Roland Hayes (1887-1977)
by Randye Jones
“I wonder how well aware people are of the serious intent and purpose to which these songs were given by the religious leaders of my forebears; and the necessity of their intelligent, inspired, leadership suited to the heart and soul needs of my people at the time of the Emancipation Proclamation?” — Roland Hayes
Tenor and composer Roland Wiltse Hayes was born in a plantation cabin in Curryville, Georgia, on June 3, 1887. His mother, Fanny Hayes, was an ex-slave. She and her husband, William, worked as tenant farmers to raise their seven children. When William Hayes died from a work-related injury in 1898, Fanny–who Roland called Angel Mo’–moved her family to Chattanooga, Tennessee.
Because he had to help support his family, young Hayes was only able to complete the fifth grade. He worked in an iron foundry, where he was badly injured when a conveyor belt pulled him into the machinery.
His mother made certain that he attended church regularly. Hayes sang in the church choir and with a group he formed called the Silver-Toned Quartet. He studied voice with local choral director Arthur Calhoun, who introduced the young man to great operatic singers of the era, including Enrico Caruso and Nellie Melba. During this time, the young man decided that he wanted to make singing a career:
“I happened upon a new method for making iron sash-weights,” he said, “and that got me a little raise in pay and a little free time. At that time I had never heard any real music, although I had had some lessons in rhetoric from a backwoods teacher in Georgia. But one day a pianist came to our church in Chattanooga, and I, as a choir member, was asked to sing a solo with him. The pianist liked my voice, and he took me in hand and introduced me to phonograph records by Caruso. That opened the heavens for me. The beauty of what could be done with the voice just overwhelmed me.”1
Although Angel Mo’ had been the one who introduced spirituals to Hayes, she was vehemently opposed to him wasting the money to study voice privately. Instead, she wanted her son to become a minister. Despite her opposition, Hayes could not ignore the siren call. In addition to getting vocal coaching, he undertook academic studies to catch up for the lost years of schooling.
With the help of supporters, Hayes raised $50.00 and left home with the plan of attending Oberlin. However, he ran out of money and ended up as a student in Fisk University’s preparatory program in 1905. In addition to his music courses, he sang with the Fisk Jubilee Singers, and he supported himself as a waiter. Just before he was to graduate, he was informed by the teacher who had sponsored his studies that he was going to be expelled from school. Sixty-three years later, the school would present Hayes with an honorary doctoral music degree–one of eight he received over his career. Fisk University president James Lawsen stated that “We are indebted to you not only for your service to this university but for bringing the enjoyment of music to people throughout the world.”
Hayes joined the Jubilee Singers when they toured in 1911. Along with Singers director John Wesley Work, II, and two other members of choir, he recorded nine spirituals for the Edison Phonograph Company. When the Singers returned to Nashville, Hayes decided to relocate to Boston. He believed that he had a better chance of becoming a professional musician in the north than in the south.
Over the next several years, he continued his vocal studies with renowned basso Arthur Hubbard and continued academic study at Harvard University’s extension school. He engaged Columbia Records’ personal recording service to produce recordings of opera arias, Negro spirituals and other art songs that he sold to raise funds. He also toured with two other musicians–William Lawrence and William Richardson–who called themselves the Hayes Trio. Hayes found some success in his endeavors, including sales from his recordings; however, he was unable to get professional management:
I remember that one day–I think it was in 1920–I met William Brennan, who was the manager of the Boston Symphony. I told him about my hopes, and he told me that no one of my race would ever be accepted in music. I thanked him. I wasn’t angry at what he said, but I knew that I still hadn’t done enough.2
Years later, Hayes commented in his biography that:
I can say truly that never in my whole life have I wished I were a white man; but I confess that there were times, long ago, when it seemed difficult to be a Negro in a white world. In the South, I had been carefully taught my “place,” and I did not suppose that in the North my place would be, in the beginning, less restricted than at home; but I had somehow hoped that I would not so frequently be reminded of it.3
In April 1920, Hayes sailed for London, England, accompanied by Lawrence Brown, his pianist since 1918. Hayes found a new voice teacher, composer, conductor and noted interpreter of German lied Sir George Henschel, as well as managers who helped him with bookings. For the first year, he performed regularly but found little financial success. Finally, he gave critically successful recitals at Wigmore Hall and the Royal Chapel of the Savoy. During the Royal Chapel, presented on Palm Sunday, Hayes featured an a cappella performance of the Negro spiritual, “Were You There.” Authors Christopher Brooks and Robert Sims stated that Hayes’ performance of the spiritual:
… was such phenomenon that a photo of it was later immortalized in a bust by Renée Vautier. It captured the tenor in a deep, almost transcendental pose with his head slightly raised and his eyes tightly closed as if he were internalizing the words that he had just sung about the crucified Christ dying on the cross…. Roland caused a few in his dispassionate British audience to drop their heads and shed tears. When he applied his well-developed messa di voce to the single word “Oh,” with a stunning portamento, the listeners were totally enthralled.4
The notoriety from the performance resulted in a “command” for Hayes and Brown to perform before King George V and Queen Mary of Great Britain. Hayes studied with Theodore Lierhammer and French composer Gabriel Fauré. His engagements in cities across Europe were mostly warmly received, but Hayes had difficulties when he went to Berlin, Germany. He described the performance:
Well, I came out on stage, and there was a burst of hissing that lasted about ten minutes. I just stood there, and then I decided to change my program. As soon as it was quiet, I began with Schubert’s “Du bist die Ruh.” I could see a change come over the hostile faces, and by the end of the song I knew I had won.5
Hayes returned to the United States in 1923 to give a recital in Boston. Philip Hale, critic for the Boston Herald commented that “if nature gave this singer a superior voice, to his own hard and intelligent work alone does he owe the neatness of his attack, his admirably smooth legato, and above all else, his perfect diction, the like of which has not been heard in Boston for many a day.”6 This time, under the management of the same William Brennan who had discouraged him three years earlier, he began touring the country. Southern venues would not engage him initially, but he soon sang to an integrated audience in Atlanta, as well as performing in other southern cities.
