or drop me a line."

(Goddard 1979, 283)

Solomon taught at the Royal Academy of Music and at the army school of music at Kneller Hall in west London. He had also played in the College's orchestras with Jenkins.

In a letter to the author, dated Paris, August 31, 1982, Briggs wrote that Edmund Jenkins had "guided me in my Musical and Instrumental Studies-In other words- Responsible for the Success of my Professional Career. Unfortunately, I was in Berlin, Germany when he PASSED. His memory is always present in all of my undertakings" (spacing in original).

Opportunities to improve professional skills were not the only advantage in London for orchestra members and Jenkins. Sidney Bechet acquired a soprano saxophone, an instrument that he would feature on his recordings beginning in the 1920s (Chilton 1987, 45). He was billed to play it at a Southern Syncopated Orchestra concert in Glasgow, Scotland, on December 22, 1919 ("Musical Promenade" 5). There were opportunities to attend concerts (provided the schedule of shows at the orchestra's London venue, Philharmonic Hall, permitted), to purchase sheet music, and to meet with other musicians. There were social successes, from Briggs and Bechet appearing at a garden party at Buckingham Palace to the orchestra's participation at the Peace Ball in November 1919 (Green 1982, 76, 78).

As detailed elsewhere, members of Cook's orchestra also found employment in other bands. It was now fashionable to dance to jazz bands, and some thought that the best bands had black instrumentalists. Briggs recalled: "For the French people the jazz band was the drums" (Goddard 1979, 284). For Cook and his manager George Lattimore the ebbing away of members was a continuing problem as well as the pair's own bickering. They had to have people of African descent in the orchestra, however far from the "South" their origins: it was a black group, and black substitutes had to be found.

In September 1919 the group included Bertin Salnave, born in 1892 in Haiti, and a student in France when recruited by Lattimore. He recalled that "when Will Marion Cook left us, Lattimore sought the help of the respected coloured musician Edmund Jenkins, son of the well-known director of the Jenkins Orphan Asylum in Charleston." At that time, "Lattimore committed the direction of the orchestra to trumpeter E. E. Thompson" (Demeusey 1978, 210). Yet again highly-trained Eurocentric musicians were being recruited. Salnave was a flute player, and France had and has the best institutions and tutors for that instrument. Thompson was a graduate of Kneller Hall, for he had been in the West India Regiment of the British army.

Egbert Thompson had been born in Sierra Leone, West Africa in 1883. His father, a Jamaican, was a soldier in the West India Regiment, a black infantry group with white officers used for colonial control, generally with one battalion in the Caribbean and another in Africa (Dyde 1997, 213). Raised in Jamaica, Egbert Thompson joined the regiment as a musician and showed such promise that he was sent to England, to Kneller Hall in 1897-1898. He played both trumpet and saxophone, could read music, and write band arrangements. He was not permitted to be the bandmaster because of his color and so left for New York in 1907 (Clausen 1988, 161). There he led bands and was known as "the Black Sousa" (Charters and Kunstadt, 1981, 20). He served in France in the French army's 367th Infantry Regiment, one of four African-American regiments that, to the surprise of many Americans, were welcomed by the French and served under French direction in the trenches. The 369th Regiment's band, the "Hell Fighters," led by bandmaster James Reese Europe, has the most fame. The aforementioned Francis Eugene Mikell also served in one of these military bands. After the Armistice, Egbert Thompson returned to New York where Lattimore recruited him.

In the orchestra in November 1919 with Thompson, Salnave, and Briggs was Jacob Patrick, the trombonist whose musical education had taken place at the Jenkins Orphanage. He had been in the orphanage band with his brother and Edmund Jenkins in London in 1914 (Rye 1987, 138). Trombonist Frank Withers and Briggs, Salnave, and a Puerto Rican-born bassist named Santos Rivera from the Syncopated Orchestra were members of an orchestra conducted by Jenkins at London's Wigmore Hall in the afternoon of Sunday December 7, 1919. It was a full size orchestra. The other fifty instrumentalists were academy students and professors, and professional musicians. Salnave was the principal flute; Briggs—"scared to death"—was in the brass section with Covent Garden opera house French horn player Adolph Borsdorf (Green 1982, 81). The principal trumpet of the orchestra, Frank James, had a brother, E. Fred James, who would later teach Jenkins both oboe and bassoon at the Academy (Green 1982, 81).

