Negro Hayes

On the deck of the transatlantic liner Aquitania, scheduled to sail in a few hours for Europe, Conductor Walter Damrosch stood beside a Negro, extended to him a small disk of metal. Passengers who observed the ceremony could readily perceive that this was no casual donation of a gratuity. The little disk was, indeed, the highest formal honor which a Negro can achieve—the Spingarn medal, awarded annually* to that Negro who, in the opinion of a committee, has better deserved distinction than any other of his race. Tenor Roland Hayes, the recipient, expressed his thanks.

Next day, the press of the Nation affirmed, quite correctly, that the reward could not have been better bestowed. Tenor Hayes is an artist of the first rank. Born in Curryville, Ga., his mother a freed slave, he worked as a stove-molder, sang in a church choir, was encouraged to train his voice. At first, because of the incredible prejudice against his race, he received scant attention in the U. S. He went to Europe, toured England triumphantly, sang before King George in Buckingham Palace (TIME, Oct. 8, 1923), conquered hostile audiences in Germany, returned to the U. S., where it was then admitted that his voice is exquisite in texture, resonant, powerful, dextrously trained; that his interpretations of the songs of Schumann, Schubert, Brahms, Wolf give proof of a fastidious intelligence and fine musical scholarship; that no other singer has ever equaled his feeling for the Negro Spirituals.

Said Mr. Damrosch: “In the last 25 years, Negroes have made great strides in the cultivation of civilized or European music; among these, Roland Hayes is one of the most eminent, because he has really penetrated into the emotional and spiritual content of the music of our great masters.”

Dark Music

Walter Damrosch, in his eulogy of Tenor Hayes—an unusually felicitous utterance from the famed conductor—did well to stress the adjectives “civilized,” “European,” as applied to accepted music. For, while it is rare that a Negro comes to note for his interpretation of “the music of our old masters,” there is another musical tradition which arose out of the black race and has bid fair to jostle civilized, European music into limbo.

It is a music that stole, with a mutter of muffled tom-toms, out of Africa. It hid with the Norway rats in the hold, of pitching slave-ships; it crawled between the leaves of missionary Bibles to leap out grimacing and twitching, whenever a buck preacher smote the Book with his barrelhouse fist. The cadence of the cakewalk, wild plantation revels, darktown strutters’ balls; the frenetic hallelujahs of jubilee revivals where hundreds of Negroes, drunk with ecstasy, wash in the blood of the Lamb, the shifting, subtle rhythms of such spirituals as All God’s Chillun Got Wings and Swing Low, Sweet Chariot, all are part of that Dark Music. Mississippi roustabouts, limber blackamoors on sunbaked levees hummed it, strummed it; prancing shadows in the Vieux Carré of New Orleans heard it and humped themselves, their feet running wild.

About the year 1911, May Irwin, famed comedienne, introduced to Manhattan one of these levee-songs, The Bully. Musical critics noted the arrival of ragtime. James Weldon Johnson (now Secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) announced in print that ragtime had musical possibilities. He further observed that the original ragtime tunes were Negro folk songs set down by composers, a statement supported by the fact that all the first popular songs in this tempo treated Negro subjects in negroid English.

Quite quickly, however, came a change. Ragtime began to be composed to words which bore no relation to cotton-picking or coal-black mammies.

The very character of syncopation altered. Ragtime molted; Jazz, that Klaxon-throated Phoenix, rose from the ashes of untold night-club cigarets; the Blues crept on sly haunches out of the red-light alleys of Memphis, goose-fleshed the U.S. with the Macabre, demoniac plainsong of generations of junketing cats.

