Roland Hayes

• Born: June 3, 1887
• Birthplace: Curryville, near Calhoun, Georgia
• Died: January 1, 1977
• Place of death: Boston, Massachusetts

Singer and composer

The most highly paid tenor in the world in the 1920’s, Hayes was the first African American to win international fame as a concert performer. He also was one of the first performers ever to promote his own concerts.

Early Life

Roland Hayes was born to former slaves Fanny and William Hayes on a farm in Curryville, Georgia. When Hayes was young, a falling tree killed his father. His mother struggled to work the farm and raise her sons, and by the time Hayes was twelve, she decided to move to Chattanooga, Tennessee. Her plan was for Hayes and his brothers to alternate working and going to school until they all had received an education. In an early interview, Hayes said that the children walked the entire sixty miles to Chattanooga barefoot in order to save their shoes.

Hayes’s first job was pouring molten metal into molds and wheeling it from one room to another in a factory. More often than not, the liquid metal splattered as he poured it and burned his feet and legs to the bone. Despite the pain, Hayes sang as he worked, and his powerful voice landed him a quick promotion because it boosted morale. His brothers, however, were unable to keep their jobs, so Hayes had to drop out of school to help support his family.

Hayes’s first great spiritual experience came when he was invited to sing with the Monumental Baptist Church choir in Chattanooga and he met musician Arthur Calhoun. Calhoun took Hayes to his home and played some phonograph records for him. That was the first time Hayes heard the voices of opera singers Enrico Caruso and Nellie Melba. As he listened, Hayes remembered, “I felt as if a bell rang in my heart.” He decided right then to become a great artist.

Life’s Work

When Hayes was older, he left Chattanooga for Nashville and joined the Fisk Jubilee Singers. He eventually traveled to Boston, where he sang as lead tenor with the Jubilee Singers. When the group returned to the South, Hayes decided to remain in Boston, sending for his mother to join him in a little apartment he secured. His mother cooked for him and listened with a critic’s ear while he practiced. When critics later praised his diction as “almost perfect,” Hayes said, “I owe it to my dear old mother, who was born a slave [and] never had a minute of schooling in her life.”

After years of singing in Boston, Hayes had not “arrived.” No one would underwrite the type of recital he needed to push his career to the next level. Hayes decided to become his own manager, arranging and promoting his own concert by guaranteeing the four-hundred-dollar fee to perform at the Symphony Hall of Boston. Then he opened the telephone book, selected two thousand prominent names, and asked each patron to purchase two tickets at $1.50 each. He had hoped to sell only enough tickets to avoid bankruptcy, but he was stunned when every ticket sold. Hayes gave a dazzling, standing-room-only performance, earning two thousand dollars in the process. The concert earned him a reputation as one of the first entertainers ever to manage his own concert.

Next, Hayes was invited to perform in Santa Monica, California, where he had his second spiritual experience. A Santa Monica man told Hayes that he always got “something more” from Hayes’s performances, but the man was not sure what that something was. Hayes pondered what he did that other singers did not do. Then it came to him: He shared the haunting songs of the African experience with his audiences. Hayes came to believe that he could help African Americans progress by sharing their experiences through song.

Hayes decided to study Africa and his African roots. His first stop on the way to Africa was London, where Queen Mary requested a performance in Buckingham Palace. Melba, the singer Roland had heard on the phonograph years before, also was in England, and she declared, “The king and queen are right; you are truly a great singer.”

When Hayes traveled to Berlin, a hostile audience greeted him with a full ten minutes of boos and hisses. He waited, terrified; then when they finally quieted down, he sang “Thou Art My Peace” and two French numbers. Suddenly, the audience burst into applause, lifted Hayes onto their shoulders, and marched him around Beethoven Hall twice.

Hayes toured Europe many times, singing his songs in seven languages, including French, German, Italian, and Russian. Many of his songs had never been set to music, and Hayes arranged their orchestral accompaniment himself.

By the late 1920’s, Hayes had become the most highly paid tenor in the world, yet he always visited black churches in the communities he toured so that those who could not afford to purchase a ticket still got to see him perform.

Hayes and his wife maintained homes in Massachusetts and Georgia. His Georgia residence was the same six-hundred-acre farm where he was born and where his mother had been a slave. Despite his fame and wealth, however, his wife and daughter were thrown out of a shoe store for sitting in a whites-only area; when Hayes confronted the store clerk, he and his wife were arrested and he was badly beaten. He sold the farm and left Georgia for good. Hayes spent his last years mentoring young musicians, teaching at Boston University, and accepting numerous honorary degrees and awards.

Hayes died of pneumonia at the age of eighty-nine in Boston. He was posthumously inducted into the Georgia Music Hall of Fame in 1991.

Significance

Hayes was one of the major musical talents of the early twentieth century. He took songs about the African American experience—songs never orchestrated or arranged but passed down from generation to generation—and shared them with people all over the world. He never finished high school, yet he learned to sing in seven languages. He rose from poverty to sing before kings and queens, winning international fame. He also was an entrepreneur, one of the first performers on record to successfully promote his own concerts.

Bibliography

Brooks, Tim. “Roland Hayes.” In Lost Sounds: Blacks and the Birth of the Recording Industry, 1890-1919. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004. Provides biography and describes Hayes’s recording career.

Hayden, Robert C. Singing for All People: Roland Hayes, A Biography. Boston: Corey & Lucas, 1989. A thorough biography that includes details of Hayes’s arrest in Georgia that eventually led to his selling his Georgia property.

Hayes, Roland. “As If a Bell Rang in My Heart.” Interview by William L. Stidger in The Human Side of Greatness. New York: Harper & Bros., 1940. First-person interview in which Hayes tells his life story.

Helm, MacKinley. Angel Mo’ and Her Son, Roland Hayes. Boston: Little, Brown, 1942. Hayes’s memoirs as told to his close friend, Helm. Describes in detail Hayes’s impoverished youth and remarkable career.

Scott, Michelle R. Blues Empress in Black Chattanooga: Bessie Smith and the Emerging Urban South. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008. A detailed study of the life of Bessie Smith and the mind-set and culture in which she was raised. Includes quotations from Roland Hayes that confirmed the conditions author Michelle Scott explored in the book.