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.
This subject is explored in a fascinating book published last year by the University of North Carolina Press: Kika Kila, by Professor John W. Troutman. The author explains how the new music helped preserve Hawaiian culture after the monarchy was overthrown by United States marines, the queen tossed in prison, and the Hawaiian language banned in schools. But the impact on the American mainland, where Kekuku and his followers went to teach and perform, was also profound. One indication was that by 1916, Hawaiian records were the top selling music category in the United States. Have a listen to one of them:
Another sign was the success of the Oahu Publishing Company. Although founded by a car thief who had escaped from a prison road gang,
it enrolled over 200,000 Americans in Hawaiian guitar classes and correspondence courses from the 1920’s to the 1940’s. And it was one of several similar organizations.
Most significantly, Troutman argues that the development of both blues and American country music (as well as other musical genres throughout the world) were decisively influenced by native Hawaiian musicians, who extensively toured the American South and other regions during the earth 20th century. He further contends that their vital contribution has been ignored by musicologists intent on finding African roots for “black” music and European roots for “white” music, based on pre-set notions.
Troutman’s work may have broad implications. In 1941, when Pearl Harbor was bombed, Hawaii was a distant territorial possession. Yet a visceral sense of violation and outrage propelled America into the Second World War. I wonder if part of the reason was a widespread familiarly with and attachment to Hawaii, inculcated as much as anything else by the popularity of the steel guitar. Would an attack on Guam or the Northern Mariana Islands have had quite the same effect?
The story that Troutman has uncovered also illustrates the dangers of viewing particular forms of culture as the exclusive product of any one group of people, rather than as the result of a diverse and constantly evolving set of influences. Indeed, I would posit that “cultural appropriation,” far from being a bad thing, is the way that civilization advances. And that — while amends should be made to those who have been denied recognition for their cultural achievements (or, worse yet, had them suppressed or destroyed) — all culture is ultimately the common heritage of all mankind.
But let us return to Joseph Kekuku. What became of him? After performing throughout the United States and Europe, he married an English woman and settled in, of all places, Dover, New Jersey, where he died of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1932. There he rests in silence. But the steel strings he set in motion are forever vibrating.
