Sweet Leilani Syndrome: The Statehood Movement, Tourism, and Music in 1930s Hawai‘i

A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE DIVISION OF THE UNIVERSITY OF HAWAI‘I AT MĀNOA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

IN

AMERICAN STUDIES

May 2021

By

Jesse J. Otto

Dissertation Committee:

William R. Chapman, Chairperson Elizabeth Colwill Ralph Thomas Kam Brandy Nālani McDougall John P. Rosa

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Acknowledgments

I am extremely grateful to my amazing committee for guiding me through writing this difficult history while living through a difficult period of history. William R. Chapman, Elizabeth

Colwill, Ralph Thomas Kam, Brandy Nālani McDougall, and John P. Rosa each helped prepare me for this work through mentoring me during my time in the PhD program and each made significant contributions to this dissertation. I could not imagine having a kinder, more generous, or more thoughtful committee than this one.

I want to thank Iāsona Kaper for transcribing and translating sources for this project.

I want to thank the Department of American Studies for being a wonderful place for me to grow as a human being over the past seven and a half years. I particularly want to thank

Karen Kosasa, Director of the Museum Studies Program, for introducing me to the department through her amazing program. I also want to thank the Graduate Program Coordinator, Rumi

Yoshida, for her kindness, dedication, and guidance over the years. Finally, I want to thank

Jeffrey Tripp, who supervised me in two different GA positions over two and a half years, for being an amazing and inspiring mentor.

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Abstract

In 1930s Hawai‘i, the statehood movement allied with the tourism industry to use the music industry to market their causes on a global scale using a fantasy that presented the islands as a feminized and exoticized, yet white-dominated space. White elites had used this fantasy, built on old racist ideas from the US continent, for decades before the 1930s while actively working in many ways to make Hawai‘i into a white space in both reality and the colonial imaginary. A key component of this process was the work of the tourism industry in collaboration with the

US continental music industry to replace an island industry and culture innovated largely by

Kānaka Maoli with haole musicians and popular styles of music from the US continent. Harry

Owens, a haole from the US continent, became the most prominent musician in the process initially as musical director on the internationally popular government funded radio show

Hawaii Calls and shortly after through his music being featured in hit motion pictures. Owens’ autobiography, music, TV show, and the movies with which he was associated were built on tourism’s distorted image of the islands. The formulaic nature of these commodities fueled the spread of tourism and pro-statehood messaging as it granted spokespeople like a sense of authenticity and authority that Americans found credible because it conformed to and confirmed their false notions of Hawai‘i and Hawaiian culture and music. Statehood and tourism advocates’ successful use of the music industry brought about profound changes for individual musicians in the islands including new opportunities along with challenges to navigate. The entertainment industry’s use of this fantasy to market Hawai‘i proved so profitable that this fantasy remains the foundation of entertainment industry commodities depicting the islands into the twenty-first century. iii

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements…………………………………………………………………………………………….……..i

Abstract………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….…ii

Introduction……………………………………………………………………………………………………….……..1 Shaping the Global Perception of Hawai‘i……………………………………………………...1 Tourism, the Music Industry, and their Impacts…………………………………….……..11 Partnership of Tourism and the Music Industry ………………………..…………….…..17 Literature Review on Music and Tourism as Fantasy………………………………….…20 Methods, Methodologies, and Theoretical Frameworks.……………………………..23 Chapter Synopses…………………………………………………………………………………………25

Chapter 1: Mythmaking and the History of Hawai‘i………………………………………………....30 American Racism and Hawai‘i……………………………………………………………………....32 The Emergence of Tourism……………………………………………………………………………42 Transportation, the Built Environment, and Tourism…………………………………….48 Marketing………………………………………………………………………………………………….....61 Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………………………………....65

Chapter 2: The Music Industry and Hawaiian Music………………………………………………….67 Hawaiian Music……………………………………………………………………………………………..69 The Music Industry………………………………………………………………………………………..75 Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………………………………...103

