Roland Hayes was born on June 3, 1887 in Curryville, GA to his formerly enslaved mother and tenant father. When his father died in 1898, his mother moved the family to Chattanooga, Tennessee. He grew up in Chattanooga, fostering his passion for singing Black spirituals in the church. He dropped out of school when he was 16 and began singing on the streets for money to help his mother.

He was discovered by a music teacher who offered to give him singing lessons, which he accepted. In 1907 at age 20, he entered Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee as a preparatory student. He studied hard and worked to support himself until he caught up to his peers academically, and became an official Fisk student. As a student, he joined the famous Fisk Jubilee Singers, where he flourished.

He later moved to Louisville, Kentucky to accept a job performing as a singer at a silent movie, where he was forced to sing offstage in order to conceal his racial identity. While in Louisville, the president of Fisk University invited him to sing as lead tenor with the Fisk Jubilee Singers on their tour in Boston, Massachusetts. He agreed to go with them, and it changed the course of his life forever.

After the Jubilee Singers had finished their tour, they went home to Tennessee, but Hayes stayed in Boston. He was determined to make a life for himself onstage as a famous singer. He found a job and saved his money for quite some time before he was able to rent out the Symphony Hall in Boston and cover all the expenses for his first concert. From then on, he organized and promoted all of his own concerts until he achieved a career as a successful classical concert singer.

He sang his first European tour in London in 1920. It was here that he received a message from King George and Queen Mary of England, requesting a personal performance from him. He went on to tour Europe several more times, singing in seven different languages, and always including the Black spirituals passed down to him from generations of ancestors, which he called “Aframerican Religious Folk Music”. He even performed in front of a desegregated audience in Atlanta, Georgia in 1924!

On his European tour in October of 1923, he was introduced to Countess Bertha Katharina Nadine Colloredo-Mansfeld, a very wealthy woman of Hapsburg ancestry. They entered a wildly passionate and tumultuous relationship, and despite the countess’s refusal to divorce her husband, she and Hayes welcomed a daughter named Maya on February 12, 1926.

Hayes and Countess Bertha officially broke things off sometime in the 1930’s, and while he still maintained contact with his daughter; he moved back to the States. Shortly after his return to America, he married a woman named Helen Mann, and they welcomed a daughter named Afrika.

Together they maintained residences in Brookline, Massachusetts and Curryville, Georgia, where they owned a 600-acre farm-the very same farm his mother had been enslaved on. After a disturbing, racially-motivated attack on Hayes and his wife in a shoe store in Georgia in 1942, Hayes began contemplating his family’s permanent departure from the Southern state.

He finally sold the farm and left Georgia for good in 1948, proclaiming that his move was motivated by his family’s safety; he held no bitterness towards the attack.

He performed again at Carnegie Hall in 1962 to celebrate his 75th birthday. He then spent his later years encouraging and mentoring young, aspiring artists. He donated much of his time, resources, and finances to build a path for the next generation of musicians. He also taught at Boston University, where he earned numerous honorary doctorate degrees and awards, including the NAACP Springarn Medal.

He gave his final performance in 1973 at the Longy School of Music in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He retired comfortably and died on January 1, 1977 in Boston. He is buried at Mount Hope Cemetery in Dorchester, Massachusetts.