Hawai‘i’s Steel Pulse

Back in the scrape-the-Brady-Bunch-kistch-off-Waikīkī 1980s, plenty of heavy lifting was done over at the Moana-Surfrider to bring the First Lady back to her original grandeur in time for her 90th birthday.

Letters were sent to the descendants of the same Park Avenue old-money families who’d once lodged annually for weeks at a time, warm requests for old photographs and other memorabilia for a little second-floor museum. The local elite were interviewed for any way-back-when information they could pass along to the designers. Hallway rugs were meticulously patterned to match what the wealthy walked across nearly a century prior. The lobby’s original hardwood floors were stripped of linoleum and polished to where the grain popped out in such high relief that you were compelled to kick off a slipper and run your bare foot across the smooth wood surface.

Even the original drink menu on the Banyan Veranda was faithfully reproduced, right down to an eighty-dollar whiff of Louis XIV cognac and glacier ice floated in from Alaska. No kidding.

This and more was what they told us during orientation when I got my first job waiting tables on the Veranda over three decades ago.

I soon learned that this massive authentication effort would be centered not by the color of the drapes in the oceanfront rooms, but by the live music performed nightly out in the courtyard, from right where they used to broadcast Hawai‘i Calls, the immensely popular radio program that began luring tourists out here way back in the 1930s.

Looking back, it’s hard to imagine how the hotel’s entertainment coordinator pulled it off, but there they were, week after week: Moe Keale on Mondays, Jerry Santos on Tuesdays, Henry Kapono on Wednesdays, Jerry with Olomana on Thursdays, Ho‘okena or Leon Siu or Ryan Tang on Fridays. On the weekends we had Mahi Beamer and yes, Emma Veary and Charles K.L. Davis. All of these legends would only attract others, too, with folks like Frank Kawaikapuokalani Hewett or Robert and Roland Cazimero dropping by to sit in all the time.

To get to work every evening, I used to walk along the beach right past the Halekulani, where instead of anybody from the Moana’s Hall of Fame roster of living legends, you’d see this trio of guys lined up on the oceanfront terrace in matching aloha shirts, long white pants, and kukui-nut lei delivering the kind of trade-mark tropically swaying sound it appeared the Moana was trying to avoid. Instead of Jerry’s slack-key rhythms, or Moe Keale’s distinctive uke and silky baritone, or those unforgettable Cazimero harmonies sung in ‘Ōlelo Hawai‘i, the signature sound over at the Halekulani was the steel guitar.

I loved the sound of it, but to me, it was way more Blue Hawaii than True Hawai‘i, something the hotel had likely contracted out to please the sort of tourist who’d enjoy an Elvis impersonator on the Vegas strip. And I wasn’t the only one who felt this way at the time. So synonymous had that steel sound become with Hollywood, with cartoonish hapa-haole ditties, with a postcard tourism ad, that it never would have occurred to me that if these two first-class resorts were competing to see who could deliver a more authentic Hawaiian sound, it was the Halekulani that had the edge.

I never would have guessed that that guy standing behind his table steel in that kukui-nut lei, a man named Alan Akaka, was just as much of a legend as Moe Keale. Or that Akaka could trace the roots of his craft on a direct line through the very same steel player who used to weave in and out of Uncle Moe’s rich baritone with Sons of Hawai‘i. Or that that line extended all the way back to the 1890s, right around the time they were clearing the Waikīkī lot where the Moana would be erected in 1901.

Slack-Key Nation

Back in 1990, to me Hawaiian meant slack-key and ‘ukulele. I’d heard all the folk legends about that long-ago kanaka maoli with the great ear and feel for music who comes across a Spanish guitar for the very first time, fiddles with the tuning knobs a bit, and in so doing, comes up with a sound that would launch a nationalist movement.

All over the radio, all you heard was Gabby Pahinui’s iconic 1960s Brown Album, the one that made slack-key pretty much obligatory for the kind of roots backyard ‘Nalo sound that, along with Gabby and Eddie Kamae’s Sons of Hawai‘i and Sunday Mānoa’s Guava Jam, became the very soundtrack for the Hawaiian Renaissance then marching ahead at full steam.

I also kind of vaguely knew how King David Kalākaua rescued hula from a decades-long missionary ban, and that he famously penned the anthem still sung today (or half-sung by most of us) to put an official us-guys stamp on everything from a UH volleyball game to a DOE May Day performance. Everyone knew his sister Lili‘uokalani composed not just Aloha ‘Oe, but hundreds of mele still performed today, or that she could easily draw wonderful new sounds from a whole range of Western instruments.