Chapter 3: The Biography and “Autobiography” of Harry Owens…………………………….105 Early Life and Arrival in the Islands……………………………………………………………….114 The Launching of Calls……………………………………………………………………...128 International Superstar…………………………………………………………………………………135 World War II, Television Series, and Tour Guide……………………………………………146 Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………………………………….154

Chapter 4: Fantasy and Persona……………………………………………………………………………….156 Harry Owens: The Human Being and the Persona…………………………………………156 “Owens sells romance, Hawaiian style, with superlative effectiveness”………..172 Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………………………………….175

Chapter 5: The Aftermath……………………………………………………………………………………..…177 Resistance and Preservation of Culture………………………………………………………..178 Emerging Opportunities for Cultural Preservation and Employment for Kānaka Maoli…………………………………………………………………………………………………………….188 Asians and Asian Americans Navigate Racism……………………………………………….201 Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………………………………….205 iv

Conclusion………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..206 Films and Television………………………………………………………………………………………209 Projecting and Obscuring………………………………………………………………………………213

Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………………………………………....215 1

Introduction

By the 1920s and 1930s, tourism had constructed enduring images of Hawaiians as happy-go-lucky beach boys, friendly bus drivers, smiling lei sellers, funny entertainers, or beautiful women performing an exotic and somewhat erotic form of dance-all were part of the heavily marketed image of Hawai‘i. Within these trivialized versions of Hawaiian culture, limited and defined roles existed for Hawaiians as service providers and entertainers. The racial ideology that still excluded Hawaiians from middle- and upper-echelon occupations carved a niche for them in tourism that made profitable use of their culture as well as their labor. —Elizabeth Buck1

Few other parts of the world, and none in the tropics, were as comprehensively marketed as Hawai‘i. None was so strongly marketed through music. —John Connell and Chris Gibson2

Americans think of Hawaii in terms of scenery, pineapple plantations and Pearl Harbor, but mostly in terms of its familiar music…A climax of some kind came in 1937 when was given a song, already popular in Hawaii, to sing in his movie Wedding. The song, , written by Harry Owens, soon set the steel guitars wailing and performers shaking more than ever, and juke boxes trembled with the tune. —LIFE Magazine3

Shaping the Global Perception of Hawai‘i

Since the early twentieth-century rise, the industry has marketed a particular image of

Hawai‘i which has come to define the global perception of the islands. This distortion of life in

Hawai‘i often depicts the islands as a feminine space open to white domination and presents

Kānaka Maoli4 as passive, content people whose primary aspiration is to assist whites. All races

1 Elizabeth Buck Paradise Remade: The Politics of Culture and History in Hawai'i (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1994), 173-174. 2 John Connell and Chris Gibson, “No Passport Necessary: Music, Record Covers, and Vicarious Tourism in Post-War Hawai‘i,” The Journal of Pacific History 43, no. 1 (June 2008): 72. 3 “Mainland Knows About Islands’ Scenery and Pineapples, but Mostly Their Music,” LIFE, Feb 22, 1954: 24- 25. 4 and Samuel H. Elbert define “Kanaka Maoli” as “Hawaiian person.” They explain that kanaka translates as person and kānaka is the plural form of the word. In this dissertation, I use these terms as nouns to identify people who are descended from the indigenous people of the Hawaiian Islands. I have used the term Native Hawaiian as an adjective for this same group of people. This use has no relation to 2 other than whites and Kānaka Maoli are generally erased from this white supremacist and misogynist fantasy world. Native Hawaiian scholar and activist Haunani-Kay Trask explains the purposes and impacts of this trope: “To most Americans, then, Hawai‘i is theirs: to use, to take…Above all, Hawai‘i is ‘she,’ the Western image of the Native ‘female’ in her magical allure…The point, of course, is that everything in Hawai‘i can be yours, that is, you the tourist, the non-Native, the visitor.”5 Creating Hawai‘i Tourism, published in 2004, is a case in point.

