Gordon Hill Jenkins (May 12, 1910 – May 1, 1984) was an American arranger, composer, and pianist who was influential in popular music in the 1940s and 1950s. Jenkins worked with The Andrews Sisters, Johnny Cash, The Weavers, Frank Sinatra, Louis Armstrong, Judy Garland, Nat King Cole, Billie Holiday, Harry Nilsson, Peggy Lee and Ella Fitzgerald.
After the Jones band broke up in 1936, Jenkins worked as a freelance arranger and songwriter, contributing to sessions by Isham Jones, Paul Whiteman, Benny Goodman, Andre Kostelanetz, Lennie Hayton, and others. In 1944, Jenkins had a hit song with "San Fernando Valley". In the 1940s, he was music director for the radio version of the program Mayor of the Town, and his orchestra provided the music for Ransom Sherman's program on CBS.
In 1945, Jenkins joined Decca Records. and, in 1949, had a hit with Victor Young's film theme "My Foolish Heart", which was also a success for Billy Eckstine. At the same time, he regularly arranged for and conducted the orchestra for various Decca artists, including Dick Haymes ("Little White Lies", 1947), Ella Fitzgerald ("Happy Talk", 1949, "Black Coffee", 1949, "Baby", 1954), Billie Holiday ("Crazy He Calls Me", "You're My Thrill", "Please Tell Me Now", "Somebody's on My Mind", 1949, and conducted and produced her last Decca session with "God Bless the Child", "This Is Heaven to Me", 1950), Patty Andrews of the Andrews Sisters ("I Can Dream, Can't I", 1949) and Louis Armstrong ("Blueberry Hill", 1949 and "When It's Sleepy Time Down South", 1951).
Jenkins wrote the score for the Broadway revue Along Fifth Avenue, starring Nancy Walker and Jackie Gleason, which ran for 180 performances in 1949.
The liner notes to Verve Records' 2001 reissue of one of Jenkins' albums with Armstrong, Satchmo In Style, quote Decca's A & R director Milt Gabler, saying that Jenkins "stood up on his little podium so that all the performers could see him conduct. But before he gave a downbeat, Gordon made a speech about how much he loved Louis and how this was the greatest moment in his life. And then he cried."
During this time, Jenkins also began recording and performing under his own name. One of his enduring works while at Decca was a pair of Broadway-style musical vignettes, Manhattan Tower and "California" which saw release several times (78s, 45s, and LP) in the 1940s and 1950s. He worked for NBC as a TV producer from 1955 to 1957, and performed at the Hollywood Bowl in 1964. By 1949, Jenkins was musical director at Decca, and he signed – despite resistance from Decca's management – the Weavers, a Greenwich Village folk ensemble that included Pete Seeger among its members. The combination of the Weavers' folk music with Jenkins' orchestral arrangements became popular. Their most notable collaboration was a version of Lead Belly's "Goodnight Irene" (1950) backed by Jenkins' adaptation of the Israeli folk song, "Tzena, Tzena, Tzena". which produced the album Gordon Jenkins' Almanac in 1956, Jenkins was hired by Capitol, where he worked with Frank Sinatra, notably on the albums Where Are You? (1957) and No One Cares (1959), and Nat King Cole, with whom he had his greatest successes; Jenkins was responsible for the lush arrangements on the 1957 album Love Is the Thing (Capitol's first stereo release, which included "When I Fall in Love", and "Star Dust" two of Cole's best-known recordings), as well as the albums The Very Thought of You (1958) and Where Did Everyone Go? (1963).
Jenkins' granddaughter, singer/songwriter Ella Dawn Jenkins, known as EllaHarp, is a career musician in San Francisco.
Awards
In 1966, Jenkins received a Grammy Award for Best Instrumental Arrangement Accompanying Vocalist(s) for Frank Sinatra's rendition of the song "It Was a Very Good Year".