Radiolab - The Vanishing of Harry Pace: Episode 5

Roland Hayes and the Lost Generation: Episode Five from The Vanishing of Harry Pace, a six-part series created by Jad Abumrad and Shima Oliaee. Here’s the extraordinary story of Roland Hayes, another great (and largely forgotten) creator of new cosmologies.

Duration: 44m
Broadcast on: 02 Jul 2021
Audio Format: other

Roland Hayes and the Lost Generation: Episode Five from The Vanishing of Harry Pace, a six-part series created by Jad Abumrad and Shima Oliaee.

Here’s the extraordinary story of Roland Hayes, another great (and largely forgotten) creator of new cosmologies.

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And this is the vanishing of Harry Pace, a miniseries on RadioLab. So we've finished our trilogy on the Many Lives of Harry, and we're going to keep expanding outward. I know we call this series the vanishing of Harry Pace, but he was not the only one to be vanished. There are others like him who were similarly vanished, sometimes by their own design. Now one of the things that has been really frustrating for us in reporting this series haunting even is that our central guy. We don't have Harry's voice, we don't have it. Harry got all of these other voices on records, like Ethel Waters, Trixie Smith. I mean yeah, take Ethel as an example, when you hear her voice. I come along in that era. I was working in nightclubs. Like when you hear her speak, it makes all the difference. You know her. I could sing, dance, talk, and whistle, I'll make you laugh and I'll make you cry. But Harry's kind of lost to us. So one of the things we did early on is we called every archive that we could find, every record collector asking, "What do you got? What do you got?" We were trying to find something. And along the way, that's when we met a dude that we did not expect to meet, a contemporary of Harry and his story. Yeah, it kind of became one of the most inspiring musical tales that I've ever heard. It actually began with a misunderstanding on our part. We were actually hunting for Harry. It has a picture of the label. On the back, it has who's in it and the logo for Black Swan, I guess. Tim, can you say your name and your title? So we have it. My name is Tim Brooks. I'm a media historian. We found a way to Tim because he's one of the few people who have records from the Black Swan label. In fact, people told us, "You got to talk to this guy because he had just released a compilation called Black Swan." Do you want me to go get a copy of that? Yeah, we would love that. And these are all recordings from the Black Swan label, like the early years? No. No. Actually, this is called Black Swans with an S on it. It turned out the compilation was not what we thought. And it includes, for the first time, the Roland Hayes, the historic Roland Hayes recordings that were made in 1917-18. Tim started telling us about this guy named Roland Hayes and these very old recordings that he had hunted down with great difficulty. And we were like, "Cool, it's not what we're looking for. I don't really want to go into this because this guy never recorded for the Black Swan label.

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