Published by Robert C. Allen, originally from and the retired president of a tourism company, the book celebrates the history of the tourism industry in Hawai‘i and is packed with photos of white people depicted as heroes for their role in building the industry. The cover features a 1960 photograph, created and disseminated by the Hawai‘i Visitors Bureau to promote tourism, of a young woman named Rose Marie Alvaro.6 A particularly striking piece in this book demonstrates the potency of tourism’s messaging: Allen’s description of the government sponsored radio show , that aired internationally from 1935 to 1975, was plagiarized from Native Hawaiian scholar George S. Kanahele’s Hawaiian Music and

Musicians. Allen cites no sources in his book and his plagiarism of a Native Hawaiian scholar indicates that he believes, as Trask writes, that Hawai'i is there for the taking by the non-Native visitor.7

concepts of blood quantum. For example, this dissertation describes musicians who claim one eighth Hawaiian ancestry as Native Hawaiian artists along with musicians who claim full Hawaiian ancestry. 5 Haunani-Kay Trask, From a Native Daughter: Colonialism and Sovereignty in Hawai'i (, HI: University of Hawaii Press, 2005), 136-137 and 144. Trask names this essay “‘Lovely Hula Hands’: Corporate Tourism and the Prostitution of Hawaiian Culture.” “Lovely Hula Hands” was a popular song composed in 1939 by R. Alex Anderson. George S. Kanahele notes that Harry Owens and his Royal Hawaiian Orchestra were the first ensemble to perform the song.- George S. Kanahele, ed., (revised and updated by John Berger), Hawaiian Music and Musicians: An Encyclopedic History (Honolulu, HI: Mutual Publishing, 2012), 512. 6 Hawaii...Never Easier to Sell. Hawaii Visitors Bureau, 1961. VHS. 7 Robert C. Allen, Creating Hawai'i Tourism: A Memoir (Honolulu, HI: Bess Press, 2004), 204-206. 3

I argue that statehood and tourism advocates used the music industry in the 1930s to shape the global perception of Hawai‘i around this distortion. This 1930s marketing through the music industry sparked a craze in the entertainment industry that seared this vision into the world’s imagination. This effort was part of a long tradition that began in the nineteenth century in which white elites used many methods to popularize this fantasy of Hawai‘i as part of an effort to recreate Hawai‘i as a white space in both reality and the colonial imaginary. Music had long been part of the promotion of tourism in Hawai‘i, but dramatic political and economic changes intensified that relationship in the 1920s and 1930s. Advances in transportation first helped tourism emerge as a significant industry in Hawai‘i in the late 1920s, but sugar remained the dominant industry in the islands’ economy for decades to come.8 In 1934, the US federal government passed the Jones-Costigan Act which declared that due to their territorial status, island sugar producers were subject to tariffs and quota restrictions that put them at great disadvantages to their continental competitors. The US Congress further threatened the profits of island elites in 1935 with the passage of the Wagner Act that allowed dockworkers to organize.9 These events prompted island businessmen and politicians to launch a major push for statehood. This new statehood movement allied with the emerging tourism industry to create the government funded radio show Hawaii Calls in 1935.10

8 James Mak, “Creating ‘Paradise of the Pacific’: How Tourism Began in Hawaii,” Working Paper No. 2015-1 for University of Hawai‘i Economic Research Organization dated February 17, 2015, accessed November 21, 2019.http://www.uhero.hawaii.edu/assets/Paradise_Mak.pdf, 59. 9 Dean Itsuji Saranillio, Unsustainable Empire : Alternative Histories of Hawai'i Statehood, (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), 68; Noel J. Kent, Hawaii: Islands under the Influence (Honolullu, HI: University of Hawai'I Press, 1983), 90. 10 Kanahele, 267-269 and 623-625; Mak, 59; Saranillio, 66. 4

Hawaii Calls quickly became an enormous worldwide hit launching its first musical director, Harry Owens (1902-1986), to international superstardom while establishing Hawai‘i as a profitable place to depict in entertainment industry commodities. This long-standing settler colonial fantasy has determined how the entertainment industry depicts Hawai‘i to the present day. The successful dissemination of this fantasy also played a substantial role in further

Americanizing and “possessing” Hawaiʻi, while contributing to the very processes of racialization in which the fantasies were rooted. Although this process grew tourism and further Americanized Hawai‘i, local residents including some Kānaka Maoli found ways to use the immense changes brought about by this process to better their lives and preserve and grow their cultures while many others actively resisted the corrosive effects of this process.