Some of us may have heard about Kalākaua passing the uke around during legendary kanikapila sessions at ‘Iolani Palace. Most of us probably owned a uke, even if it was stuffed in its dusty case in the back of a closet somewhere. Thanks to artists like Aunty Genoa Keawe, Moe Keale, and Bradda Iz—not to mention those finger-flying instrumentalists in the Eddie-Kamae-Ota-san-Peter Moon-Troy Fernandez-Jake mode—we became so familiar with that uke sound in Hawaiian music that we would later vote it the official State Instrument.

But that Alan Akaka steel sound I used to walk right by every night—I mean, I didn’t even know it was called the Hawaiian steel guitar. Or that its invention could be traced not to some nameless musically inclined kanaka maoli, but to a single actual human being, a man by the name of Joseph Kekuku. Or that steel guitar’s Overthrow-era rise led to its prominent place in one of the first and loudest decolonization efforts ever undertaken here, or that its greatest practitioners soon fled occupied Hawai‘i in favor of fame and better fortune on the American continent, where they could be treated as professional artists, even in the racist climate of early 1900s America, instead of as lazy reluctant field hands.

Or that this wave of long-ago Hawaiian diaspora is the very reason we hear the sounds we do in an Eagles song, Neil Young, Jerry Garcia on steel in “Teach Your Children” or Bonnie Raitt’s signature slide sound. B.B. King: it was the Hawaiian music crackling out of his radio down on the Mississippi Delta that set him on the path to becoming a guitar legend.

Ever stop to consider the sound effects in a Bugs Bunny cartoon?

Out in the Shed

None of the above would have ever really occurred to me until I happened upon Kikā Kila: How the Hawaiian Steel Guitar Changed the Sound of Modern Music (University of North Carolina Press, 2016), a marvelous and deeply layered love song of a book composed by musician, performer, and scholar John W. Troutman.

Troutman’s bona fides extend from decades as a UC anthropology professor to Louisiana State University to a position at the Smithsonian as its National Museum of American History’s curator of American music. And to the point here: Troutman’s quintessentially scholarly journey has all along been interspersed with his active side gig as an internationally sought-after performer of, yes, Hawaiian steel guitar.

Rather than simply and-then-and-then-and-then his way through a chronology of Joseph Kekuku’s life, or the Hawaiian steel guitar itself, like most authors of even the best niche texts, Troutman instead uses his central characters to draw us into a show. The spotlight pulls back to illuminate much bigger things: Hawaiian nationalism, struggles against White supremacy, the extremely complex nature of decolonization acts performed by composers, musicians, and dancers often employed by the very forces working to silence, if not erase them entirely.

If you’re thinking, hmm—U of California, LSU, Smithsonian, American music—that, here we go again (and that’s what I always think when I pick up another one of these outsider books, anyway), then have no fear.

This is no Unfamiliar Fishes. It ain’t The Colony or A. Grove Day or Michener or Ashley P. Judd or Hiram Bingham or James Cook. It’s not one of those books about a local celebrity that name-checks Shoal of Time in a hurried paragraph about the 1800s in the name of “context” and then calls it a day. No, what Troutman offers here is a masterclass on how to immerse yourself in the river of prior research, to acknowledge and even celebrate the accomplishments of your hard-working predecessors, and to assemble their insights to make surprising and ultimately vital connections for your audience.

 For starters, anybody with a book even remotely related to Hawai‘i who treats the quotation marks around the word “annexation” as a form of correct spelling is already on the right track. To get to that point, Troutman has locked himself in the shed with everyone from David Malo and, yes, Gavin Daws and Ralph Kykendall, all the way through George Kanahele to Noel Kent to Haunani-kay Trask to Robert Stauffer to Jon Kamakawiwo‘ole Osorio to Noenoe Silva to J. Kēhaulani Kauanui to Adria L. Imada.

He employs an incredible array of primary-source interview subjects and beyond, assembling a genealogy of Hawai‘i-focused writers that would floor any University of Hawai‘i Ph.D. dissertation committee—this in a book that is first and foremost and always about a musical instrument. And from the more-than-a-quarter of his book devoted to detailed chapter notes that don’t just list these impressive names, but that offer deeper dives into their work on the points he’s making in the chapters themselves, it’s obvious that Troutman hasn’t just heard of, say, Lili‘uokalani’s Hawai‘i’s Story—he’s read it over and over again, marked it up, dog-eared its pages with loving respect.

