Stephen Jenks (March 17, 1772 – June 3, 1856) was an Yankee tunesmith, teacher, and tunebook compiler.
Between 1799 and 1810 he authored and coauthored more than ten printed collections of sacred and secular music; after moving to Ohio, he became a farmer and a maker of percussion instruments.
Although many of these result from his use of modal harmony and, as previously mentioned, strong melodic writing for the individual parts, his use of these relations is not simply random, they are used to express the text being set.
while at the same time urging the pious to the divine will of resignation: The pull of these two worlds presented in the text, the death of the body and the acceptance of this fact in the wait for eternal life beyond, is reflected in the music with the sudden shifts between a minor and C major, resulting in the clash between the G sharp and G natural, even at one point with a cadence of an E major/minor chord.
The group of tunebooks that Stephen Jenks helped release are as follows: Many of his tunes are still sung at Sacred Harp singings.