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
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, (more…)
