On September 12, 1926, at 9:15 p.m., Edmund Thornton Jenkins died at the Hôpital Tenon in Paris, aged 32, after two months on the ward — and the record cannot say of what. The French registration left the cause blank. American consular files said peritonitis; a doctor who saw him suspected cancer of the throat; his family heard he had fallen from his bed and lain there until pneumonia took hold; a friend told the Pittsburgh Courier it was an ulcerated stomach. Jenkins was the son of the Charleston minister whose orphanage bands fed Jabbo Smith, Cat Anderson, Gus Aiken and Tommy Benford into jazz. He had sailed to London with one of them in 1914, stayed seven years at the Royal Academy of Music collecting its composition prizes, and in December 1919 brought his own Folk Rhapsody on Black American themes into Wigmore Hall — more than four years before Rhapsody in Blue. America first heard the piece in 1996.
Edmund Thornton Jenkins, photographed around 1913 — roughly a year before he sailed to London with one of his father's orphanage bands and stayed. (Photographer unknown; Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons)
Sources: Edmund Jenkins — Wikipedia , Jeffrey Green, "The death of Edmund Jenkins, Paris 1926" — AfriClassical (Hôpital Tenon; the competing accounts of the cause) , "Edmund T. Jenkins of the Royal Academy of Music" — Jeffrey Green, Historian (Royal Academy years; the December 1919 Wigmore Hall concert) , "A Musical Genius, Remembered" — Charleston magazine (the orphanage band's jazz alumni; Brussels premiere of Charlestonia, 1925) , Edmund Thornton Jenkins — StudySC / South Carolina Encyclopedia (American premiere of Charlestonia, October 4, 1996) , "Like a time capsule, Spoleto reveals lost opera Afram ou La Belle Swita" — Charleston City Paper, June 1, 2016
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