BY TRAV S.D. | For Black History Month, a brief introduction to the Hyers Sisters—pathbreaking black singers and actors whom I only just learned about while putting together my recent post on bandmaster Patrick Gilmore, who booked them for the World’s Peace Jubilee and International Musical Festival in 1872.

It has been plausibly claimed that the Hyers Sisters were predecessors to Bert Williams, George Walker, and Aida Overton Walker, Black Patti, and The Whitman Sisters. More arguably, it has also been claimed that they started in the first American musicals (not just the first black musicals, but the first ones). That’s for the debate stage, but I like the boldness of the boast.

The sisters were Anna Madah Hyers (1855–1929) and Emma Louise Hyers (1857–1901). They were children of Samuel B. Hyers a “high end” Sacramento barber and amateur opera singer. The dad obviously cut the top heads in the California capital and accrued some wealth and property as a result, for he educated his two daughters in piano and voice from a young age, to the extent that they were giving public recitals by 1867.

These were such a success that he took the girls, still children on a national, coast-to-coast tour, and they made a sensation wherever they went. The fact that Anna was a soprano and Emma was a contralto who could hit bass notes meant that they could perform wide ranging duets, with Emma sometimes taking parts that were intended for males.

This by itself would have been groundbreaking, but where they chose to take their career next truly sets the Hyers Sisters apart. Having toured with some all-black minstrel companies such as Callender’s, they chose to produce and star in their own musical plays, making the risky and then unheard of choice to do so withoutblackface.

Many of their vehicles were written by the equally significant Black American writer Pauline Hopkins, who’ll be getting her own post here in a few weeks. Their vehicles included Out of Bondage (1876), Urlina, the African Princess (1879), Peculiar Sam or The Underground Railway (1880), Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1880), and Colored Aristocracy (written 1877, performed 1891) and others. They were devoted to communicating the black experience without caricature, in an era when nearly no one else dared to.

After Emma died at the age of 44, Anna continued to tour with Isham’s Octoroons and others under the name Madah Fletcher.

I refer you now to two greater authorities on this topic. Professor Jocelyn Buckner of Chapman University wrote this terrific article for the African American Review in 2012 entitled “Spectacular Opacity: The Hyers Sisters Performances of Respectability and Resistance. And singer, historian and film-maker Susheel Bibbs has paid tribute to the sisters in performance, on film, and on this website. 

For over 600 more Travalanche articles about black culture, go here.

NOTE: The above content is reprinted, with author’s permission, from the entry found here.

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