George S. Kanahele writes, “Few individuals gave Hawaiian music more exposure in the

20th century than Harry Owens.”11 Owens was born in O’Neil, , in 1902, grew up in

Montana, and spent most of his early music industry career in California, where he achieved national fame as a composer.12 Matson Navigation Lines, a major shipping company with huge investments in the tourism industry, recruited Owens in 1934 to come to Hawai‘i to serve as bandleader at the company’s tourist venues, most notably at the , which was their premier luxury resort. As the face and sound of tourism at the industry’s most prestigious venues, he was the logical choice to serve as musical director of a radio show dedicated to the promotion of the industry. Owens’ fame rose quickly peaking in 1937 when he became the first to win an Academy Award as both composer and lyricist for his

11 Kanahele, 624. 12 “Missoula Boy Now is Famed For His Music,” The Missoulian (Missoula, MT), September 28, 1924, page 13. 5 song “Sweet Leilani,” which also became the best-selling song in the world up to that point.13

Although 1937 was the zenith of his fame, he remained an international superstar for decades branding himself as “Mister Hawaii” as part of a manufactured fantasy of authenticity and authority, in spite of the fact that he had only lived in the islands for less than four years.

Throughout his decades in the international limelight, Owens worked through the persona that had brought his fame and thus remained one of the most prominent advocates of tourism to

Hawai‘i and statehood for the islands.

The entertainment industry operates through archetypal disposable tools. Owens was only one of a series of well-known white male bandleaders from the US continent brought to

Hawai‘i by the tourism industry to perform for wealthy white elite tourists and residents.14 He not only had the signature traits such as physical appearance and charm that his employers and audiences expected, but he quite successfully assumed the persona of a combined sage, medium, and insider cultural tour guide required to succeed. While the distorted representation of Hawai‘i that was popularized through Owens continues to pervade entertainment industry commodities, he did not create this persona and he has been largely forgotten.

The tourism industry created the sector of the music industry in Hawai‘i in which Owens participated and this portion of Hawai‘i’s music industry was well-suited to disseminate

13 Kanahele, 624; Gary Giddins, Bing Crosby: A Pocketful of Dreams-The Early Years, 1903-1940 (Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Company, 2002), 480 and 483. Kanahele notes that until Owens won, every Academy Award had gone to songwriting teams that divided the duties of writing music and lyrics. announced Owens as winner and handed him the award. In 1943, Berlin’s “White Christmas” made him the second person to win as both composer and lyricist. Also, “Sweet Leilani” spent a record twenty-eight consecutive weeks on the radio show Hit Parade and sold more than twenty-six million copies of sheet music. 14 , “Remember Waikiki?,” Paradise of the Pacific, August 1942: 16. 6 tourism’s vision of Hawai‘i beyond the islands. The various sectors of the music business in

Hawai‘i in the 1930s that were largely disconnected from one another because they catered to specific ethnic and/or socioeconomic groups. Owens labored in the elite sector which operated primarily out of tourist industry venues in downtown Honolulu and Waikīkī and catered to wealthy tourists and local elites. Although some island residents participated in this sector of the industry as both performers and spectators, it was mostly non-local and intricately linked to the global music industry on many levels: bandleaders were imported from outside of Hawai‘i to direct orchestras to replicate globally popular styles of music; these orchestras consisted in part or in total of musicians from outside of the islands; and the audiences consisted of a significant portion of tourists along with some military personnel from outside of the islands.15

These global links affected distribution of music performed in the sector as wealthy tourists and military personnel popularized compositions by composers in this sector of the industry well beyond the islands in a variety of ways.16

Owens’ tenure as a Matson employee exemplifies the non-local nature of this facet of the industry. Owens named this orchestra Harry Owens and His Royal Hawaiians not due to the

