Donny Hathaway Live: Through the Lens of Roland Charles

by Keith Rice, Ph.D., Historian/Archivist, Tom & Ethel Bradley Center - October 14, 2025

The Tom & Ethel Bradley Center’s mission is to collect, preserve, and disseminate the visual history of the region with an emphasis on ethnic minority communities and photographers. Some of the photographers did much more than make photographic images. Some were businesswomen and men, artists, poets, and entrepreneurs. Roland Charles was an example of all those attributes rolled into one person.

Roland Charles was born in New Orleans, Louisiana in 1938. Prior to moving to Los Angeles, California to pursue a career in photography, Charles served in the United States Air Force. In addition to a bachelor’s in communications from Windsor University, he received formal training in television production and photography at Otis College of Art and Design, L.A. Trade-Tech College, and University of Southern California (USC).

Roland Charles was a prolific photographer who made images across a variety of photographic genres. The collection is one of the Bradley Centers largest collections (45.83 linear feet). It includes artistic, portrait, people, sports, commercial, street, fashion, entertainment, album cover photography and more. The images are in the form of negatives, slides, and prints. In 1984, Charles co-founded and directed the Black Gallery and the Black Photographers of California (BPC). So, the collection also includes paper records and audio-visual materials created by those organizations.

The collection is divided into six series. I focused my attention on series five which features photographs of musicians and singers during the 1970s. Musically, that time-period is frequently associated with often criticized disco music. But good music is good music. The 1970s was a great time for all kinds of music. Roland Charles made many images of Soul/R and B artists during that time. He photographed many performers who may not have “crossed over” into the so-called pop music category but were and still are icons in the Black community. Donny Hathaway was one of those artists.

Roland Charles documented Donny Hathaway during the recording of one of my top three all-time favorite albums: Donny Hathaway Live. This is one of many concerts that I wish I could go back in time and attend. Donny Hathaway Live is considered one of the greatest live soul albums ever recorded. The album became a household staple in Black communities. Many of Charles’s images could have easily been the album cover but that was taken by Jim Cummings. I was also excited to discover these photographs in the collection because decades after its recording I had the pleasure of being a sound engineer for the Al McKay All-Stars which at one time included drummer, Freddie White, who was only sixteen-years old when he played on Live.

Live was recorded during several performances in late summer and early fall of 1971 at two locations: Doug’s Troubadour in Los Angeles and the Bitter End in New York. Charles’s photographs are dated August 24, 1971, and the location is the Troubadour. The Troubadour is not a fancy high-tech venue. It is a very small intimate space that introduced up and coming singer songwriters to the world during the 1960s and 1970s. It is a live music performance venue. So, Hathaway and his band of phenomenal musicians performed without flashy light shows, pyro techniques, or synchronized choreography. The performance is in the musicians and the music. Roland Charles images visually document what is heard on the Live album’s Troubadour dates, Donny Hathaway-vocals and keyboards; Mike Howard-guitar, Phil Upchurch-guitar; Willie Weeks-bass guitar; Earl De Rouen-congas; and Fred White-drums at their best on every note played and every word sung. What makes this small collection of images so important is that they are the only images to my knowledge that exist of this extraordinary performance in a public institution. Unfortunately, on January 19, 1979, Donny Hathaway fell fifteen stories from a window in his room at the Essex Hotel in New York City in an alleged suicide. He was 33 years old. His daughter Lalah Hathaway continues his legacy. She has a beautiful voice like her father and is a very successful solo artist in her own right.
 

Image Gallery

Post tagged as: bradley center, photographs, los angeles