We’re all familiar with Hawaiian music, right? Chinky-chanky ukulele rhythms, liquid pedal steel
guitar, falsetto singing, and a whole lotta shakin’ going on. Just add a
tropical backdrop, a couple of long-haired wahines with leis, and the
image is complete. Amazing, isn’t it, how readily we accept this picture,
particularly since it completely disregards the centuries of hula kuhiko (ancient) chants that more properly define the native music of the Hawaiian
Islands.
Of all the modern musical traditions in Hawaii, ki ho`alu, or slack key
guitar, is perhaps the most pervasive. Slack key guitar is exactly what it
sounds like, ki ho`alu, a “loosening of the keys” on the instrument’s
neck, coupled with open-chord tunings, embellished harmonics, and fingerpick
techniques. Leave it to the Hawaiians — a culture plundered by both the East
and West as well as various religious groups — to reduce guitar playing to
simple fundamentals, then re-invent it with flair.
Almost everything we consider “Hawaiian music,” then, is a recent invention,
and interestingly, its roots lie with the Spanish/Portugese and
Mexican/Californian immigrants who came to the Islands in the 1880s. Though the
guitar’s appearance in the islands is unrecorded, it’s likely the instrument
was brought by one of these groups, who also introduced the ukulele. Slack
key’s Hispanic roots are perhaps why the style’s flourishes are so reminiscent
of flamenco.
Nothing did more (or less) for Hawaiian music than the tourist boom in the
early decades of this century, when Matson steamliners brought droves of
visitors to frolic on the beaches of Waikiki. National live broadcasts of radio
programs like “Hawaii Calls” sent the palm-tree sway of Island life into the
homes of Americans on a weekly basis. The Islands’ PR machinery painted
portraits of a modern paradise with bronzed young men riding the surf and
glossy-haired beauties undulating in the balmy breezes, and the American public
loved it. For all its picturesque qualities, nothing was more evocative of the
Islands than its music and “Hawaiian music” became a trend.
If the perky pluck of ukulele strings and gentle steel fairly screamed
“Hawaii”, the languid style of slack key guitar playing said the same in a
quiet whisper. It became the style of choice at parties and luaus, often simply
because it lent itself to improvisation. Slack key also developed several
distinct forms, from folkie leanings to pronounced jazz stylings. Still, it
might have remained just a musical sub-genre indigenous to Hawaii were it not
for a guitarist named Gabby Pahinui.
Gabby “Pops” Pahinui was the first player to record slack key guitar in the
mid-Forties, followed by Leonard Kwan and Sonny Chillingworth in the Fifties
and Ray Kane and Atta Isaacs in the Sixties. (Both Kwan and Kane have played
the Cactus Cafe.) All across the islands, slack key emerged as the favored
style, but it was Pahinui who gave it personality. A resident of the Wainae
coast of Oahu, Gabby Pahinui worked for the City of Honolulu as a roadworker
but come the weekends, friends and family would gather for the pleasure of his
music. As Hawaii entered the union as a state in the late Fifties, the
langorous, lulling beauty of slack key emerged as the perfect accompaniment to
a new era.
But slack key guitar — and other traditional forms of music — nearly died
out in the Sixties in Hawaii because of yet another kind of Western invasion:
rock & roll. Young people on the Islands fell for its rhythms as did their
counterparts on the Mainland, and even tourists seemed more interested in
novelty tunes. Out went heritage and in came “go-cat-go.” Still, rock &
roll’s conscience acknowledges its own sense of tradition eventually, its
myriad cultural influences periodically rising to the surface. In the late
Sixties and early Seventies, a renewal of interest in Hawaii’s heritage took
place, and the once old-fashioned sound of slack key now became a treasured
artform.
Leading the Seventies “Hawaiian Renaissance” was Pahinui, who had caught the
attention of Ry Cooder; Cooder tapped Pahinui to record with him, even naming
the album Chicken Skin Music, a reference to music so haunting it causes
the listener to break out in goosebumps. Pahinui, Kwan, Chillingworth, and
Isaacs were joined by players like Peter Moon, Keola Beamer, Ledward Kaapana,
Reverend Dennis Kamakahi, and George Kuo, as well as Pahinui’s sons, Martin,
Bla, and Cyril. It may have been a bastard form of music played on imported
instruments with technique imitated, but there was no question that slack key
was now considered as Hawaiian as the Islands’ white sand beaches. When Gabby
Pahinui died in 1987, the time seemed right to archive the recordings.
In 1994, George Winston’s Dancing Cat Records began releasing a series called
“Hawaiian Slack Key Guitar Masters Series” that included releases by Ray Kane,
Cyril Pahinui, Ledward Kaapana, and Sonny Chillingworth, who died that year.
Releases continued in 1995 with CDs from Moses Kahumoku, Leonard Kwan, Ozzie
Kotani, and Keola Beamer, followed in 1996 by George Kuo and Reverend Dennis
Kamakahi. In addition, the label released an album of acoustic steel and slack
key duets from Barney Isaacs and Kuo, and a narrative history disc with a
number of the musicians talking about and playing slack key guitar.
The beauty and range of slack key is remarkable, as these gorgeously produced
discs attest in vocal and pure instrumental styles. Hawaiian music may still be
thought of as Don Ho schlock but this series of recordings reveals a tradition
far removed from that stereotype. Ha’ina `ia mai ana ka puana. And now
my story is told.
This article appears in August 23 • 1996 and August 23 • 1996 (Cover).