Make a Pretty Sound: A Story of Ella Jenkins—The First Lady of Children’s Music

K-Gr 3–The book opens with a time line covering the first half of Ella Jenkins’s life, born 1924, read respectfully, solemnly by versatile Waites. Her noteworthy performance enlivens with Jenkins as a little girl who “whistles with the birds,” who “wants to make a pretty sound.” Waites embodies the rhythms of Jenkins’s Chicago youth—recess rhymes, music from Morocco and India, “every voice an invitation.” Aunt Willie May’s jukebox, Uncle Flood’s Louisiana blues, dazzling Bronzeville where Louis Armstrong and Cab Calloway strut and play, feed her musical soul. The decades of her long, peripatetic life perpetually beat to a soundtrack that she always shares with the children—music she makes, music she creates—through civil rights battles, victorious celebrations, international explorations. Always, “she can hardly wait—to show the children.” Jenkins’s bio, author’s note, and the time line part 2 appends.