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SOUTH CAROLINA MUSIC HALL OF FAME Preserving the State's Soundtrack

 

 
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SOUTH CAROLINA
MUSIC HALL OF FAME
INITIATIVE

STANFIELD GRAY
EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR

843.478.1167
grayjs@cofc.edu

 

 

 

 

 

 
OUR MISSION

THE SOUTH CAROLINA MUSIC HALL OF FAME INITIATIVE produces programs, exhibitions and concerts exploring the music and musicians of South Carolina.

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It considers the lives of the artists, their communities, and their lasting imprint on the state’s culture. The initiative reflects the vibrant roots of the Palmetto State, including African, European, Hispanic, Native American, Asian and other influences. Plans are in the works for a multi-use South Carolina Music Hall of Fame Center. Read more >

UPCOMING EXHIBIT


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REVEREND JENKINS & HIS ORPHANAGE BAND

THE JENKINS JAZZ TRAIN
The South Carolina Music Hall of Fame Initiative will build an educational “Jenkins Jazz Train” exhibit to be displayed in a downtown location during the 2007 Piccolo Spoleto festival season. Proposed location is Marion Square, in downtown Charleston, pending approval of the Office of Cultural Affairs. The exhibit will feature a stage prop “Freight Train” with panels, photographs, and other memorabilia pertaining to Charleston Reverend Daniel Jenkins and his Orphanage Jazz Band. This story is of great importance to the history of South Carolina.

LEGEND
The Jenkins Orphanage, and later on, its world famous band, was born in 1891 in an empty railroad car. Daniel Jenkins, an African-American laborer who earned a meager living hauling timber for the lumber mills, had gone to the railroad yard one morning to retrieve a consignment of wood. While there, he discovered four little black boys huddled against the cold in an empty car. When he asked them why their parents had let them go out in such frigid weather, he learned that they had been abandoned.

Although Jenkins had children of his own - and precious little money with which to take care of them - he nonetheless took the four orphans home to his wife, Lena, and gave them food and beds. This simple act of charity would turn out to be the advent of an enterprise with far-reaching achievements: It would export Southern jazz to the rest of the world, incubate the talents of some famous African American musicians, and even create a new dance step that would come to define the “Roaring Twenties.”  (“The Cradle of Jazz,” by James Hutchisson, printed in Charleston Magazine.) Read more >

 

 

 

 

PUBLIC RADIO

Southern Roots & New Offshoots broadcasts the first Thursday of each month on the SC-ETV radio program Conversations with Joan at 6:30 p.m.

Host Jack McCray welcomes guests from the American South to share and discuss the music they love on public radio stations:  

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Charleston - 89.3FM,WSCI  
Greenville - 90.1 FM, WEPR
Columbia - 91.3 FM, WLTR
Conway - 90.1 FM, WHMC

Southern Roots & New Offshoots is created and produced by Stanfield Gray, and engineered by Matt Hiott at the College of Charleston. Email grayjs@cofc.edu for booking and more information. Read more >

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Stanfield Gray is the Executive Director of the South Carolina Music Hall of Fame Initiative and Director of Media Relations and Event Marketing at the the College of Charleston. Gray also teaches Introduction to Music Management at the College. Email: grayjs@cofc.edu or call (843) 478.1167.

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Jack McCray is a writer and editor for the Charleston Post and Courier, and the Co-Director of the Charleston Jazz Initiative along with with Karen Chandler. For more info visit: www.charlestonjazz.net; Email:
jackmccray@charlestonjazz.net or call (843)607.3905

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Matt Hiott is the assistant director of Synergy at the College of Charleston, a guitar enthusiast and a recording engineer par excellence. hiottm@cofc.edu