Kekuku’s Gift: A Forgotten Musical Influence on America
A pivotal moment in the history of popular music occurred at an unexpected place and time. The place was La’ie, a Mormon enclave on the northeastern coast of the island of Oahu. The time was 1885, when Hawaii was an independent nation ruled by its own monarch. And the person responsible was even more surprising: an eleven-year-old boy.
According to a story repeated for generations, the boy — Joseph Kekuku — was walking by the railroad tracks one day carrying a guitar, perhaps of the Spanish variety that had been widely disseminated in the Islands since at least the 1840’s. He idly picked up a bolt on the railroad bed and it brushed against one the strings. According to another account, which circulated within his family, he was playing guitar outside the local Cash and Carry when he leaned over and a steel comb tumbled onto the strings from his pocket. Whatever the cause, he was riveted by the sound he heard and spent the next seven years inventing a new instrument — the Hawaiian steel guitar — and perfecting a technique for playing it. For much of that time, Kekuku — whose family were pioneers unsuccessfully attempting to found a settlement for Hawaiian Mormons in Skull Valley, Utah — was enrolled in the Kamehameha School for Boys in Honolulu. From there, the new music quickly spread throughout the archipelago and the world beyond.
Another sign was the success of the Oahu Publishing Company. Although founded by a car thief who had escaped from a prison road gang, (more…)