Roland Hayes

Roland Wiltsie Hayes was born on the third of June 1887 at Curryville, in northern Georgia, the son of William Hayes — a former enslaved man of the local Brawley plantation — and Fannie Mann Hayes, a member of the Cherokee Nation. The household was tenant-farming Black-Cherokee of the post-Reconstruction Georgia hills.

He was placed at twelve at the Calhoun Methodist Sunday School and at fifteen entered Chattanooga, Tennessee, as a foundry-iron worker at the Chattanooga rolling mills. He was heard by chance in 1904 at the foundry by Arthur Calhoun, an organist and teacher of music at the Fisk University at Nashville, who arranged his enrollment at the Fisk Preparatory Department in 1905.

He was placed at the Fisk Jubilee Singers under the directorship of Mrs. Ella Sheppard Moore in 1906 and toured with the Singers across the United States and Britain in 1911. He left the Singers in 1911 to pursue solo concert work.

He was admitted in 1911 to private study under Arthur Hubbard at Boston and gave his first paid solo recital at the Steinert Hall, Boston, in November 1912.

He was the first Black soloist to perform with the Boston Symphony Orchestra on the sixteenth of November 1923 at the Symphony Hall, Boston, under Pierre Monteux. He gave his European debut at the Aeolian Hall, London, on the thirty-first of May 1920, and was received in private audience by King George V at Buckingham Palace on the seventeenth of August 1920.

He sang the first European recital of an African American art-song programme — including the Beethoven Adelaide, the Schubert Erlkönig, the Brahms Vergebliches Ständchen, and the H. T. Burleigh (placed in this archive) concert spirituals — at the Wigmore Hall, London, on the fifth of April 1921.

He was awarded the 1924 Spingarn Medal of the NAACP — the principal annual award of the organisation for outstanding African American achievement — for the European tour. He was the first concert artist of any kind to receive the Medal.

He gave on average over fifty concerts per year across the European and American concert circuits from 1923 to 1956 — over thirteen hundred concerts in the active career.

He died at Boston on the first of January 1977, at eighty-nine.

He is honored here as the first Black male concert singer of international rank.