Roland W. Hayes, African American tenor
The New York Age, 6 March 1920, p. 7.
One hundred years ago today … The day of Roland W. Hayes’s concert had finally arrived. For weeks the newspapers had been advertising “America’s leading negro tenor appearing at Aeolian Hall.” (Yes, Aeolian Hall was a venue linked to the Aeoloian music store we have visited previously).
New York Age music critic Lucien White, attended. He described the concert as “opening with a group of Negro spirituals , closing with an aria from Puccini’s ‘The Girl of the Golden West,’ and including compositions from representative Negro composers as well as some of the best of the modern Italian and French schools.” The “representative Negro composers” were Gerald Tyler, Daisy Tapley, and Nora Douglas Holt, who was “the first colored composer to win a master’s degree.” (“Pleasing Program by Roland W. Hayes, the New York Age, 20 March 1920, p. 6.).
One of the spirituals Hayes sung that night was “Steal Away,” arranged by Lawrence B. Brown, also the accompanist on piano. Brown’s song “African Maid” was also part of the program, according to the March 18th issue of Musical Courier, a weekly music magazine published from 437 5th Avenue, at 39th Street.
You can hear Hayes’s recording of “Steal Away,” recorded two years later, for the Black Swan label here:
This was Hayes’s farewell concert, the Tribune explained, before he sailed abroad with the purpose of studying traditional African musical forms in “Zululand, Syria [?], Algeria, and Egypt.”
The New York Tribune, 7 March 1920, p. 42.
After leaving New York, before traveling to African countries, Hayes sang in France and England, where he was so well received that he was invited to give a command performance for King George V and Queen Mary. (See D.L. Chandler, “Roland Hayes,” in Little Known Black History Facts.)
In 1942, Hayes and his family were the victims of a violent racist attack by police in Rome, Georgia. Langston Hughes memorialized the incident in his poem “Roland Hayes Beaten.”