The concert was largely given over to the works of Coleridge-Taylor. His widow and daughter were present, as was his tutor from the Royal College of Music, Sir Charles Villiers Stanford. Randall Lockhart wrote the biographic notes for the twelve-page souvenir program, using the 1915 biography of the composer. Musical analysis was contributed by Wendell Bruce James, another West Indian. James had been at Oxford University before the war. He had enlisted and survived infantry service and was now working as a musician in London. He was recalled by Salnave as "a great organist" (Demeusey 1978, 210). He does not appear to have known Jenkins very well, for in his analysis of the Folk Rhapsody by Jenkins which was the intruder in the Coleridge-Taylor program, he named two of the three themes but not the first, which he described as "a characteristic Negro melody." It was a Charleston wharf fisherman's song called "Brer Rabbit, What Do You Do There?" (Green 1982, 79-82, 152).

Edmund Jenkins was recalled by Salnave as revealing the worth of Coleridge-Taylor's compositions as well as refusing Lattimore's offer to lead the orchestra (Green 1982, 77, 81).

Why did Edmund Jenkins refuse the offer to be the musical director of the Southern Syncopated Orchestra? After all, he knew the musicians, had introduced them to his friends, had played with them, had conducted four of them, and had had a relationship with Cook which led to the pair working together in New York in 1924.

First, he was still studying at the Royal Academy of Music. As a Ross Scholar he had achieved scholastic greatness and moved within London's musical establishment through contacts made there. Second, although he could direct an orchestra, he was less experienced in leadership than Thompson and younger than many of the musicians. Perhaps the show band nature of the Syncopated Orchestra, with its musical puns, banjo players whose repertory and approach to performance were strongly reminiscent of those of minstrel shows of the previous century, and the equally retrospective nature of its presentation of spirituals were all in opposition to his grander ideals of art music. More likely, as the orchestra's schedule was to take it touring Britain, Jenkins would have known that to take up Lattimore's offer would be to sever his London links. And one of them was providing him with a substantial reward, for—given the student status of his colleagues in the Coterie of Friends—it must have been Jenkins who financed that Coleridge-Taylor concert from income he had earned while leading a dance band in the small hall of the Queen's Hall, central London's major concert venue. This activity was similar to that taken by one of the cellists at the Wigmore Hall concert, later to achieve fame as maestro Sir John Barbirolli. Jenkins was both American and black, fitting the image of the new music—jazz—in postwar London. He played the clarinet and the alto saxophone, and wrote arrangements of the tunes, often American. He may well have had copies sent to him from New York. The other musicians played banjo, piano, trumpet, trombone, drums, and violin. Pianist Jack Hylton rose to be a major figure in British popular music. The trumpeter's brother, trombonist George "Ted" Heath, recalled that sitting in with this band paid ten pounds a week which was "a small fortune." Unable to master the subtleties of the music, Ted Heath lasted four nights, but Jenkins recommended him to the Syncopated Orchestra and Heath says he went with it to Vienna, Austria (Green 1982, 96-97). This is the same Ted Heath whose band successfully toured the U.S.A. in the 1950s.

If ten pounds a week was a small fortune to Heath, what was Jenkins being paid as leader? One of the Coterie of Friends, a medical student from Trinidad who returned to practice there, recalled that he "earned a good salary there—fifty pounds a week" (Martin 1980). That was then equivalent to $250 in American money. Certainly Edmund Jenkins had sufficient funds to make a summer visit to the United States, departing from England on July 31 and returning by October 1920 (Green 1982, 93-94). He purchased new clarinets from Paris, through the Queen's Hall manager Herbert Henry (Green 1982, 96). And in 1921 there were several visits to the recording studios by the "Queen's" Dance Orchestra. Some were issued on the company's cheaper label as being by Jack Hylton's Jazz Band. The twenty-seven recordings feature Jenkins and reveal what a sorry standard his colleagues had, despite the band's employment in one of London's leading nightspots. As Hylton was to recall, unfairly, "virtually the only schooled musician in the outfit was a coloured clarinettist by the name of Jenkins, who was actually a professor on his instrument at the Royal Academy and could read." In fact, trombonist Jesse Stamp was an orchestral player who had performed at the Royal Albert Hall with John Solomon (Green 1982, 49, 86).

