How ‘Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood’ Introduced the ‘First Lady of Children’s Music’ to a Large National Audience
When musician Ella Jenkins appeared on the show, she brought Black diasporic music and her signature songs to televisions across America
Building on the momentum of her 1966 album You’ll Sing a Song and I’ll Sing a Song, children’s music legend Ella Jenkins’ diverse 1970s releases boosted her national profile. But nothing brought her to greater national attention in this period than her 1974 and 1975 appearances on “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood,” a nationally distributed program seen by millions of children. Jenkins experienced the power of Fred Rogers’ mass audience almost immediately. Walking through Chicago, or in the airport, she was suddenly recognizable to children and adults as “that singer from ‘Mister Rogers’!”
Jenkins and Rogers had an immediate chemistry. They hailed from starkly different worlds: Jenkins, a child of the first Great Migration of Black Americans, was born in St. Louis, and later her family settled in Chicago’s Bronzeville neighborhood. Rogers was from an upper-middle-class household in the white hamlet of Latrobe, Pennsylvania, on the outskirts of Pittsburgh. Yet they were “neighbors” in disposition, philosophy and love of music.
Both possessed an intuitive gift for communicating with children. Both regarded their work as a conduit of ethical, political and spiritual values, and both taught children compassion, neighborliness and helpfulness—not so that they would be “good,” but because these qualities were the requisites of a just and peaceful world. Finally, both were skilled musicians.
On his show, Rogers used songs to render emotionally complex ideas accessible to children and to help them navigate transitions, beginning and ending each episode with familiar songs. He also employed a crackerjack jazz trio, which improvised to scenes set both in the “Neighborhood” and “The Land of Make Believe.”
At first glance, “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” might seem to have had less in common with Jenkins’ work than another PBS children’s show, “Sesame Street,” on which an interracial cast and a colorful array of puppets spoke with knowing fluency about urban experience. The world of Mister Rogers was white and evoked small-town or suburban life through detached houses with green lawns. Yet Rogers’ approach to the television experience was more closely aligned with Jenkins’ approach to musical performance than that of “Sesame Street.”
Where “Sesame Street” revolved around short, high-energy segments designed to stimulate children’s interest in reading and numeracy, “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” had a leisurely, almost languid pace, emphasizing children’s social and emotional development. And where “Sesame Street” had a hip, self-referential vibe that endeared it to adults and older children, “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” spoke directly and exclusively to preschoolers, giving no thought to their caretakers. “Sesame Street” was a television show. Rogers called “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” a “television visit.”
/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/ff/69/ff693fd8-4571-4b4b-b5c7-a2830ee79327/gettyimages-3408125.jpg)
For her first visit to Pittsburgh, Jenkins accepted Rogers’ invitation to stay the night before the taping at the large home he shared with his wife and sons in the affluent Squirrel Hill neighborhood. The next day, he incorporated this detail into his introductory monologue:
“Hi, Neighbor! I have a treat for you today. A friend of mine is coming. She’s been staying with my family and me at my real home. You know, this [gesturing] is my television home. But at my real home is my friend Ella Jenkins. This is a picture of her [holds up photograph]. And she is a musician who loves to work with children. Look down here on the picture, and see that little drum? I have that drum right here. I brought her instruments over so she wouldn’t have to carry them all. Here’s the drum, see? [shows the drum] … That, and this baritone ukulele which she plays. Oh, she plays it so well and sings so well! Listen [plucks the four strings].”
On cue, Jenkins knocked at Rogers’ door, and the two settled down—Jenkins on a sofa, Rogers perched on a table across from her—for an informal conversation and sing-along. He was a curious and eager participant, asking questions about her musical background, following Jenkins’ lead on “You’ll Sing a Song and I’ll Sing a Song,” and tapping on the drum while she performed “Harmonica Happiness,” the camera offering close-ups of the dramatic fluttering of her fingers as she played. On “I Like Animals,” a song with a challenging melismatic phrase, he joined her on the “oo-oo part.” “Well, you certainly sing well. I enjoyed singing with you,” she said encouragingly when they finished.
The entire segment, from Jenkins’ opening “Oh, hi, Fred!” to their goodbyes, lasted about seven minutes. But in that time, it pictured a relationship between a white man and a Black woman as a friendship of equals. Telling children that Jenkins had been a houseguest at his “real” home was a “‘Fred Rogers’ way of communicating to children about race,” said the ventriloquist (and frequent “Neighborhood” guest) Susan Linn, whose puppet Audrey Duck would sing with Jenkins the following year. It echoed an earlier memorable moment in the series: a 1969 episode in which Rogers and Officer Clemmons, the singing police officer played by African American opera singer François Clemmons, seek relief from summer heat by soaking their feet together in a wading pool.
/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/d0/06/d0060c43-f079-4035-8f35-16dd75037873/gettyimages-130268020.jpg)
Broadcast at a time when white backlash to civil rights was spurring the closure or defunding of public swimming pools, the 1969 segment offered viewers an unapologetic image of racial integration. The 1974 episode with Jenkins, aired at a time of “white flight” from the “inner city,” updated this image for the post-civil rights era. The episode made a powerful impression on the famous TV host. “I don’t believe I’ve ever seen Fred look so happy and captivated,” wrote Nan Wheelock, the show’s associate producer, to Jenkins.
In the 1980s and 1990s, Jenkins would appear on “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” an additional six times. (Although it aired videos of her singing, she never visited the denizens of “Sesame Street,” and she stopped by “Barney and Friends” only once, in 1993.) She dazzled with “Go Down, Moses” on the harmonica, showed off her collection of children’s tops from around the world and gave Rogers a lesson in singing the blues. And in a 1985 episode that entered show lore, Jenkins taught Rogers and regular cast member Chuck Aber how to do “Head and Shoulder,” a Black girls’ chant she recorded on her 1971 Little Johnny Brown LP. Rogers struggled to keep up with Jenkins’ syncopated rhythms, to the point of laughing and saying, “It’s hard, isn’t it?” Rogers could have retaped the scene but decided to keep it so children could see that adults, too, learned new things and made mistakes.
Reprinted with permission and adapted from This Is Rhythm: Ella Jenkins, Children’s Music, and the Long Civil Rights Movement by Gayle F. Wald. Published by The University of Chicago Press. Copyright © 2025 by Gayle F. Wald. All rights reserved.