05 | August | 2017 |

Sol K. Bright — Homage to a Hawaiian Cowboy

August 5, 2017 Lame DogHawaiian

If you want to know what triggered the Dog’s preoccupation with Hawaiian music, check out the clip below. I came across it a few months back and have not succeeded in putting it out of my mind. The reference in the spoken introduction to an “urban cowboy” — the title of a film released in 1980 — suggests that it was recorded when the performer, who was born in 1909, was over seventy. After the first minute and a half, I defy anyone watching to sing along.

Solomon Kamaluhiakekipikealiʻikaʻapunikukealaokamahanahana Bright, Sr., was the fifth of fourteen children. In a newspaper interview — later republished in the book Hawai’i Chronicles Two (University of Hawai’i Press 1998) — he recalled gathering duck eggs as a youth in the swamps of Honolulu and

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