#706) Fox Movietone News: Jenkins Orphanage Band (1928)

#706) Fox Movietone News: Jenkins Orphanage Band (1928)

OR “Charleston in Charge”

Produced by Fox Movietone News

Class of 2003

The Plot: Fox Movietone News travels to Charleston, South Carolina to record the world-famous Jenkins Orphanage Band. Comprised entirely of African American orphans, the Jenkins Orphanage Band wows us with their hot rendition of “Shoutin’ Eliza”, complete with some of the latest dance moves. And then they do it all over again because these are outtakes from the actual newsreel, comprising take after take of the band performing the same song.

Why It Matters: The NFR write-up is a straightforward description of the film, with a recognition of the Jenkins Orphanage Band being “one of the country’s important jazz ‘incubators’.” An essay by music history professor Julie Hubbert is a detailed history of the band, its origins, and its influences. There’s also a link to the University of South Carolina Moving Image Research Collections, which includes this footage.

But Does It Really?: Sure, but I’m a little confused. The title implies that this is the original Fox newsreel about the Jenkins Orphanage Band, but the only footage available online is 10 minutes of outtakes. While this footage matches the NFR’s description of the film, nothing in the NFR write-up mentions the outtakes. This leaves me with several questions: Does the final newsreel still exist? Did it ever exist? Did I watch the actual NFR inducted film or is this my biggest fake out since “Empire“? As far as I can tell, these outtakes are the film in question, but an official confirmation would be nice. I still support “Jenkins Orphanage Band” making the NFR, I just want to make sure I watched what I was supposed to watch.

Everybody Gets One: Founded in 1891 by the Reverend Daniel Jenkins, the Daniel Jenkins Orphanage was Charleston’s only orphanage established specifically for African American children. Funding for the orphanage was always an issue (their original funding from the Charleston city council was $100 – about $4000 today), and Jenkins, inspired by the African American military bands of the Civil War era, organized a band comprised of his orphans to travel the northern states as a fundraiser. A trip to London around 1896 received major press coverage, and soon the band’s reputation grew. In the first decade of the 1900s alone the Jenkins Orphanage Band played the Pan-American Exposition, the St. Louis World’s Fair, and the inaugurations of both Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft. The band maintained their popularity over the years by incorporating the latest music into their act such as ragtime and jazz. Fox News (not to be confused with the much later cable news channel) first filmed the Jenkins Orphanage Band in 1926 with standard silent film, but with the advent of sound the rebranded Fox Movietone News returned on November 22^nd, 1928 to record the only surviving sound footage of the Jenkins Orphanage Band.

Other notes

Once again, the song is “Shoutin’ Eliza”, and I hope you like it because you’re going to hear it a lot in the next 10 minutes. Is this the only song they know how to play?
For a band comprised of children with little training, they sound great. Though I notice they start to get a little sloppy in the later takes, which is understandable.
One interesting bit of trivia: the children in the band were trained on each instrument! This film also shows off another of the band’s traits: having the band’s smallest children conduct.
About halfway through we get a few takes of a young boy doing a number of dance moves for the camera, including the Charleston, which may have originated with members of the Jenkins Orphanage Band! This is followed by two little girls dancing in front of the band, and what they lack in skill they more than make up for in adorableness.
The last part of the outtakes is the off-camera director trying to get a child to face the camera and say, “Hey hey!”. As these are outtakes, we never find out if this kid ever performed a satisfactory take. The best this cameraman can get is the kid saying “Hey!…Hey!”

Legacy

Following the death of Reverend Daniel Jenkins in 1937 (and the orphanage’s relocation after part of the original building was damaged in a fire), the Jenkins Orphanage Band continued performing, until finally being phased out in the 1980s due to financial constraints. The Jenkins Orphanage, however, continues operating to this day, now known as the Jenkins Institute for Children.