Stacking the Set

If any of this sounds too academic for your reading tastes, or if words like “scholar” or “academic” themselves translate for you into “ponderous” or ivity-avity, the ways in which, again: have no fear. Don’t forget that you’re in the hands of a seasoned performer, a man who has spent a lifetime looking out from bandstands around the world to see who among the crowd stares in rapt attention, who sings along, who drifts off into side talk with the folks at their table, and who walks out altogether without visiting the tip jar.

Troutman’s aim, as he states in his already-surprising introduction, is to catch and keep the attention of the back-rowers, the folks who came along in that we’ve-got-nothing-better-to-do-tonight mode. Beyond a few this-chapter-will-explore academic-sounding signposts, he succeeds in doing so with compelling and vivid writing, expert storytelling, insightful connections between his subjects and their layered contexts, and a writerly stance that puts him beside rather than across from his readers, as if to say, “Ho, this stuff I just read about hula is amazing! Check this out!”

With full credit to Noenoe Silva, in this case, we’re asked to take one more step from the place in our blurry memory banks where the info about hula’s having been “banned by the missionaries” is stored and notice that, wait a minute—if hula was so antithetical to missionary morals and prude sensibilities, why did it take nearly forty years for them to ban it? (Her answer: the ban coincided with the grand opening of tens of thousands of acres of haole-owned sugar plantations in urgent need of field hands who could be divided and exploited, and Hawai‘i’s tight-knit hula halaus were impeding this capitalist effort.)

With full credit to George Kanahele, and the Queen herself (Lili‘uokalani’s Songbook), our abstract notions that Kalākaua used to “entertain” guests at ‘Iolani Palace are sharpened into the full-flowered image of the King shredding on slack-key like Willie K or Led Ka‘apana, or Gabby himself. We learn that every one of the mo‘i was each raised simultaneously in kanaka musical traditions and church hymns and then steeped in Western classical music theory at the Royal School at the same time they were discovering guitars and ukes. The Hawaiian Nation’s sovereigns would have had no problem making the Palace look and sound like the kind of jaw-dropping kanikapila sessions we’ve until now only associated with Gabby’s legendary Waimānalo backyard jams.

“Kalākaua,” Troutman reminds us, “surrounded himself with guitars.”

With deference to the work of Dr. Jon Kamakawiwo‘ole Osorio, himself a bit of a shredder on guitar, as well as a composer and performer of some of our most recognizable contemporary decolonization mele, in particular, his classic “Hawaiian Soul”—an ode to George Helm, himself a bit of a shredder on guitar and, well, you get the idea—as if calling Dr. Osorio up to the stage like a guest performer who can do what he himself cannot, Troutman stands aside while the true expert breathes life into the abstraction that Kalākaua, the Merrie Monarch, famously revived hula.

What that really means is that at a time when Kānaka Maoli were being washed away by a wave of colonization that had already taken nearly all of their people and most of their land and had its sights set firmly on the nation itself, Kalākaua orchestrated a coronation ceremony not upon his ascension to the throne, but a full nine years later. And he did so for one reason only, as Dr. Osorio puts it: “to affirm for all the Hawaiianness of this king.”

Contemporary scholar Andria L. Imada then takes the stage to underscore how musically in-charge-of-things Kalākaua was in crafting the main weapon in his own We’re-Still-Here decolonization effort: mele sung entirely in ‘Ōlelo Hawai‘i, and performed on slack-key and ukulele, both as the main event and significantly, as an accompaniment to hundreds of hula performances. Imada quotes one of Kalākaua’s dancers’ astounding claim that it was the King himself who first put hula to these relatively new guitar-centered Hawaiian melodies to create the overwhelmingly effective Lāhu‘i-affirming genre, known immediately as hula ku‘i. 

As a member of Troutman’s audience, you’re just sitting there in awe, thinking, the Merrie Monarch, he didn’t just revive hula—there’s so much more to it. The whole thing hits, in fact, as so many other revelations throughout Kikā Kila do, like the high point of one of those live musical performances where the musicians make the most of things by “stacking the set” in a particular order—an insider-musician’s term Troutman uses to describe his hero Joseph Kekuku’s own skill as a performer.

The Headliner

At no point is this writerly performance strategy clearer than when the author finally does shine the spotlight directly on Kekuku and his instrument. Again with the help of an all-star lineup of guest scholars beginning with Robert Staufer (Kekuku was born in Kahana valley, so…), the author lays out in persuasive detail that assertion that initially comes off as being so folk-tale-ish—the one about Kekuku being the guy who invented steel guitar.