Many able adapters of the pit-a-padding rhythms have been concerned with these developments: Fatherly Theodore Snyder, composer of The Sheik; George M. Cohan, the Irish jigamarig, writer of buck-and-wing dips; George Gershwin, ingenius, musicianly; Jerome Kern, melodist; Tintinnabulator Zev Confrey, who wrote Kitten-on-the-Keys. But more important than any of this company is a certain Israel Baline who took the name of an English actor and a German city, became known to the public as Irving Berlin. For the last ten years, he has written a national anthem a year. His prodigality has never been approached and he has written at least three songs—Alexander’s Ragtime Band, Everybody Step, Pack Up Your Sins— which “no Broadway composer has ever surpassed,” says Critic Carl Van Vechten. Berlin, a pioneer in ragtime, was perhaps the first white man who noticeably impressed his talent upon the music of the Negro—the first to score dark jungle jingles, canniballets, revivalisteria for the Anglo-Saxophone.

Now Alexander Woollcott, famed dramatic critic, has written his biography.*

Out of the hold of a liner emerged two Russian Jews. Mr. and Mrs. Baline, landed in Manhattan, bearing with them a cloth-wrapped bundle, now Irving Berlin. At five, the child hawked papers in the Bowery. One day, a crane knocked him into the East River. When he was rescued, the ambulance surgeon found, still clutched in the minute Baline hand, five coppers, his day’s takings.

Israel Baline came to fame, however, by refusing a tip. He worked in the saloon of Nigger Mike, famed Bowery bravo of 20 years ago, was known as the Singing Waiter because he warbled as he doled out lager to the Nigger’s clients. Prince Louis of Battenberg, on a slumming party, went to hear him. Warmed by the lager, or pleased with the song, the Teuton princeling profered ten cents. Baline, unaccustomed to the ways of royalty, staggered back. The riff-raff stared; up stepped a ruddy reporter, overawed both Prince and waiter with a cataclysm of questions. Next day, Berlin received his first publicity. The reporter, one Herbert Bayard Swope, now edits The New York World.

So swift was the Singing Waiter’s rise from Rags to Riches that the reversal hardly lends enough body to his biographer’s Cinderella-theme. When Berlin was 19, Nigger Mike discharged him. Within four years, he had written a tune which was played in every corner of the U. S., in Shanghai, Moscow and along the Riviera, which “came in brass across the harbor of Singapore from the boats riding at anchor there”—Alexander’s Ragtime Band. Within four years more, he had written hundreds of other successful songs, including When That Midnight Choo Choo Leaves for Alabam, Everybody’s Doin’ It Now, I Want To Be in Dixie, At the Devil’s Ball, the score of a Ziegfeld Follies and two eminently successful musical comedies. In 1917, he wrote a bugle song:

I sleep with 97 men

Inside a wooden hut.

I love them all,

They all love me,

It’s very lovely

BUT

Oh, how I hate to get up

in the Morning. . . .

One million and a half copies of this chanty were sold. To its strains, the armies of the U.S. moved into battle.

In 1921, with Sam Harris, he built the Music Box Theatre. The profits of his first revue were $400,000. He owns a house on Long Island, writes his songs in a suite at the Ritz, Atlantic City, spends his winters in Palm Beach. Once he visited the estates of onetime Prince Louis of Battenberg—”on a slumming party.”

*The medal had previously been awarded to nine persons:

Prof. E.E. Just, head of the Department of Physicians of Howard University, for researches in Biology.

The late Alajor Charles Young of the U. S. Army, for service in organizing the Liberian Constabulary and developing roads in the Republic of Liberia.

Harry ‘T. Burleigh, composer, pianist and singer, for excellence in the field of creative music.

William Stanley Braithwaite, poet, literary critic and editor, for distinguished achievement in literature.

Archibald II. Grimke, former U. S. Consul to Santo Domingo and President of the American Negro Academy, for 70 years of distinguished service to his country and his race.

William E. Biirghardt Du Bois, author, editor of The Crisis, for the founding and calling together of the Pan-African Congress.

Charles S. Gilpin, actor, for his achievement in the title role of Eugene O’Neill’s play The Emperor Jones.

Mary B. Talbert, former President of the National Association of Colored Women, for service to the women of her race and for the restoration of the home of Frederick Douglass.

Prof. George W. Carver, for researches in Agricultural Chemistry.

*THE STORY OF IRVING BERLIN— Alexander Woollcott — Putnam (2.50).