Royal Hawaiian Hotel at which they often performed, but to link his brand closer to the internationally popular Guy Lombardo and His Royal Canadians, the orchestra on which Owens

15 I refer to this portion of the music industry throughout this dissertation as the colonial capitalist music industry because it consisted of the tourism industry replacing much Hawaiian music by Hawaiians with styles that were popular in the continental American music industry along with replacing many Hawaiian musicians with white musicians from the continent. 16 Ibid.; Kanahele, 333; Johnny Noble, “Unpublished Noble Manuscript Found in Gift to HMF,” Ha‘ilono Mele,Volume V, Number 9, September, 1979: 5; "Hawaiian Paradise," Honolulu Star-Bulletin, March 30, 1935, page 6; Webley Edwards, “Hawaii Calls,” Paradise of the Pacific, December 1949: 133. 7 modeled his band’s sound.17 Wealthy tourists brought his song “Hawaiian Paradise” to the attention of Guy Lombardo in 1935 earning Owens a lucrative contract permitting Lombardo’s orchestra to perform this song.18 “Sweet Leilani” became a mega hit because wealthy tourist and entertainment industry superstar Bing Crosby heard Owens perform it at the Royal

Hawaiian Hotel and wanted to perform the song himself in his upcoming film Waikiki

Wedding.19 Owens spent about half of the period he was under contract-May 1934 to April

1941-touring the North American continent with his orchestra.20 The national and international circulation of the island's elite music influenced global perceptions of Hawai‘i even before the commencement of the global broadcasts of Hawaii Calls.

With Hawaii Calls, the tourism industry’s dissemination of their misrepresentation of

Hawai‘i was amplified to an unprecedented level. The radio show became one of the most popular radio programs in the world and aired for forty years.21 Owens only worked with the show during its first two years on the air and on an every other show basis at his most active, but during those two years he served as musical director for more episodes than any other bandleader. The show ran without advertisements because its funding came from the Hawaii

Tourism Bureau and the territorial legislature. The lack of ads contributed to the show’s quick rise to widespread popularity.22 Upon the show’s one-year anniversary, CBS vice-president

17 Harry Owens, Sweet Leilani: The Story Behind the Song an Autobiography (Pacific Palisades, CA: Hula House, 1970), 6 and 37. 18 "Hawaiian Paradise," Honolulu Star-Bulletin, March 30, 1935, page 6. 19 Webley Edwards, “Hawaii Calls,” Paradise of the Pacific, December 1949: 133. 20 “Big Aloha Party Being Planned For Owens Band,” The Honolulu Advertiser, March 21, 1937, page 4; “Harry Owens Takes His Band To Coast Hotel November 19,” The Honolulu Advertiser, November 6, 1937, page 5; “Harry Owens Giving Up Baton-Will Turn to Radio, Write Tunes for Films,” The Honolulu Advertiser, February 22, 1941, page 1. 21 Ibid., 267-271. 22 Kanahele, 267-269 and 623-625. 8

Herbert Ira Rosenthal said, “Hawaii Calls is tops with CBS and has right of way over our entire network. It is the most popular sustaining program on the network.”23 The show was widely broadcasted through shortwave radio and during its first year on the air, fan mail flooded in from “as far away as British South Africa and South America.”24

Hollywood soon capitalized on the immense popularity of Hawaii Calls by producing a series of popular musical films set in the islands and modeled on the formula around which the radio show was built.25 1937’s , featuring the Harry Owens’ song “Sweet

Leilani,” was the first major example of this type of film and became profoundly influential.