In a bio corroborated with every eyewitness account he can get his hands on, we see exactly how yes, this one man did in fact come up with the norm-shattering technological innovation that would take Hawaiian music around the world.

When Troutman starts nerding down on the technical aspects of what Kekuku was up to, we learn incredibly that the young Hawaiian likely had an intention that had preceded his discovery of the new sound. Here the author turns to one of Hawai‘i’s first Western musicologists, Helen Roberts, who points out what in fact made Hawaiian music Hawaiian at the time, explaining how it was “coupled with a habit, which is definitely traced to ancient hula music, of gliding swiftly from a tone finished, to one to be attacked, slightly in advance of its normal appearance.”

Troutman follows this musical observation with one of his own: “Although she was describing modern Hawaiian singing, she may as well have been defining the glissando sweep of the Hawaiian steel guitar,” which allows the kind of “infinite microtonal possibilities” of traditional Hawaiian singing. In other words, Kekuku hadn’t just come up with a cool new sound—he knew exactly what he was looking for the whole time.

We further learn that Kekuku’s goal went far beyond entertainment. Immediately well-known and sought after thanks to his new invention, Kekuku insisted on performing songs in ‘Ōlelo Hawai‘i, for instance, an act of decolonization that lines right up with his stance as his own era’s George Helm or Robert Cazimero or Israel Kamakawiwo‘ole or Walter Boy Tavares. He was a staunch nationalist who spoke in favor of the Queen’s restoration, a proud member of Ahahui Aloha ‘Āina involved in circulating and publicizing that group’s anti-annexation petition, a frequent and proud performer of Kaulana Nā Pua whose many We’re-Still-Here efforts were loudly amplified by the sound of the miracle of Hawaiian innovation cradled in his lap.

So when Troutman concludes that “The Hawaiian steel guitar as conceived by Kekuku had everything to do with perpetuating specifically Hawaiian musical traditions,” and tags his song with this: “and at this moment [prior to, during, and after the Overthrow], maintaining indigenous traditions was of critical concern,” every word that the author has so far had to say about colonization, the occupation, or the Overthrow moves in our brains from “context” and “backstory” to the very center of the stage.

Troutman’s own expertly stacked set is just one reason not to balk at a thick book published by a university press. In fact, as a writer myself who’s worked with both commercial and academic publishers, and as a scholar who’s had to trudge through plenty of academic doorstops that fully fit that “ponderous” stereotype, I have to say that the deeper I got into Troutman’s performance, the more I started seeing that the fact that this isn’t a commercial trade book—that’s also the very reason it’s also more surprising and entertaining and rewarding.

Less interested in lowest-common-denominator sales (or any sales, really), less inclined to sell readers short, if not outright insult their intelligence, editors at academic presses tend to let writers indulge themselves a bit, and every once in a while, this hands-off approach is the best thing they can do for a book. As in: sure, Troutman’s forays into the social conditions of the 1900s American South seem a bit tangential, but the payoff—that the Hawaiian steel guitar was the very reason for the birth of the similarly subversive Delta Blues slide guitar (true “American” music at its most authentically “American,” or so we thought)—is beyond worth it.          

Or take Troutman’s detailed stories of the almost-instant outmigration and diaspora of more than 200 of Hawai‘i’s best and most popular musicians in the aftermath of the Overthrow, including Joseph Kekuku. Like his culturally genealogy-focused subjects, Troutman takes the time to name-check as many of these important figures as he can, and to share the anecdotes of their early-1900s efforts to create communities on the continent that were soon more “Hawaiian” than what their occupied homeland had quickly become. In so doing these virtuoso players turned their genre into the best-selling music in all of America by 1916.

As you read about these heroic performers, you can’t help seeing the chasm between a homeland where they were expected to toil for comparative pennies upholding a budding tourism industry then poised to dig up the bones of their ancestors on every bit of scenic coastline from Hilo to Hanapēpē, and the red-carpet adulation they found in the Polynesian clubs popping up from San Francisco to New York. It can instantly remind you of the stories of John Coltrane or Duke Ellington or Ella Fitzgerald or Miles Davis getting treated like royalty in Sweden or Tokyo, only to return home to the N-word and racist cops.

