You're listening to Comedy Central. Well, hello, welcome to CEP Time, the only show that's for the culture. Today, we'll be discussing black classical music. Now. I know you might be thinking that classical music it's just for old white men whose hair looks like they spend a day inside of a tornado. But black musicians have an often overlooked history of contributions in the classical music space. Take our first musician, George Bridge Tower born in Britain in seventeen seventy eight.
George was a young musical prodigy, driven into show business by his overbearing father, the eighteenth century version of Joe Jackson, Well, you better get back in there and learn that a land. Before George was ten years old, he was performing for kings and princess all over Europe. One concert was even attended by Thomas Jefferson. It's rumored that Thomas Jefferson was so impressed by the talents of this mixed race baby that he was heard saying, maybe I should make one
of these for myself. Rich Tower was so famous that Beethoven himself even wrote him a sonata, which they performed together in eighteen o three. On the sheet music. Beethoven wrote a dedication to George which read, and I quote Mulatto Sonata composer, the Mulatto Bridge Tower, great lunatic and Mulatto composer. Keep in mind Beethoven was famous for knowing how things sound. Another black classical musician the Sisterretta Jones,
a world amous opera singer from Providence, Rhode Island. Jones toured the world and even performed for then President Benjamin Harrison, who, like many presidents from the eighteen hundreds, also worked part time as a mall center. Despite being unable to perform and fully staged operas because of segregation, Jones was still too talented to ignore. She became the very first African American woman to headline a show at Carnegie Hall, which actually reminds me of the old joke, how do you
get to Carnegie Hall? You take the cute training to fifty seven Street. It's funny because it's true. Our next musician, Roland Hayes, the first African American artist to make a commercial recording and, judging from these photos, the first Mr Steel Your Girl. Although Hayes always presented raw musical talent, his career only begin because of a workplace accident. His clothes got caught in an assembly line built and it dragged him through a machine three times, nearly killing him.
And while he recovered at home in a fool by the cast. It was then that Roland started taking singing seriously, Hay. His career took off, and at the peak of the nineteen twenties, he was the world's highest paid singer, reportedly making around one hundred thousand dollars a year. That's not very rich these days, but back then that made Roland basically Kanye and Drake. Roland was also the first African
American concert artist to record his own record. He hired orchestras, scored the music, and hired out Columbia Studios, and promoted himself as the Great Negro tenor. He would even go through the phone book and if he found a name he liked, he'd called that name and try to sell them tickets, Which you mean if he didn't call you, your name was boring? What no Adam Jones is at those concerts at the ticket booth, that'd be people saying two tickets for Mofisto Bolonese please. So the next time
you think of classical music. Don't just think of Bach and Chopin, think of the ice stout players like Hayes. Well that's all the time we have for today. This has been CP time and I'm Roy Wood Jr. And remember well for the culture. See if I can do a little bit of what old Roland did here, pull a name after tone book. Hello is this Charise Dumont? Yes? Can you lone me two hundred dollars? Watch The Daily Show weeknight Central on Comedy Central in stream fool episodes
anytime I'm on Paramount Plus. Yeah, this has been a Comedy Central podcast.