Many of these films featured Harry Owens’ music and often even featured Owens himself.26 In

1941, Hollywood film producers began to hire Owens to provide technical advice on making films that featured Hawai‘i as a locale.27

The commodities Owens helped produce throughout his career, including music, cover art, movies, television shows, and his autobiography, consistently depict Hawai‘i in the way the tourism industry and statehood advocates promoted the islands: as a white-dominated, feminized space with docile natives who happily dedicate their lives to helping white people enjoy life.28 These Owens-associated commodities also erased other races, most notably

23 “Hawaii Calls to Celebrate Anniversary,” Honolulu Star-Bulletin, October 10, 1936, page 39. 24 Ibid. 25 Kanahele, 554-555. 26 “Harry Owens Giving Up Baton-Will Turn to Radio, Write Tunes for Films,” The Honolulu Advertiser, February 22, 1941, page 1. 27 “War Talk Here Interests Hawaii Orchestra Leader,” The Times, April 15, 1941, page 32. 28 Regarding Owens’ music, he not only created this depiction in his lyrics, but sonically in the music itself. His music conforms to prevailing sounds of whiteness with sonic ornamentation of Hawaiian origin. This will be discussed in greater detail in chapter 3. 9

Asians, from this fictive Hawai‘i.29 Owens’ fame allowed him to insert this messaging into many sectors of the entertainment industry. From 1949 to 1958, Owens hosted his own popular television program on which he promoted tourism and advocated statehood for Hawai‘i. His program was sponsored by United Airlines and built around the tourism industry’s vision of

Hawai‘i and its music.30

Owens’ role in growing tourism and shaping the global perception of Hawai‘i has been largely forgotten, but it was well-recognized when his popularity was at its height, and acknowledged—if inaccurately—even after his fame waned during the 1960s. In the April 12,

1970, edition of The Los Angeles Times, travel editor Jerry Hulse wrote that Harry Owens “did more to touch off tourism to the islands than all the hula girls in paradise…Owens wrote dozens of songs that tugged at the hearts of mainland dreamers. Much of it was corn, as he admits, but the disease spread and tourism with it…Infectious as typhoid. Boatloads and planeloads of tourists took off for the islands.”31 While this quote conveys the prominence of Owens’ work as a promotional tool of tourism, it also implies that an inherent quality of his work drove tourists to Hawai‘i rather than acknowledging the reality that his work was part of a larger marketing effort and his work itself was heavily marketed with giant budgets through multiple integral industries.

29 Some of these commodities erase Asians completely, while other erasures are almost complete. For example, some of the films feature a single Asian character and that character is almost certain to be a servant. 30 “Harry Owens has United Airlines sponsoring half his show,” Long Beach Independent (Long Beach, California), September 16, 1950, page 25; Dr. George S. Kanahele, “Hawaiian Music and Television,” Ha‘ilono Mele, Volume IV, Number 4, April 1978: 3; “Harry Owens and His Royal Hawaiians,” IMDb, Accessed April 11, 2019, https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1305340/?ref_=nm_flmg_slf_3 31 Jerry Hulse, “Harry’s Version of Paradise Lost,” The Los Angeles Times, Sunday, April 12, 1970, page 153. 10

Owens played a specific, well-defined role in the global dissemination of tourism’s distortion of Hawai‘i that his status as a superstar obscures. He was the most visible figure in a confluence of events that occurred in the 1930s that placed a fictive Hawai‘i in a prominent place in global popular culture, but he served as an effective tool for the architects and drivers of these events—not as the architect himself. He began as the employee of a company in the tourism industry to perform a job crucial to growing tourism, and that company had used this fantasy to promote tourism long before hiring him. Thus, promoting his employer’s vision of

Hawai‘i was part of his job description. He continued this work for many different employers including and CBS television under the sponsorship of United Airlines.

Bandleader was Owens’ job and some bandleaders become quite famous, thus creating illusions about their actual level of power. Slate Magazine music critic Carl Wilson explains that bandleaders are one layer of management within a massive corporate complex, in which they have control over the musicians in their orchestra while remaining subservient to other layers of management such as venue owners and record companies. 32

Bandleaders have the power to impact greatly the quality of life of the performers who work under them. Wilson notes that music industry history is filled with accounts of both kind and cruel bandleaders, but that while “we tend to hear a lot less gossip about the good or even great bosses of the music world,” the stories of the cruel leaders often do not get aired until musicians near the end of their careers and no longer fear burning bridges.33 The evidence

32 Carl Wilson, “If Bandleaders Are Bosses, What Management Style Makes the Best Music?,” Slate Magazine, August 28, 2018, accessed February 16, 2020, https://slate.com/human-interest/2018/08/bandleader- management-styles-which-approach-works-best-for-bands.html. 33 Ibid.; Wilson’s assessment is absolutely consistent with my own experiences, particularly in creating my MA thesis about black orchestras in Omaha, Nebraska before 1950. I had the opportunity to spend years chatting 11 overwhelmingly indicates that Owens was a kind and honest bandleader because even long after his star faded and he passed away, accounts of him appear to be universally positive and often specifically praise his character.

