HERE IN HAWAII - Hawaii Musics (Plural) - Part 2 February 19, 2008
Posted by Kelly in : Big Island Hawaii, General, HERE IN HAWAII, HERE ON THE BIG ISLAND , 3commentsHawaiian Musics (Plural) - Part 2
[Click here to first read “Part 1″]
In the first two decades of the 20th century, paralleling America’s fascination with the ukulele there was a craze for pseudo-Hawaiian “novelty” songs. Some featured nonsense words, like “Yakka-Hula Hickey-Doola.” Some were risqué ditties, like “They’re Wearin’ ‘em Higher in Hawaii.” Others were vaudeville numbers built on ethnic jokes, like “O’Brien is Tryin’ to Learn to Talk Hawaiian.” You probably won’t hear those songs in public today.Few composers on Tin Pan Alley had ever been west of New Jersey; but their songs did help to get Hawaii’s visitor industry going.
Fortunately, by the 1930s, songs combining proper Hawaiian and English words had become hits on the radio, and are still in the repertoire of local musicians. Known as hapa-haole (half-Caucasian) songs, these include “On the Beach at Waikiki,” “The Hawaiian Wedding Song,” and “My Little Grass Shack in Kealakekua.” (You know that one . . . it’s “where the humuhumunukunukuapua’a goes swimming by.”)
By now, show-bar and luau entertainers have gotten hundreds of thousands of people - maybe even you - singing along to “Pearly Shells” or “The Hukilau Song.” Hapa-haole songs are still being written; and in a delicious irony, there is now a rendition of “Little Grass Shack” sung entirely in Hawaiian!
Just as on the mainland, there was a folk-music revival here in the 1960s and ’70s. Young local musicians sought out obscure, older musicians in rural places, and got them recorded. Among their traditional and vintage songs, in both Hawaiian and English, many were accompanied by slack-key guitar, a style that local guitar players immediately took up and celebrated.
As the two generations played and recorded together - almost always acoustically, not amplified - new popular songs were composed in both languages. A burgeoning interest in “world music,” since the 1980s, has stimulated interest in Oriental and Polynesian musical styles, particularly in drumming. And Hawaiian songs have now been cross-pollinated with the Reggae rhythms of another famously musical tropical island - Jamaica - to produce the sound known here as “Jawaiian.”
You can hear the music of the islands on Big Island radio stations, but bear in mind that our huge mountains block the signals, so most stations broadcast from the east side can’t be heard in the west, and vice versa. KHBC in Hilo (1060 AM and 92.7 FM), KAPA (100.3 FM in Hilo, 99.1 in Kona — website offers live streaming radio broadcast), and KWXX in Kona (101.5 FM) have Hawaiian music formats.
HERE IN HAWAII - Hawaii Musics (Plural) - Part 1 February 19, 2008
Posted by Kelly in : About Hawaii, General, HERE IN HAWAII , add a commentHawaiian Musics (Plural) - Part 1
There’s a Grammy Award given for “Hawaiian Music,” but that’s just one category. And as most local musicians and enthusiasts can tell you, there are many varieties of “Hawaiian” music in Hawaii.
More often than not, that Grammy goes to a “slack key” artist, whose finger-picking guitar style involves loosening one or more of the six strings. So, there are dozens of slack-key tunings, some of which originated 100 or more years ago, when players who did not know the instrument’s “correct” tuning began to invent their own.
Slack key may be widely recognized - and rewarded - but it is not the Islands’ only musical style. The earliest Hawaiian music comes from their oral tradition of aboriginal chants, known collectively as mele.
These include invocations, prayers, rituals, and mythological stories, usually sung unaccompanied or with gourd drums or rattles. Mele are widely heard, today, especially in official or public events and dedications, and as accompaniment for traditional hula.
During the 19th century, haoles brought Old-World music to Hawaii.
It was immediately popular with the ali’i (royalty), who set Hawaiian poems to Western-style melodies, with harmonies they’d learned from singing Christian hymns. By the 1880s, King Kalakaua had a royal band, and his bandmaster had set the monarch’s poem “Hawaii Pono’e” to stately music. You hear it now, as the State anthem, typically sung at the start of a public event. At the end of that event, however, many people will spontaneously sing “Hawaii Aloha” - the beloved though unofficial anthem, written around 1860 by a commoner, Makua Laiana. And by the time she was deposed, at the turn of the century, Queen Liliuokalani had written dozens of popular songs, most famously “Aloha Oe.”
But most of what people call “Hawaiian music” today had its origins in the 20th century. I’ll tell you about that in my next column.