And when you read of how Hollywood came to embrace everything Hawaiian primarily because of these musicians, it’s hard not to imagine an alternative world, one without the steel guitar and hula ku‘i drawing such fawning attention to these Native people. You’re forced to ask: in the absence of such a positive (if often exotifying) worldwide spotlight on Hawaiian performers singing almost exclusively in their Native language, would the Big Five white supremacists then working so hard to stamp out ‘Ōlelo Hawai‘i simply have gone the usual Manifest Destiny route of shoving everyone onto a reservation, or deporting all the kids to one of the BIA’s 26 boarding schools like the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, and then a mass grave?

Troutman himself may not overtly make these particular connections. But here and in other instances, he is able to lead us into this deeper thinking precisely because UNC Press gave him the latitude to give just a little more detail here, to expand on somebody’s name there, to let the source he’s quoting go on for a couple of more sentences. It’s easy to peg all of this as the exact kind of material that would have gotten slashed by some know-it-all commercial press editor’s pen, but to me it was gold, if only for the hours of Youtube rabbit-holing it spread the seeds for.

I mean, have you ever even listened to Feet Rogers? (Hint: search the master steel player and you’ll hear that you absolutely have—yeah, that’s the guy.)

You Go, Girl!

If you’re wondering, well, if it was so all-the-rage at the turn of the 20th century, if Kekuku’s invention made such an amazing sound that it got adapted by musicians composing in all kinds of other genres to the point that it became standard equipment in any Nashville or New York or LA music studio, whatever happened to that Hawaiian steel sound that started the whole thing in the first place? The answer, of course, is that the moment any authentic kind of roots music is able to dominate the American pop culture consciousness to the point of topping the charts, as Hawaiian steel did by 1916, it follows at the speed of Elvis chasing a fried banana sandwich that white people will start imitating it, appropriating it, minstrelizing it, theme-partying it into a parody of its original self, even when they’re being sincere.

Here Troutman yields his stage to scholar Jane Desmond (Staging Tourism), who tells us that “Caucasian women could experiment with exotic styles noted in magazines” of the era, “trying them on has one might a dress.” Troutman himself continues: “Emerging from such tendencies, scores of white Hawaiian bands by the 1920s show up in photographs from parties, picnics, and other gatherings in every part of the country,” so that by the 1930s, “Hawaiian musicians and dancers came to comprise only a small fraction of the ‘Hawaiian’ bands performing in the United States.” The photo he includes to punctuate this point is every bit as frat-boy-sorority-sister-party as you’d imagine it yourself.

This leap over the line between, on the one hand, the respectful adaptation of the kind employed by Delta-Blues slide guitar players and Nashville country music producers, and on the other, the outright minstrel show that haole performers of the more cringeworthy hula-hula-naughty-little-wiggle happa-haole songs delivered—this typically Haolewood appropriation of Hawaiian steel is what Troutman uses to complete the setup for his comeback narrative. 

By the time the Hawai‘i Calls radio program broadcast from the Moana’s veranda jumped the shark in 1975, the hotel’s deep-grained hardwood lobby floors long since having been smothered with linoleum, Troutman tells us that the steel guitar had become so synonymous with the worst hapa-haole minstrel music that many forgot that the instrument itself wasn’t just another product of the Hollywood gaze.

Heard outside Waikīkī, Troutman continues, that steel guitar sound would more than likely be weeping out of a radio in the form of a sad country song serenading some homesick soldier stationed at Schofield, or Hickam, or Bellows, or any one of the other 26 military bases soon to occupy a full fifth of Hawai‘i’s land. So completely successful had Joseph Kekuku’s innovation been at altering the musical landscape across the whole of American popular music, in fact, that people had come to think it had come from someplace else.

So much so that by the 1950s, when the need for a soundtrack for the Hawaiian Renaissance arose, the choice was unanimous. From Sons of Hawai‘i to Sunday Mānoa to the Mākaha Sons, from the Peter Moon Band to the Brothers Cazimero and beyond, the overwhelming keep-the-country-country authentic backyard sound was, as we well know, the traditional slack-key guitar, an upright bass, and songs sung once again almost exclusively in ‘Ōlelo Hawai‘i.

Even the great Gabby Pahinui, who for over a quarter-century prior to John Dominis Holt’s On Being Hawaiian had become known as a Waikīkī steel guitar legend, felt the pull. When it was time to put the definitive stripped-down roots-Hawaiian sound to vinyl and in so doing spearhead the Renaissance as much as Holt’s famous essay did, for his still-iconic Brown Album Pops shunned the “tourist music” sound of his favorite instrument and famously chose what he had begun honing with Eddie Kamae and the Sons of Hawai‘i: his slack-key guitar. And with that, slack-key pretty much took over the local music scene, with reports of classes that “sprung up like mushrooms all over town,” while the steel guitar, as Troutman concludes this sad part of how his beloved instrument got whitewashed into irrelevancy, “began to drift into obscurity.”