Hayes spent most of the next two decades giving vocal recitals and performing with orchestras throughout the United States and Europe. It is estimated that his income for 1924 approached $100,000 (according to the Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1957, the per capita income in 1920 was $740.00). He was given a hero’s welcome when he sang in the Soviet Union in 1928. Unlike bass-baritone Paul Robeson–who made his first visit to the country six years later, Hayes did not embrace socialism as an alternative to America’s political disenfranchisement of African Americans. He stopped touring in Europe in the 1930’s because the changes in the political climate were no longer friendly to a black man.
On January 31, 1931, Hayes performed at Constitution Hall, which had been dedicated less than two years earlier in Washington, DC. In a review of the recital the following day, the reviewer noted:
Hayes’ mellow tenor was at its best in the group of ballads of Beethoven, Handel and Mozart, with which he opened his program… nI (sic) the German and French group the tenor sang with impeccable diction and emotional force. The applause was prolonged after each number and he responded with many encores… The spirituals were sung with the deepest feeling of the evening. As sung by this master singer of his race, each spiritual is made a masterpiece of vocal art without losing any of the primitive appeal of the original compositions.6
Curiously, there was no mention of an incident prior to the recital in which Hayes reportedly demanded that the hall audience be desegregated. The incident led hall management to institute a “white artists only” policy that played a major role in the much-publicized controversy between contralto Marian Anderson and the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) eight years later.
Hayes’ typical program set a precedent for many African American singers by closing with a section of spiritual settings. James Weldon Johnson compared the tenor’s approach to singing spirituals to that of Robeson:
Through the genius and supreme artistry of Roland Hayes these songs undergo, we may say, a transfiguration. He takes them high above the earth and sheds over them shimmering silver of moonlight and flashes of the sun’s gold; and we are transported as he sings. By a seemingly opposite method, through sheer simplicity, without any conscious attempt at artistic effort and by devoted adherence to the primitive traditions, Paul Robeson achieves substantially the same effect. These two singers, apparently so different, have the chief essential in common; they both feel the Spirituals deeply. Mr. Hayes, notwithstanding all his artistry, sings these songs with tears on his cheeks. Both these singers pull at the heart strings and moisten the eyes of their listeners.7
Hayes married his cousin, Helen Alzada Mann, in September 1932. They had a daughter, Afrika Franzada.
From the 1940’s until his retirement in 1973, Hayes performed sparingly, including annual recitals at Carnegie Hall in New York and concerts at Fisk and other colleges. He purchased and settled on the Georgia farm where his parents had been tenant farmers in his youth . Unfortunately, the Great Depression of the 1930’s significantly affected his financial stability, forcing Hayes to take over the management of much of his own performance scheduling. He published his autobiography, Angel Mo’ and Her Son, Roland Hayes, in 1942 and a collection of spirituals set for solo voice, My Favorite Spirituals: 30 Songs for Voice and Piano, in 1948.
Hayes supported the development of several African American singers who followed in his wake. Anderson, Robeson, sopranos Leontyne Price and Dorothy Maynor, and baritones Edward Boatner and William Warfield are only a few of those who benefited directly from Hayes’ influence.