The Southern Syncopated Orchestra made no recordings. And its nadir, when members drowned when the SS Rowan was sunk in October 1921, occurred at the same time that Jenkins and the band went to the recording studios no fewer than four times. The SSO had entertained far more people than Jenkins had in his concerts or at the Queen's small hall. Its reputation and various legends survived. Jenkins, who died in Paris in 1926, almost vanished from the history books. One can wonder what would have happened if Jenkins had accepted Lattimore's offer.

First, the Syncopated Orchestra's renditions of Coleridge-Taylor compositions would possibly have continued, probably expanding with excerpts from his well-known Song of Hiawatha arranged for vocalists with quartet- or orchestral-backing. Secondly, there would perhaps have been a more positive approach to the culture of African Americans, fuelled by the fact that Edmund Jenkins had been raised in the ex-slave South where he knew black folk music traditions. After all, his hometown had its street cries documented in a book published in Charleston in 1911 (Leiding 1911). There were two Syncopated Orchestra members to have been raised in New Orleans, and three others in the South.

This positive attitude was politically inspired. The motivation of Edmund Jenkins is not supposition, although we know that his father was prepared to write strongly to South Carolina's governor from London in 1914, stating that unfair treatment was not reasonable. Also known is that the Orphanage's secretary, Eloise C. Harleston (from 1912, the second Mrs. D. J. Jenkins) was the sister of the founder of the city branch of the NAACP. Edwin "Teddy" Harleston also pressed white officials on behalf of black South Carolinians in 1916 when public utterances and support for that black-led organization were life-threatening. Teddy Harleston's work included having a white man arrested for the attempted rape of a black girl aged ten and campaigning against the state law that banned black teachers in colored schools. The latter led to the law changing in September 1920 (Green 1982, 40; Ball, 2001, 191-196). We also know that Jenkins remained in touch with his old tutor Benjamin Brawley who wrote pioneering books on the black contribution to American life.

It is of interest that the other clarinetist in that band in 1914 London was Emerson Harper, who became a solid friend of writer-poet Langston Hughes. Hughes, whose left-of-center political views are well known, dedicated his first volume of autobiography (The Big Sea) to Emerson Harper and his wife. At the Royal Academy of Music, Jenkins took his final piano lessons with Alan Bush, who was to teach composition there for over fifty years although he was a man, his obituary records, who "combined uncompromising communist convictions with a friendly reasonableness" (Cole 1995, 15).

In London, Edmund Jenkins was a member of the African Progress Union (APU). The APU was formed in 1918, and was led by John Archer, the Liverpool-born son of a sailor from Barbados and mayor of a Thames-side borough in London in 1913. The APU had formally requested the British government to have an African member in the delegation that was to discuss peace terms with Germany, and also that Germany's colonies in Africa should not be returned to Germany (Green 1982, 64-65). From the earliest (December 1918) reports of APU activities in West Africa we can see names of Jenkins's associates including Wendall Bruce James and Alfred Adderley, but not Jenkins. But also absent at that time was the name of John Alcindor, who took over from Archer in July 1921.

Alcindor's report on his first year as president has survived, and that 1922 document lists the fourteen members of the committee and the six executives. Jenkins is named as a committee member. Brief details of these political associates of Jenkins reveal high levels of sophistication and experience. Alcindor was a medical practitioner born in Trinidad and trained at Edinburgh University. Graduating in 1899 he moved to London, attended the Pan-African Conference there in 1900 where he became a friend of both future NAACP leader W. E. B. Du Bois and Coleridge-Taylor. One of his vice-presidents was Ojo Olaribigbe, from either Gambia or Sierra Leone, another Scotland-trained medical doctor. The other was Nigerian lawyer Max Thompson. The treasurer was Kwamina Tandoh, a Ghanaian merchant who had settled in London around 1906. The secretary was Emma Smith, one of the England-educated sisters of a Sierra Leonean lawyer. The sisters, more at home in London than in Freetown, had been close friends of Coleridge-Taylor. The assistant secretary was Edith Barbour-James, a teacher of mathematics born in Barbados, who had worked as a school principal in Ghana (then the Gold Coast), and whose London wedding to John Barbour-James in October 1920 had included Archer among the guests.