Kuleana

If you’ve ever taken one of those longer Hawaiian Airlines flights where they mesmerize you with those wonderful videos of local John-Cruz-Robert-Cazimero-Henry-Kapono legends performing their hits against our timeless visual backdrops, then it wouldn’t be a spoiler to say that Troutman’s story ends hopefully. One of the more breathtaking video shots is the one where Pomaka‘i Keawe Lyman, strumming her uke at the end of a Kāne‘ohe Bay dock backdropped by the verdant Ko‘olau curtain framing Waikāne Valley, delivers a silky-smooth falsetto rendition of ‘Alika, the signature song of her legendary grandmother, Aunty Genoa Keawe. Seated beside her to tag her lines in perfect harmony is her daughter Mālie, perhaps seventeen or eighteen at the time, who is cradling the steel guitar she uses to weave in an out of her great grandmother’s verses with the expertise of the legendary David Feet Rogers.

Rogers, as you already know if you followed up on the above Youtube recommendation, may have been the thread that allowed steel guitar to survive the dark years of the Renaissance-era slack-key boom. If you Youtube any of Aunty Genoa Keawe’s standards, it’s either Feet’s dad George “Pops” Rogers or his Uncle Benny that you hear on steel. And it was Feet’s own oh-so-subtle icing-on-the-cake, lay-out-until-the-song-requires-it playing that completed the sound of one of our more important culture-reclaiming Renaissance-era groups, Sons of Hawai‘i. 

Founded by legendary ukulele player Eddie Kamae, who would study ‘Ōlelo Hawai‘i from Mary Kawena Pukui herself for the sole purpose of recovering as many yet-to-be-written-down Hawaiian mele as possible from wherever he could find them, including, famously, the deepest recesses of Waipi‘o Valley—for over three decades the Sons would boast a rotating lineup of first-ballot Hawaiian Music Hall-of Famers, from Gabby to Joe Marshall (it’s his sound you hear when John Koko’s or Robert Cazimero’s bass drives a thumping Haleakala-Hilo-One-type mele), to slack-key master George Kuo, with, along the way, Dennis Kamakahi, and Moe Keale, the pure Hawaiian ukulele virtuoso from Ni‘ihau, also the uncle to Israel Kamakawiwo‘ole. Standing out among these legends was Feet Rogers, a man who’s steel guitar sound was so definitive—that is, so much more intentionally Joseph Kekuku, and so much less like what generally happened down at the Moana for Hawai‘i Calls—that Kamae refused to book any gigs whenever Feet’s day job as a merchant seaman took him out of town. 

To see and hear the young Mālie Lyman plucking those distinctively understated Feet Rogers accents that rung out from my Hawaiian Airlines screen in 2025 seems a kind of miracle of musical genealogy. Troutman builds his hopeful ending by making this connection between Lyman and Feets Rogers concrete, beginning with George Kanahele, who founded the Hawaiian Music Foundation in 1971, at the height of the slack-key boom, to celebrate the Hawaiian steel guitar’s place in Hawaiian music history by holding concerts with whoever was left. Then it was the arrival of…some haole guy from Ohio?

Again: no kidding. Ohio. 

As a young boy growing up in the very geographic center of the American continent, Jerry Byrd had happened upon a traveling tent show that included a Hawaiian music five-piece marked by the chromed shine of the National guitar on the lap of a direct contemporary of Joseph Kekuku. A life-long obsession was born, one where Byrd worked to filter out both respectful Jerry-Garcia adaptations and Haolewood appropriations of steel and focus wholly on the traditional Joseph Kekuku sound, all the way up there in Ohio. By the time he retired and moved to Honolulu in the 1970s, Byrd was so surprised to find himself among a such a small handful of wholly traditional steel players left standing that he felt the calling to start teaching.

Byrd’s appearance makes for a wonderful full-circle ending for Troutmant’s tale. Hawaiian steel had taken such a lasting hold over the decades on the continent—actual Hawaiian steel guitar and not just its country-music adaptations—that in the person of Jerry Byrd, it was able to return intact, if not in purer form than what could generally be found here in a Hawai‘i at a time when the sound was still working to separate itself from hapa-haole tourist music. By every account Troutman was able to track down, and in that way that some haole hula enthusiasts or paddlers or ‘Ōlelo speakers or slack-key players (or, yes, writers) go the extra mile if only to not come off as one typical haole, Byrd was also an exacting and demanding teacher, an assertion that suggests his true allegiance to the authentic steel sound and its understated role in traditional mele intended all along by Joseph Kekuku. 

