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==Early years and family==
Hayes was born in [[Curryville, Georgia]], on June 3, 1887, to William Hayes (died ca. 1898) and wife Fannie (or Fanny, née Mann; ca. 1848 – aft. 1920),<ref name="auto">{{Cite web|url=http://www.wargs.com/noble/bogdanov.html|title = Ancestry of Igor and Grichka Bogdanov}}</ref><ref>Christopher A. Brooks, [http://iupress.typepad.com/blog/2015/02/the-unique-bond-between-roland-hayes-and-his-mother.html "The unique bond between Roland Hayes and his mother"], [[Indiana University Press]] blog, February 13, 2015.</ref> tenant farmers on the plantation where his mother had once been a slave; the Hayes farm appears to be on one of the tracts of land given by a plantation owner named Culpepper to some black people who worked for them. Roland's father, who was his first music teacher, often took him hunting and taught him to appreciate the musical sounds of nature.
When Hayes was 11, his father died, and his mother moved the family to [[Chattanooga, Tennessee]]. William Hayes claimed to have some [[Cherokee]] ancestry, while his maternal great-grandfather, Aba Ougi (renamed as Charles Mann) was a [[Chieftain]] from the [[History of Ivory Coast#Trade with Europe and the Americas|Ivory Coast]]. Aba Ougi was captured and shipped to the United States of America in 1790.<ref>The University of North Carolina library extension publication, Vols 10–11 (1944), p. 25.</ref>
Mt. Zion Baptist Church in Curryville (founded by Roland's mother<ref>{{Cite web|url=http://www.bso.org/media/15174/WhoIsRolandHayeswResKit.pdf|title="Who is Roland Hayes?"}}</ref>) is where Roland first heard the music he would cherish forever, [[Negro spiritual]]s. It was Roland's job to learn new spirituals from the elders and teach them to the congregation. A quote of him talking about beginning his career with a pianist:
<blockquote>I happened upon a new method for making iron sash-weights," he said, "and that got me a little raise in pay and a little free time. At that time I had never heard any real music, although I had had some lessons in rhetoric from a backwoods teacher in Georgia. But one day a pianist came to our church in Chattanooga, and I, as a choir member, was asked to sing a solo with him. The pianist liked my voice, and he took me in hand and introduced me to phonograph records by [[Enrico Caruso|Caruso]]. That opened the heavens for me. The beauty of what could be done with the voice just overwhelmed me.<ref name="afrovoices.com">{{Cite web|title = AFROCENTRIC VOICES: Roland Hayes Biography|url = http://www.afrovoices.com/rhayes.html|website=afrovoices.com|access-date = 2016-02-24}}</ref></blockquote>
Hayes trained with Arthur Calhoun, an organist and choir director, in Chattanooga. Roland began studying music at [[Fisk University]] in Nashville in 1905 although he had only a 6th-grade education. Hayes's mother thought he was wasting money because she believed that [[African Americans]] could not make a living from singing. As a student he began publicly performing, touring with the [[Fisk Jubilee Singers]] in 1911.{{cn|date=November 2022}} He furthered his studies in [[Boston]] with Arthur Hubbard, who agreed to give him lessons only if Hayes came to his house instead of his studio. He did not want Roland to embarrass him by appearing at his studio with his white students. During his period studying with Hubbard, he worked as a messenger for the Hancock Life Insurance Company to support himself.{{cn|date=November 2022}}
==Early career==
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