Jenkins was adept at more than just ballads, turning out one song after another, as his stepdaughter Irene described it, like a mill grinding wheat. Many of his topical compositions were recorded by other artists over the ensuing years, including "Billy the Kid", drawn from a popular 1926 biography of the cowboy killer; "The Wreck of the Royal Palm", about a two-train collision in Georgia in 1926; "The Tragedy on Daytona Beach", based on the 1929 death of race car driver Lee Bible in Florida; "The Fate of Frank Dupre", the story of an Atlanta robbery/murder; and "Ben Dewberry's Final Run", which recounted the death of an Atlantan who was the engineer in a 1908 train wreck.McNeil p. 205Miller p. 161 In all, he wrote more than 300 non-sacred songs, many of them "news ballads".
