Bohee & Hyers

May C. Hyers (kneeling) and stage daughter Bohee Hyers, theater photo (not dated)..

"Pioneer African American Vocalists and Musicians in Recorded Music"

For around one hundred years, historians regarded cylinders and discs recorded by Black Americans as "lost sounds." Over the past years they have been rediscovered; some have been transferred to CD and accessible to researchers. One pioneering recording artist was May C. Hyers. She recorded some fifty cylinders for the Kansas City Talking Machine Company in 1898. Her repertoire ranged from opera and patriotic songs to minstrelsy items and so called coon songs such as "Hot Coon from Memphis."

We cannot be sure these songs were recorded, as the evidence is only that they were advertised in catalogues. In those days, recordings could not be easily duplicated, and individual cylinders were made to order. Thus the catalogue may represent Hyers's potential repertoire. On the other hand, one cylinder has survived among the many advertised by the Louisiana Phonograph Company for Bebe Vasnier and these date to 1891.

May C. Hyers toured with Sam Hyers, father of the then famous Hyers Sisters, Anna Madah and Emma Louise. Contemporary Louisiana Phonograph Company flyers suggested that May was another sister. In fact, she was the sister's stepmother ----- May was the second wife of Sam Hyers. In 2007 the present writer met and interviewed May C. Hyers's great-great-granddaughter in Washington, DC in Georgetown. She explained that the family had moved only a few years previously and that much of what was in their old house had to be discarded. She had saved some theatrical poster photographs ---- one shows May C. Hyers with her 'stage daughter' Bohee (named after the black banjo virtuosos and recording artists). If there had been any cylinders in the old house, she would probably not have recognized what they were if she had seen them. I was just a few years too late.

Sources: Eurojazzland: Jazz and European Sources, Dynamics, and Contexts, edited by Luca Cerchiari, Laurent Cugny, Franz Kerschbaumer; photo courtesy of Adrienne Wheeler