The work of the APU, in a steady campaign for global black rights, is outside the scope of this article. There were musical elements, in that Georgia-born tenor Roland Hayes and his pianist Lawrence Brown moved on the edges of the group soon after they arrived in London in 1920. Hayes gave well-received recitals in London, and became involved with the Union. Alcindor met with Du Bois at the London Pan-African Congresses of both 1921 and 1923. Jenkins was involved in both (Green 1982, 105, 137-140).

By 1923 Jenkins was based in Paris; after a disillusioning return to America he went back to France in 1924, and died there in September 1926, aged thirty-two. His Charlestonia, that Folk Rhapsody (the title of the piece was changed in the 1920s) presented at the Wigmore Hall in London in 1919, was performed for the first time in America more than sixty years later and was issued on CD in 2004. A pre-Gershwin alliance of African American themes in the European orchestral tradition, Charlestonia hints at what Edmund Jenkins might have done with the Southern Syncopated Orchestra had he accepted George Lattimore's offer in 1919 (Got the Saint Louis Blues: Classical Music in the Jazz Age, 2004).

Afterword

In 1979, when researching the life of Edmund Thornton Jenkins (1894-1926) I was entrusted with documents by Edwina Harleston Fleming of Charleston, South Carolina. The bulk of these were donated to the New York Public Library's Schomburg branch; a small selection has since been donated to the Charleston Jazz Initiate at the Avery Institute, College of Charleston, in Charleston, South Carolina. The Fleming documents led to contacts with some of Edmund Jenkins's friends or the children of those friends. One contact was Randall H. Lockhart, whose address in Roseau, Dominica (once the British West Indies, and not to be confused with the Dominican Republic) was obtained from Herman D. Boxhill of Antigua, who responded to my letter in the Advocate of Barbados.

Randall Lockhart was living in London during the period of the Southern Syncopated Orchestra's tour of Britain. He was a law student and returned to the Caribbean in December 1922.

His first letter, dated August 26, 1979, includes the following comments:

Not all the names that you mentioned arouse a chord in my memory but several still do. . . . Jenkins was acquainted with most if not all the outstanding American Negro Musicians of those days, Roland Hayes, Harry T. Burleigh, Will Marion Cook. The last-named came to London with his Southern Syncopated Orchestra. He and his band rendered music of a more popular appeal than did Hayes or Burleigh, but they took London by storm and privately they were a hectic crowd, so that a good time was had by all.

Burleigh and Hayes were classic tenors, presenting recitals of European classics and spirituals. Of the social group which the students had named the Coterie of Friends, Mr. Lockhart wrote:

I remember all the persons named as members of the "Coterie of Friends," all of whom were West Indians ranging from Grenada, the Bahamas, Trinidad, Barbados and Tobago. The one exception was Mano [sic] Plange, a fine, outstanding and handsome man who was a Nigerian or a native of the Gold Coast (as it was then).

Lockhart contributed an essay to the program sold at a December 1919 concert in London. Mounted by the Coterie of Friends, the orchestra included four members of the Southern Syncopated Orchestra as well as John—later Sir John—Barbirolli, a fellow student of Jenkins at the Royal Academy of Music. Of the two he wrote: "They were fond of each other and my impression was that each respected the other's talent."

In a letter postmarked June 16, 1982, Mr. Lockhart wrote: "Will Marion Cook, very informal and off-hand. . . . I want to but cannot place George Lattimore."

In a letter dated March 4, 1981, he advised he had been in London once, in 1947, since qualifying as a lawyer in 1922. In 1983 he thanked me for the copy of Edmund Thornton Jenkins: The Life and Times of an American Black Composer.