Roland Hayes: The Legacy of an American Tenor

Abstract

Roland Hayes: The Legacy of an American Tenor. By Christopher A. Brooks and Robert Sims. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015. 401pp. $40 The life story of lyric tenor Roland Hayes (1887-1977) is one of the most dramatic, and inspiring, in American cultural history. At the height of his fame, in the 1920s and 1930s, this African-American was acclaimed by critics and audiences alike. He was extremely successful on the concert circuit, commanding high fees and often selling out large venues in both the U.S. and Europe. Moreover, he achieved those heights in an era of rampant segregation, when African-Americans were beginning to be accepted in popular entertainment, but the concert hall was resolutely closed to them. He was a real barrier-buster. Why is it, then, that Hayes is much less well known and celebrated today than contemporaries and near-contemporaries such as Paul Robeson and Marian Anderson? Why is this his first book-length biography aside from his own self-serving autobiography Angel Mo'and Her Son, Roland Hayes (Little, Brown, 1943), published in the 1940s? For one thing, he was not as aggressive a racial activist as Robeson. He conducted himself with a quiet dignity, and while he did what he could to lessen Jim Crow practices, for example, fighting for integrated or at least semi-integrated audiences at his concerts, when push came to shove he usually backed off. Audiences today like heroes who raised their fists in defiance, whatever the cost to themselves (easy for us to say!). The authors of the rather modestly-titled Roland Hayes: The Legacy of an American Tenor suggest another reason when they observe, toward the end, that Hayes himself, in his later years, began to regret the fact that he had largely disdained recording. In fact, he had avoided most media, including films and even radio broadcasting, except on rare occasions when those media would meet his terms. He seemed to have little desire to preserve his art for future generations. Today you will search in vain for video of Hayes on YouTube, while there is plenty for Robeson and Anderson. Hayes was born in poverty on a small farm in Georgia, to former slaves. His father died when he was young, and he was raised by, and very close to, his mother Fannie ("Angel Mo'"). Inspired at an early age by recordings of Enrico Caruso owned by a white acquaintance, he determined to become a concert singer, a seemingly impossible goal for a poor black youth in the early 1900s. He made his way to Nashville and, despite having only a sixth-grade education, managed to get admitted to the Fisk University music program on the strength of his talent. He was dismissed from the university just before graduation for somewhat mysterious reasons, but was invited to perform with the famous Fisk Jubilee Singers (a semi-autonomous organization) and then moved on to Boston to study and advance his career. During the 1910s he worked his way up, though his own relentless efforts, culminating with a triumphant sold-out performance at Symphony Hall in 1917. He had to rent the hall and do all the marketing himself, since no organization would sponsor him. Despite this success the white establishment would still not accept him, so he went to Europe in 1920 where he worked his way up the concert ladder there, eventually scoring a huge triumph at prestigious Wigmore Hall, a command performance for the King and Queen, and endorsement by none other than Dame Nellie Melba. …