Jenny Jenkins: A Song History
"Jenny Jenkins" is a courting song in which a suitor, hoping to take Jenny to a dance, quizzes her on the colors she might wear; she turns most of them down, though she may settle on one in the end.[1] The Traditional Ballad Index explains that it often served as a courting game: each color question had to be answered in rhyme, and a girl stuck for a rhyme owed the boy a kiss or, perhaps, agreed to go to the dance with him.[1] The Index files the song as Roud 731 and remarks that the game could yield some "rather strange rhymes."[1]
Nicolaus Heideloff, fashion plate, British, 1800. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0). Shown in fun for the song's question of which color to wear; it has no connection to the song.
The Index cites printed versions under several names, including "Will You Wear Red?" in two Sharp collections, alongside texts in the Brown, Flanders/Brown and Linscott collections, and it treats a Vance Randolph fragment as related to the song if not part of it.[1] It also lists archive recordings by Warde Ford (1938) and E. C. and Orna Ball (1941), plus recordings by Bascom Lamar Lunsford, Frank Proffitt (as "Julie Jenkins"), Margaret MacArthur and the New Lost City Ramblers.[1] The Alan Lomax Kentucky Recordings site lists Addina Palmore Wilson singing "Jenny Jenkins" as a play song at Marrowbone, Cumberland County, Kentucky, on 24 August 1942.[2] Ruth Weatherman's performance of "Jennie Jenkins" is part of the Abrams Folksong Collection, made up of songs W. Amos Abrams recorded between 1938 and 1946; this item carries no date.[3]
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