He taught privately and, in 1950, at Boston College. He received numerous national and international awards, such as the NAACP’s Spingarn medal, for his musical accomplishments. Roland Hayes died at the age of 89 at Boston General Hospital from pneumonia. Various sources report the date as either December 31, 1976, or January 1, 1977; however, hospital officials indicate that the composer and vocalist expired on January 1. Author Marva Carter summed up Hayes’ life and career:
Hayes’ life of almost ninety years reveals a remarkable story of a man who went from the plantation to the palace, performing before kings and queens, with the finest international and American orchestras, in segregated communities before blacks and whites alike. He was of small stature, dignified manner, and non-violent persuasion. He chose to overcome racism by example and in doing so became a trailblazer. When he sang, art became more than polished excellence. It appealed to something universal, something beyond the emotions, and something beyond the intellect, something one could call the soul.8
Hayes and the Concert Spiritual
Hayes’ contributions to the development of concert spirituals were reflected in his work as a performer, composer, scholar, and educator. His earliest recording of spirituals came from a self-funded session with Columbia in ca. 1918. In an interview, the tenor was critical of the recordings:
I had set out to become an artist, but I still had to learn that I must approach art personally; I had still to be taught that I, Roland Hayes, a Negro, had first to measure my racial inheritance and then put it to use.9
Although he was dissatisfied with the artistic results, he was able to use the monies raised from the album sales to support his professional development. During a 1922 session for Vocalion Records, Hayes again recorded several concert spirituals by Harry T. Burleigh (1966–1949), including “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” plus his own setting of “Sit Down.” He returned to Columbia between 1939 and 1941 to record several songs, including his settings of several spirituals. In 2013, the Library of Congress selected Roland Hayes’ 1940 recording of “Were You There” for inclusion into its National Recording Registry.
There have been numerous tributes to Hayes, especially in his adopted home of Boston. As part of a concert commemoration of Hayes’ life and musical contributions, the Boston Symphony Orchestra commissioned and premiered George Walker’s Lilacs, which received the Pulitzer Prize for music in 1996. The Roland Hayes School of Music program was instituted at nearby Madison Park Technical-Vocational High School.
Author F. W. Woolsey summed up Roland Hayes’ musical career, including a quote by the tenor:
In his own, more elegant way, Roland Hayes is simple, direct and old-fashioned. He has no hesitation in singing Monteverdi to school children in the rural South and spirituals to an international audience at The Hague in Holland. He believes unshakably in universality–‘What we have in us is also part of somebody else… why else did the French and English respond to my people’s songs?’11
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1“A Bouncy Seventy-Five: Roland Hayes, Despite His Age, Gives Concerts, Teaches and Reminisces,” New York Times, 3 June 1962, 127.
2ibid.
3MacKinley Helm. Angel Mo’ and Her Son, Roland Hayes. Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1942, 99.
4Christopher A. Brooks and Robert Sims. Roland Hayes: The Legacy of an American Tenor. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015, 67).
5“A Bouncy Seventy-Five: Roland Hayes, Despite His Age, Gives Concerts, Teaches and Reminisces,” New York Times, 3 June 1962, 127.
6 Review. Boston Herald, 11 November 1923.
7“Negro Spirituals Win Hayes Praise,” The Washington Post, 1 February, 1931, M12.
8Marva Griffin Carter, “Roland Hayes–Expressor of the Soul in Song (1887-1977),” The Black Perspective in Music, Autumn 1977, 188.
9Woolsey, F. W. “Conversation with Roland Hayes,” The Black Perspective in Music, Autumn 1974, 184.
10Woolsey, 185.
Musical excerpt “Vesti la giubba” from Pagliacci by Ruggiero Leoncavallo, recorded by Roland Hayes in 1918, from Lost Sounds: Blacks and the Birth of the Recording Industry, 1891-1922, companion CD to the book Lost Sounds by Tim Brooks. Archeophone Records, 2005.
The author thanks Reginald Didham of the Boston Conservatory for speaking with Afrika Hayes-Lambe, who kindly supplied information related to her father’s cause of death. The author also owes another debt of gratitude to the late musicologist, Dr. Dominique-René de Lerma, for obtaining confirmation from Boston General Hospital on Hayes’ date of death.
More About The Singer
Roland Hayes was profiled by tenor George Shirley on April 1, 1974, for Shirley’s radio broadcast, Classical Music and the Afro-American. Listen to the historic broadcast, hosted by WNYC, which includes performance excerpts.
The Spirituals Database is a searchable listing of compact discs, long-playing discs, 78 rpm, and audio cassette recordings by various vocalists, including this artist, of Negro Spirituals set for concert performance. Information is available about song selections spanning a century from Burleigh’s “Deep River” to the present day. To see the recordings by this artist currently represented in the database, please click on the image to the right.
To cite this page:
Afrocentric Voices in Classical Music. Created by Randye Jones. Created/Last modified: February 12, 2024. Accessed:. http://www.afrovoices.com/wp/roland-hayes-biography.