Byrd’s roster of students would go on to include pretty much every single one of the go-to steel players you hear when some contemporary local artist decides to top off a recording with that iconic once-again-Hawaiian sound, such players as Owen Salazar, Casey Olsen, Greg Sardinha, Paul Kim, Bobby Ingano, and yes, the very same Alan Akaka I used to walk right by on my way past the Halekulani poolside terrace. The result has been a revival that continues today, with so many young musicians turning to what they now much more clearly see as an instrument of this place: Devin Nakahara. Makamae Lyu-Napoleon. Pono Fernandez. Kapono Lopes. Do yourself a favor and go Youtube one of the most notable among them, Alan Akaka’s own student, Mālie Lyman. I guarantee you’ll become an instant fan, which would only help this important revival effort.

Postscript: Our Steel Pulse

While nine years can seem like nine hundred in the trend-conscious world of music, the Hawaiian steel guitar continues the hopeful trajectory Troutman left us with when his book came out in 2016. Gone is that cringe I used to feel walking past the Halekulani. Today when you catch the steel’s laid-back melodic weep wafting through even an airport terminal, it fits right in. The kind of outreach efforts begun by George Kanahele endure in the form of the Waikīkī Steel Guitar Festival, neighbor island performances, Facebook and IG groups frequented not just by old-guarders like Akaka and Ingano, but also next-generation hopefuls likely inspired by Mālie Lyman, who has only soared higher. 

The one thing that has changed dramatically on the local music scene only adds to Troutman’s surprising comeback story. Back in 2016, it was enough for him to mention in passing that “in the 1980s, Jawaiian music, a local genre steeped in reggae, began a long tenure as the anthemic music for Hawaiian youth, with hip-hop soon to follow.” That is, in the same way that the rock-and-roll of the sixties drew so many up-and-comers away from traditional Hawaiian music, the overwhelming popularity of Father Bob Marley has led a generation to look towards Jamaica rather than the rich musical traditions singing out from their own backyards.

This would have sounded disappointing nine years ago. Back then, Jawaiian—or, Hawaiian Reggae, as it came to be known—it was party music. Escape. Adding rap to it seemed a kind of trend-chasing gimmick. Like any music you don’t really give your full attention to, it all “sounded the same” to me, easy to look down upon unless I bothered to take a close look at what it had actually been up to on its own terms all these years.

But then one day in 2019, I began to change my own tune on Hawaiian Reggae. See, an army of helmeted armed-to-the-teeth police officers working in the service of a California-based multinational corporation set on planting a twenty-story building in the middle of the Mauna Kea conservation district—these soldiers of the State ascended the Mauna so they could put dozens of seventy- and eighty-year-old kupuna in zipties and throw them in jail. On the one side, you had a local-Japanese governor and the usual cabal of fixers tearing Hawaiian families apart to smooth the way for yet another development for the benefit of outsiders, and on the other you had…

Mainly you had thousands of Kanaka Maoli educators, scholars, lawyers, kumu hula, and their students, all deeply fluent in the conversations of the OG Trask-inspired scholars Troutman highlights at the beginning of his book, many of whom were themselves up there protecting the mauna, including Jon Osorio and Noenoe Silva, who were both among those arrested. By 2019, of course, most of the Kia‘i were also fluent in ‘Ōlelo Hawai‘i, and just like Joseph Kekuku and the players of the rebel Overthrow-era Hawaiian National Band, so many of them had been raised in hula halau or Kamehameha Concert Glee or some still-jamming Waimānalo backyard, or even just New Hope—I mean, if you ever went up there to help hold space against the TMT’s bulldozers, you’d find no shortage of legendary musicians, all the way from Jack Johnson to Amy Hānaiali‘i or John Cruz to…Jamin Wong? 

Absolutely: Jamin “Chief Ragga” Wong, the charismatic frontman for Ho‘aikāne, the forty-plus-year legacy Hawaiian Reggae band that had helped birth the genre in the first place. And Chief wasn’t the only Ragga up there, as we’d all soon learn when the upside-down Hawaiian flags came out on all four stages a couple of months later at the KWXX Ho‘olaule‘a, the biggest festival in the world for Hawaiian Reggae, suddenly the medium for so many of the most memorable Mauna-movement-related decolonization mele. With its minor chords befitting the gravity of the movement, its urgent driving beat, its forty-year history of having ingrained itself into a Hawaiian us-guys consciousness, just as the more melodic traditional Hawaiian mele had done at Kalākaua’s coronation ceremony, now it was the music of Mixjah, of Ten Feet, of Ho‘aikāne, of Sudden Rush, rapping, yes, in ‘Ōlelo Hawai‘i that got thousands of fists pumping in the air in the streets of Hilo.

