Roland Hayes

E. Azalia Hackley Collection, Detroit Public Library.Roland Hayes pictured with a diamond tie pin presented by King George V, of England on April 23, 1921. 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…