Oley Speaks - Biography

Biography

Speaks was born in Canal Winchester, Ohio, the son of a grain merchant and contractor. He was ten when his father died, and his family moved to Columbus soon afterwards. He learned the piano as a boy, and was praised for his baritone voice as early as 1891 by The Columbus Dispatch. In the 1890s he began his career as a railroad clerk at a station in Columbus, Ohio, until he decided to pursue his musical passions. He was developing a reputation as a fine baritone singer in churches in Columbus before he moved to New York City in 1898 and started taking lessons. One of his voice teachers was the American soprano Emma Thursby. Speaks had a successful career as a singer, touring the US giving recitals and also appearing in oratorios.

Speaks began to write songs, many with religious themes. He studied composition with Will Macfarlane and Max Spicker. In 1907, he wrote On the Road to Mandalay using the words of Rudyard Kipling's poem "Mandalay", which sold over one million copies. The song was a popular parlour ballad, particularly in the United Kingdom and British territories worldwide, and was boosted by the recording by Frank Sinatra which was released on the Come Fly with Me album in 1958. However, after some resistance from the Kipling estate over the omission of several verses, this version of the song remained embargoed in the British Commonwealth until it appeared on the digitally-remastered release of the album many years later. Speaks had two further million-selling successes, Morning to a lyric by Frank Lebby Stanton in 1910 and Sylvia to a lyric by Clinton Scollard in 1914, but neither has been popular in the age of the gramophone, though his material turns up in anthologies; the American baritone Robert Merrill and the Swedish tenor Jussi Bjorling both recorded Sylvia, and the Irish tenor John McCormack has recordings of all three famous titles available on CD. More recently, American baritone Thomas Hampson has also recorded On the Road to Mandalay.

Speaks was a prominent member of ASCAP, where he was elected Director 1924 – 1943. He was also a National Patron of Delta Omicron, an international professional music fraternity.