In a scene nobody could have imagined back when Troutman’s book was published at a time when Hawaiian Reggae was still largely ignored or looked down upon by the gatekeepers of Hawaiian music, Hawaiian Reggae finally had its first true moment at the very first Nā Hōkū Hanohano awards that followed the overwhelmingly successful Lāhui-affirming protection of Mauna Kea. The award for Best Hawaiian Reggae Album went to Ho‘aikāne, and the response among the Hawaiian Music Elite to the group’s typically through-the-roof high-energy performance that night says all we need to know about what has become a fusion of roots Hawai‘i music, a full understanding that Jamaican reggae has been altered into Hawaiian—certainly not traditional Hawaiian, but Hawaiian nonetheless—altered in a way that is not all that different from how Kalākaua himself set hula to music with hula ku‘i, or Joseph Kekuku replaced “Spanish” with Hawaiian steel. 

Watch it on Youtube: a whole banquet room packed with hundreds of the legends of traditional Hawaiian music, much more Hawai‘i-Theater than KWXX Ho‘olaule‘a, two-hundered-dollar designer aloha shirts, thousand-dollar mu‘u mu‘u—they’re rushing the stage, bend-ya-BACK, and-ya-KNEES! Stretch outcha hand like a racing jockey! Like the vast crowds in the streets of Hilo, at the festivals among the diaspora in Vegas, at the Shell, they all suddenly become one, united in the moment like it’s some kind of church revival meeting, or…coronation ceremony.

And that, you have to conclude, is what set Ho‘aikāne’s Back on the Porch apart from the unprecedented number of entries that year, from track after track after track of Mauna-inspired Hawaiian Reggae. Of all the fist-in-the-air, We’re-Still-Here decolonization mele put out in the genre in a year that saw the loudest and most profound assertion of Hawaiian identity since Kalākaua’s coronation ceremony, it was Ho’aikāne alone that drew an unmistakable line straight back to 1885.

That sound! Running all the way through Back on the Porch, ringing out like some kind of announcement, so unexpected here on this album, it moves the needle. Take a listen: the collection’s list of hard-hitting party-starting signature Hawaiian Reggae jams is kicked off not by one of Chief’s iconic raps, but with the “Mākaukau!” and the ipu tap of Aunty Ipo Tavares, wife of founding member Walter Boy, mother of current co-frontman Isaiah. From there, Chief’s dad Papa Wongie takes us, in ‘Ōlelo Hawai‘i, back to his roots with “Huelo,” an upbeat traditional backyard Hawaiian standard. And what is it that we hear layering in that tasty fill at the end of the first verse?

What is that sound coloring the the subsequent title track, surprisingly welcoming us into Chief’s more expected rap, a rap that turns out to be a kind of genealogy of the whole Ho‘aikāne journey? 

There it is again on the slack-key-introduced “Heavenly,” not as some kind of sample, but in that unmistakable subtle Feets-Rogers ring-out way that makes it as vital musically as it is symbolically. 

There it is again at the end, all the way through the final track: “Punalu‘u Nani,” a song written by none other than Eddie Kamae himself, with the help of, yes, Mary Kawena Pukui. We’re drawn not just back to the beginning of an inventive album designed to further close the gap between “Hawaiian” and Hawaiian Reggae, or even the beginning of Ho‘aikāne, when Russell Mauga and Walter Boy Taveras founded the group. No, that surprising-yet-oh-so-familiar weeping sound is there to connect us to the beginning of Hawaiian music itself.

Back in 2016, Troutman never would have believed it. Right here on the Nā Hōkū Hanohano Award-winning Hawaiian Reggae Album of the year, an album composed and performed by the group widely considered the gold standard of the genre—the very signature of this consensus top-level collection of music in a year loaded with astounding decolonizing See-You-On-The-Mauna affirmations of Hawaiianness—it’s is not a rapped interlude, a punchy keyboard backbeat, the usual mix-it rhythmic hits. It’s something far more traditionally fist-in-the-air than that, something far more subversive, far more revolutionary, far more Lāhui-defining.

It’s the sound of Joseph Kekuku’s steel guitar.

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Image by Linus Belanger.