Roland Hayes

I sang a composition arranged by Roland Hayes this Sunday at church. Our church’s regular choir doesn’t do the summer services, so I sometimes sign up to sing a solo one week. This year I learned that we would be preaching from Luke 2, which tells stories of Jesus as a boy, and went looking for solos that drew from those stories. I found one: an arrangement by Hayes of an African American spiritual, “Little Boy (How Old Are You?).”

I was unfamiliar with Hayes, which is somewhat criminal. Not only was he the most well-known African American classical tenor of the early part of the twentieth century, his name spoken in the same breath with Paul Robeson and Marian Anderson, but his adopted home base was Boston. He didn’t start there; he was born in Curryville, Georgia, near where his mother had been enslaved, and he learned spirituals and hymns from the elders in Curryville’s Mt. Zion Baptist Church, which his mother had helped to found. After his father’s death, his mother moved the family to Chattanooga, and he studied music at Fisk University and toured with the Fisk Jubilee Singers. He moved to Boston, where he studied with Arthur Hubbard, who encouraged the young man to take lessons at his house so that the white students at his studio wouldn’t be bothered.

Young Hayes had drive. He paid for his lessons with money earned from jobs as a messenger for the Hancock Life Insurance Company. He made his New York debut with Walter F. Craig’s orchestra in 1916, but was determined to launch a solo career, which he did by renting out Jordan Hall for his first concert, then Boston Symphony Hall for his second. He did his own publicity, taking out newspaper ads and using the phone book to call Bostonians. It worked; he filled the hall. The concert was a financial and artistic success. He began doing house concerts for wealthy patrons including Isabella Stewart Gardner. But he was still not taken seriously as a classical musician.

So he went to Europe, where he repeated the playbook in London, then other capitals. The photo above dates from this period; that’s a diamond tie pin that was given to him by the King of England. When he returned, he was finally able to command the artistic respect due him; he premiered with the Boston Symphony in 1923, and sang as a soloist with the orchestra in ten performances from 1923 to 1944, under both Pierre Monteux and Serge Koussevitsky. He reduced his performing schedule after this, but still gave yearly recitals at Carnegie Hall and taught.

Hayes made his earliest recordings in 1923, for Aeolian Vocalion, and made many other recordings for Columbia, Vanguard and other labels. 1954’s release of The Life of Christ, a recital with Reginald Boardman on the piano, featured the tune “Little Boy (How Old Are You?),” which is the rare solo written about the events at the end of Luke 2, when the 12-year-old boy Jesus went missing from his family to go and sit among the teachers at the Temple. It’s an affecting song, and hopefully my performance did it a little justice. You can hear Hayes’s performance of it below: