The Forgotten Story Of How Hawaiians Transformed American Music - Honolulu Civil Beat

Posted: 07 Jun 2020 03:01 AM PDT

Kale Kahalehili and Jean Duff needed to get home to Hawaii. Philadelphia was no place for an interracial couple in 1915. They were struggling. Their kids were struggling.

The young couple met at a theater in Honolulu in 1902. Kahelehili was a dashing young musician playing in an orchestra. Duff was a model from the mainland — 10 years his senior — touring the world as a magician's assistant.

They fell in love and he followed her home to Philadelphia.

Kahalehili got work as a hotel porter and picked up a few gigs with local bands. Making ends meet was harder than they expected, but the young lovers had a plan.

Hundreds of Hawaiian performers made a living in vaudeville in the 20th century.

Wikimedia

Hawaiian music was on its way to becoming the most popular music in America, and Hawaiian performers were in high demand on the vaudeville circuit. Once they got married, the couple thought they could earn fame and fortune on the stage.

The fates — and Philadelphia society — were not kind.

By 1915, the couple's life had become fodder for melodramatic newspaper articles soliciting donations to send the family to Hawaii — a place where their marriage might be more accepted.

They had run up against society's conventions, Duff lamented. And they were paying for it.

Their story — or as much of it as we can piece together from old newspaper articles and historical documents — is part of a long-erased chapter of American musical and pop culture history.

After the overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom, Hawaiian musicians journeyed to the United States in droves. Hundreds of ukulele and steel guitar players and hula dancers in search of adventure or just a chance to make a decent living.

Many never came home again.

Some, like Kahalehili, would die in poverty and obscurity, thousands of miles away from their island homes. Others would find fame and fortune.

They would star in Broadway shows, play grand concert halls in New York, and make their way through a busy circuit of theaters and juke joints across the American South.

Along the way, they would change American music forever.

Kahalehili and Duff's dream of striking it big as a vaudeville act wasn't entirely outlandish. After all, others had done it.

In the early 20th century, Hawaiian music — or a kind of anglicized version of Hawaiian music — was the most popular music in America.

The steel guitar was a big part of what made Hawaiian music so popular.

"It was a very new modern style," says John Troutman, curator of American music at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History. His book, "Kika Kila: How the Hawaiian Steel Guitar Changed the Sound of Modern Music," was published in 2016.

"People were remarking left and right all day long about how this is an entirely new concept for playing the guitar, how it sounded unlike any other guitar playing they'd ever heard in their lives."

No one knows for sure how the Hawaiian steel guitar was invented, but many credit a Native Hawaiian from Oahu named Joseph Kekuku.

There are a few legends about how Kekuku first created this new sound, but the story told in his family involves a metal comb that Kekuku carried in his pocket.

"He leaned over to pick up his guitar and it fell out of his pocket and hit the strings on the neck of his guitar and created different sounds that he hadn't heard before," says AlyssaBeth Archambault. Her great-grandfather was first cousins with Joseph Kekuku. They grew up together playing music in Laie.

Samuel K Nainoa was Joseph Kekuku's cousin, and grew up playing music with him in Laie.

Courtesy: AlyssaBeth Archambault and Family

Kekuku fabricated a steel bar and finger picks to pluck the strings and run a bar over the strings as well, developing a style of playing that could translate to other guitars and genres of music.

And Kekuku did most of this as a high school student at Kamehameha Schools in Honolulu.

"When he was demonstrating this all the other kids just freaked out and they began taking this idea to all of the islands," Troutman says. "And so by the early 1900s you see examples of this popping up in other islands within Hawaii, not just Oahu."

Hawaii was undergoing massive change in the early 1900s. It was just a few years after the overthrow of the Hawaiian kingdom, and times were tough for Hawaiians.

Most of the jobs available to Hawaiians at the time were low-paying menial labor. So Hawaiian music really served multiple purposes in the 1890s, Troutman says.

On the one hand, music gave many Hawaiians the ability to support their families. It also helped preserve Hawaiian language at a time when its use was being widely discouraged. And many musicians were also using their platform to promote sovereignty and cultural pride.

In 1904, Kekuku quit his job as a clerk in Honolulu, and set sail for the mainland. He set up shop in Seattle, playing with local bands and teaching other musicians how to play steel guitar.

Before long, Kekuku was touring up and down the West Coast playing with other Hawaiian bands. Hawaiian music was catching fire. And Hawaiian musicians were heading to the U.S. in greater and greater numbers.

AlyssaBeth Archambault's great-grandparents, Samuel and Eugenia Nainoa, were recruited by a vaudeville promoter to go to the mainland in 1912.

The family spent more than a decade on the road, touring all across the U.S. Archambault's grandmother was born on the road, and grew up performing with her parents.

A few years ago, Archambault had an art residency in Pennsylvania, and she found out that her great-grandparents had once performed at a theater about a mile from where she was staying.

"That just sort of sent me down a path of doing research of like, wow, if they played a mile from here, where else have they played?"

The answer was hundreds of cities. And they hit most of those cities more than once over the years.

Samuel K Nainoa performed in hundreds of towns across the United States in the early 1900s.

Courtesy: AlyssaBeth Archambault and Family

All these visits to small towns up and down the United States that the Nainoa family made — that hundreds of Native Hawaiians made — had a profound and often overlooked impact on American music.

By 1915, Hawaiian guitar music was outselling every other genre of recorded music in the United States, Troutman says.

Traveling musicians were spreading the sounds of the Hawaiian steel guitar all across America and early blues musicians were listening.

"There were droves of Hawaiian musicians who were performing throughout the deep South," Troutman says. "There was a much greater sense of interaction that was taking place that was leading to the proliferation of all of these different sounds."

If you listen to early blues musicians like Son House, Robert Johnson or Muddy Waters, you're hearing the sound of the steel guitar, Troutman says.

"In fact people like Son House referred to the slide style of playing as the Hawaiian way of playing," Troutman adds.

It wasn't just blues. The steel guitar had a profound impact on country music too. But when you read about the history of both genres — roots music that led to rock and roll and everything that came after — you almost never read about Native Hawaiians.

"As a longstanding music historian, it's something that I'd never heard of before, I'd never recognized and so then I began to wonder, well why don't we know this?" Troutman says. "Why don't we understand this central and powerful role that Hawaiians have played in the development of all kinds of musical genres?"

For decades, this history had completely been ignored by music historians.

One of the reasons this history has been overlooked, Troutman says, is because of how musical genres were racialized by the music industry.

Record companies in the 1920s would recruit musicians based on their race, basically creating race-based musical genres. Country music, for example, was categorized for white musicians and rhythm and blues for black musicians.

"And so we've been fighting against these race-based genres of music that cut out really critically important populations of people who were deeply implicated in the origins of that music, including Native Americans, including people from Hawaii, including Latinx people who were just written out of that history — written out of the stories."

The result is that few people know Native Hawaiians inspired the development of the Delta blues slide guitar. Or that Native Hawaiians inspired the use of the steel guitar in country music.

"All that history was just gone, it was just absent," says Troutman.

The individual stories of all those Hawaiian musicians who toured across America have mostly been forgotten too.

Kale Kahalehili and Jean Duff had three children and raised them in Philadelphia.

Newspapers.com

We came across Kale Kahalehili searching through recently digitized newspaper archives.

From what we've been able to piece together through newspapers and genealogy sites, Kahalehili and Duff got married in the early 1900s, hoping to strike it big on the vaudeville scene.

Their dream was not without precedent. Around the same time, a Native Hawaiian man named July Paka and his white wife, who went by the name "Toots," made an explosive debut on the American music scene.

Joseph Kekuku toured with their band, and "Toots Paka and Her Hawaiians" are credited with helping to make Hawaiian music so wildly popular in the 20th century.

Things didn't go as well for Kahalehili and Duff.

Kahalehili came down with tuberculosis. Then Duff caught it too. They struggled with racist neighbors — and police.

Kahalehili sued the Philadelphia police department in 1906 for false arrest and battery — and won.

By 1915, when Kahalehili was arrested for getting into a fight with a white neighbor who hit his child, life was grim. Their three young children earned a little cash for the family as models, but struggled at school because of the color of their skin.

Newspapers in Philadelphia wrote about Kahalehili and Duff after Kahalehili was arrested in 1915 for defending his children from a neighbor who hit them.

Newspapers.com

Duff had been a famous child model in Philadelphia, so the story of what became of her as an adult garnered national interest for a little while.

Articles about their troubles pop up in newspapers in 1912 and again in 1915, along with mentions of a few fundraisers trying to help them get back to the islands.

"I want to go back to Honolulu," Duff told a newspaper in 1915, adding, "I'm a Philadelphia girl, but I cannot live with my own people if they insult the husband that I love."

They never made it back Hawaii.

Kahalehili died in Philadelphia in 1923. Duff died there in 1941.

A lot of musicians who left Hawaii in the 1900s planned to return, but never did.

But they raised their children and grandchildren with a strong connection to the islands.

For a while in the 1930s, Kahalehili and Duff's son Paulo had a weekly radio spot performing with his own Hawaiian band.

AlyssaBeth Archambault's great-grandparents left five children behind on Oahu, when they embarked on what they thought would be a short tour of the continent in 1912.

Eventually, they settled in Los Angeles and Sam Nainoa opened a music studio teaching the steel guitar.

More than 60 years later, his great-granddaughter flew to Hawaii with one of his guitars to meet her family in the islands.

AlyssaBeth Archambault poses with a statue of Joseph Kekuku. Her great-grandfather was Kekuku's cousin and grew up playing music with him in Laie.

Courtesy: AlyssaBeth Archambault and Family

"They were like, 'Oh, you're Auntie Ula's granddaughter. You come on over, you have a place to stay,'" Archambault says.

Relatives she'd never met picked her up at the airport, and took her home.

"They told me everything about the island family. And I told them everything about the mainland family," she said. "And I learned that they used to call us the Hollywood family. You know, the family that left never came back."

Joseph Kekuku, the man whose way of playing the guitar transformed so much of American music, also never made it home.

He toured for a number of years, before settling in Chicago for a while and teaching steel guitar there. He died in 1932, and is buried in New Jersey.

His legacy — the legacy of all those Hawaiians who spent years touring up and down the United States — can still be heard on the radio today.

In Their Own Words: Students Share Lessons Learned From Organizing And Protesting - LAist

Posted: 05 Jun 2020 06:55 PM PDT

Scenes from Los Angeles Sunday, May 31, 2020, during protests over the death of George Floyd. (Chava Sanchez/LAist)

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"This isn't new to us," 18-year-old Asia Bryant told me earlier this week.

Stories and data show that schools are not safe havens from the kind of racial injustices being highlighted by recent protests.

Students have been out there on the front lines, but their voices have not often been heard in the media coverage of this week's demonstrations.

We wanted to listen to young people and to hear - in their own words - about their experiences.

So I reached out to students involved in fighting for justice in the classroom, about the lessons they're learning from what's happening outside of the school setting.

Their responses are transcribed excerpts from interviews I conducted this week. They have been edited for length and clarity. We're not using the minors' last names to protect their privacy.

Brooklyn, 16, has been involved with organizing since her freshman year of high school. (Courtesy of Brooklyn)

Brooklyn, 16, is a youth leader with Community Coalition's South Central Youth Empowered thru Action. She first got involved after attending a meeting as a freshman. Next year, she will be a senior at Crenshaw High School. Here's what she told me:

My school environment in ninth grade was very negative. It didn't really feel like a school. It just did not feel like a second home. It felt like a prison.

I get along with everybody - or at least try to include everybody in everything, including adults, children, everybody my age, anybody. I tried to have a relationship with cops, but they don't talk. They're very intimidating and it makes me very unsafe having them inside the school because you never know what they're doing. They're just there, walking up and down the halls.

We started talking about the budget for schools and the LA budget and where the money is going, and as youth, how we could get our voices out there. We did a lot of talking and talking to people in charge and everything, but it seemed like a lot of other problems were overpowering that problem.

You can listen to Brooklyn share her experiences by clicking play below:

I went to a board meeting when we went to go talk about the budget and giving it to lower income schools rather than higher income schools. We did do a little small march around before going in, but nothing like what was happening Saturday.

I chose to go to the rally in Beverly Hills because I wanted to protest with my people. It was a very peaceful protest. They had people giving speeches, getting people to sign petitions.

It was amazing. It was young toddlers, older children, older people. Everybody was there, from every age group.

Being a black female in America right now and being able to go to rally on Saturday meant a lot to me.

Things started to change when we got to a certain point in our march, Fairfax and some other street. That's when the cops showed up.

I was fine at first, but once I saw them get out their cars with their gear on, with their bullet guns and other weapons, I was very scared, because none of us had a weapon. Not a single one of us. We all had a sign. That's it.

After a while of us standing there, my organizer decided it was time for me to go. It wasn't safe anymore.

We're talking about a peaceful youth protest. It's gonna be a little difficult. We're trying to get all the parents on board because, you know, these are youth. Our group was talking about trying to get people to sign these petitions and to rally with us about the budget for LA, trying to get more money to the schools.

It just makes me feel so sad that our generation - my generation, the younger generation - have to step in and use our voices to talk about the problem.

I can't even say I want us to sit down and have the conversation because it feels too late to have a conversation. There's no time to talk anymore. It's time for actions. It's time for them to make changes.

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Asia Bryant, 18, joined the youth-led organization Students Deserve at the beginning of her senior year. This year, she is graduating from Hamilton High School. Here's what she said to me:

The reason why I became involved in Students Deserve was through a teacher. I had no prior knowledge of what it meant to become an advocate for students, let alone an advocate for myself.

The most recent issue that we were addressing at the [Students Deserve] General Assembly that I went to, was the banning of pepper spray [in schools].

We came up with strategies. We said, "What was the problem? Why is it that the people who were pepper sprayed were predominantly black students? What was something that could have been done to correct that? What should we do? What are our next steps to build this campaign, so that it brings attention to our superintendent?"

It all starts within our school system.

Another topic that was discussed was the school-to-prison pipeline, where some schools would lead some African American students, minorities, straight into the prison system and the justice system unfairly. All because school systems failed them and failed to provide them with the necessary resources.

I am so happy and so proud that this conversation is coming about, where they're starting to see a pattern of how this came to be, and what students deserve.

This isn't new to us. Everything that's happening — everything that's being talked about — has already been ongoing. It's just been swept under the rug and just avoided because people didn't want to have this type of conversation, because it made them feel uncomfortable. Well, then it's like, "how do you think we feel?"

I have been to protests, but not necessarily a protest like this one — where we were protesting the end of gun violence, the protest for the end of random searches.

At first I was a little bit unsure, because of corona, and I know police presence is going to be there and I don't know how they're going to react.

So it was last minute. I woke up right at 12. And I said, "Hey, Mom, is it okay if I can go to this protest?"

And she said no.

She probably was nervous because she'd been watching the news, hearing about what's going on, and she didn't know how it was going to play out. If I was there and she couldn't get to me.

I told her a bunch of my friends are already there. I'm not going just on my own.

It was beautiful. It was peaceful up to the point where police showed up. And that's when things took a shift in the atmosphere.

There was a moment where I said, "hey, it's time for me to go."

I went home.

[My mom] asked me, "how was the protest? You're back really early." I said, "Mom, it was intense."

I learned you don't stop fighting. You just can't stop fighting because I feel like the moment that you choose to stop fighting is the moment where you've chosen the side of the oppressor. So I feel like I can take that message back and just spread it across to everyone.

We are taking risk. We are just out there, making sure that our voices are heard because we've been silenced for so long. And so that's why I'm proud to be involved in this type of work, because it's teaching me so much as an advocate, as an organizer, because I know how to construct these conversations, how to organize solutions.

Even though I'm graduating, I hope I see an increase in resources and increase in mental health. Because as of right now, black and brown students are suffering in school systems, we're not obtaining the necessary resources that we need... we're not the highest and top priority. We're being criminalized within our own schools, within our own school system.

Amee, 17, has organized with the grassroots organization Students Deserve for three years. (Courtesy of Amee)

Amee, 17, attends Dorsey High School and has been organizing with Students Deserve for the past four years. Here's what Amee said to me:

Students Deserve is a grassroots coalition of parents, students and teachers that fight for justice, and what that means for us is just making schools a safer place for black, brown and Muslim students when it comes to challenging, oppressive systems like the school to prison pipeline and overpolicing in our schools.

First, I was taking part in our 'End Random Searches' initiative, which was a campaign that lasted three years to try and get rid of the random wanding and backpack searches.

This policy would disproportionately affect black and brown and Muslim students in low income communities.

When I first joined Students Deserve I was very shy and not super outspoken.

I feel like there's an image that all politicians put out there that "we work for you" that "we are public servants for you," and that "we will listen to the people's ideas" and "I will do my best to represent you, represent our community in this official board," but I would say that it takes pressure from students to have a room and space at the table for them to actually bring it. And I would say that that's really exemplified by the fact that [the random search policy] took three years to end.

In school, I feel like all we learn is about the American Revolution in history. All we learned is the American Revolution, slavery and a short story about the civil rights movement. And that's really it. We don't learn a lot about the labor movement, about the gay rights movement, or the women's suffrage movement or the little tiny movements and the rebellions that happen in between all that.

What I've learned through teachers who are willing to teach the real history of America and the people who have fought for our rights here, and the peer education that I get from Students Deserve: it's the rebellions that make change. It's people standing up and being loud and deciding to not be silent, and also to not be still, that is what makes change.

And I feel like I really learned that firsthand, over the three years of organizing about the end random searches campaign, before the student strike happened in January of 2019. And that really showed me that protesting and that disrupting is really what makes change.

I really sympathize with these protesters who are willing to risk their lives and just spread a message. And the message is to defund the police, which aligns with our partner organization, Black Lives Matter LA. Their demands are to defund the police and to prosecute killer cops and I really feel and love everybody that is putting their lives on the line for black lives.

And this also connects to what Students Deserve is asking for in schools: more psychiatric social workers and peer mediation or a peer counseling class and other resources that are centered around mental health and student well-being other than policing.

What Students Deserve uses is the divest-invest model that we have modeled after BLM, where we divest from criminalization and police, and invest in health, in psychiatric social workers, and counselors, and more teachers and more nurses and all the stuff that actually makes a community and actually makes students feel safe, instead of cops. We believe in care, not cops. And I feel like officials are hearing this everywhere.

It matters that this is happening to youth because students are in school for very much of their young adult life. For eight hours of the day, five days a week. And for police to be around us - in our schools, in our classrooms waiting on us in the morning when we come into school, for such a violent symbol to be in young developing people's faces every day - it is not right. It feels like youth are attending prep schools for prison.

What kind of message are we sending our young people and the educators who work at schools?

Valentin, 17, attends Esteban Torres High School and organizes with InnerCity Struggle. Here's what Valentin told me:

I was organizing before, but it was usually through artistic platforms such as poetry, theatre, and then I was told by a student that if I was really passionate about social activism, I should probably link up with InnerCity Struggle.

And I did that, and now here we are.

There's a lot of work we do. Some examples that come to mind are our civic engagement. We have done a lot of work getting people to pre-register to vote. That's something we've done a lot of. We also gathered as many petitions as possible to expand the voter age range to 16. We work hard spreading the word of the census, the Schools and Communities First Act.

We've educated our communities on housing rights, too. I come from a family that - we've gone through poverty, we've had to move a lot. We've had to find and readjust to a lot of new spaces. And that's definitely something I'm very passionate about. And I just feel like I'm really giving back to my community because that's something that hits so close to where I'm from and where I come from.

The reason why I think it's important to take youth voices into account is every major decision that's being made today is gonna affect tomorrow

The decisions that are being made now will affect the people today. But the ones who have to pick up the consequences and deal with them most directly are the youth we're the ones who have to recuperate from any mistakes that are made today

It's so hard going through something like this during a time like this, because there's so many youth who are so passionate, who have such strong beliefs, and such eloquent and well-spoken words that they'd like to share, but they simply don't have the platform to do so. Especially during the pandemic. There are a lot of parents who are scared of that and won't let their children participate.

I personally haven't been able to participate in any of the in-person protests that have been going on, which is unfortunate because I feel the need to and I definitely, it's something that I want to, but I haven't participated in respects to my family's wishes. They're very afraid of what's going on, and I completely understand why they're scared, whether it be COVID-19, or the extreme use of police force. And if I were to go out to protest, I'd leave my mother afraid and awake all night. And that's something that I don't want to do.

What I have been doing is taking time to respond and have conversations with folks.

I identify as Hispanic. Amongst my community, I've seen a lot of people complaining of the label, Black Lives Matter and try to bring up "well, Hispanic lives matter too."

So I've responded to one of these posts. I let them know what I was advocating for when I use the term Black Lives Matter.

I made sure to call this individual and see how they were doing and I wanted to make sure that nothing I said offended them or hurt them, and they seemed to understand. They expressed to me that they were just frustrated and they want to change. And I said, "I understand that. But if you want change, we all need to fight together with this." The person then took down the post that they were making, and now I see that they're standing in solidarity with the movement, which is something I'm very proud of.

Situations like this give me hope. Because they show me that mentalities can change

It could just take one person to show the slightest bit of empathy or sympathy. It could just take one conversation, or one phone call, or one gesture. And I feel like that's gone unnoticed during these fights. Sometimes we're so busy trying to look at this bigger picture that we forget to ask our neighbor how they're doing. We forget to ask our friends. We're so busy fighting this huge fight that we forget that issue sometimes, even in our own homes. And it's something that it's caused me to reflect.

I personally will be trying to push forward, whether or not Black Lives Matter is trending on Twitter. We need to remember what we're fighting for, whether or not it's getting news coverage, whether or not it's a popular movement, whether or not the news is deciding to broadcast it.

These fights don't go away.

***

This story was produced with additional reporting by Josie Huang.

We want to listen to more young people. You can get in touch with us by emailing reporter Carla Javier, or filling out the form below.

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