Tourism, the Music Industry, and their Impacts

Unfortunately, the question of individual character has at times elided larger issues concerning the impact of tourism on Hawai'i, its culture, and its people. While tourism has provided opportunities for many artists, preservationists, and cultural practitioners, the industry has had profoundly negative effects on many aspects of life in Hawai‘i. Jerry Hulse championed tourism to Hawai‘i to such an extent that the School of Travel Industry

Management at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa has commended him for that work.34 Hulse compares the tourism promoting fantasies foundational to Owens’ work to a disease writing that it was “Infectious as typhoid.”35 Whereas Hulse uses the simile to celebrate tourism,

Haunani-Kay Trask also employs the concept of illness to analyze tourism in Hawai‘i and does so to convey the deleterious impact of the industry on the islands. She critiques the myths that the tourism industry has propagated through the work of people like Harry Owens, “This fictional Hawai‘i comes out of the depths of Western sexual sickness that demands a dark, sin- free Native for instant gratification between imperialist wars.”36 The tourism industry, in particular, she argues, degrades and distorts native culture. Prostitution, she writes, serves as a

with older musicians whose careers began in that era and they were eager to talk and write about the kind and nurturing bandleaders as well as those who were not good to work for. 34 “Jerry Hulse,” School of Travel Industry Management at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, September 14, 2018, accessed October 22, 2019, https://tim.hawaii.edu/about-values-vision-mission- accreditation/celebrate-a-legacy-in-tourism/2008-celebrate-legacy-honorees/jerry-hulse/ 35 Hulse. 36 Trask, 137. 12 useful framework for explaining the transactional effect of the industry on Hawaiian people and culture.37 Within this tourism as prostitution, she writes, “Hawai‘i itself is the female object of degraded and victimized sexual value.”38 Trask notes that tourism has positioned itself as the centerpiece of Hawai‘i’s economy making dependents of other industries like construction and forging partnerships with schools in order to spread pro-tourism messaging to youth while funneling them into tourism careers. Tourism’s negative effects range from increasing crime, high cost of living, and lack of possibilities for personal economic betterment, which together result in the forced out-migration of Kānaka Maoli.39 Returning to the metaphor of tourism as illness, she explains that to make certain tourists do not have to reckon with these uncomfortable truths, “Hotel historians, like hotel doctors, are stationed inhouse to soothe the visitors’ stay with the pablum of invented myths and tales of the ‘primitive.’”40

Owens’ work exemplifies Trask’s insights with precision. Trask notes that the commodities of the entertainment industry shape perceptions of reality as she writes that the truth about tourism’s effects on the islands shocks most people “because the Hollywood, tourist poster image of my homeland as a racial paradise with happy Natives waiting to share their culture with everyone and anyone is a familiar global commodity.”41 The following poem by Harry Owens illustrates how well his commodities conform to Trask’s critiques,

There’s a land of many rainbows, There’s an isle across the sea Where tradewinds play, like violins, A lovely melody,

37 Ibid., 140. 38 Ibid., 144. 39 Ibid., 137-145. 40 Ibid., 143. 41 Ibid., 18. 13

Where natives sing the whole day thru Beneath a banyan tree And strum guitars beneath the stars And fun is all for free; There’s a land of many rainbows: It was made for you and me.

Owens’ conflicting explanations of the poem’s origin offer an introduction to the persona that he assumed to advance his career and demonstrate the dramatic nature of tourism’s fanciful depiction of the islands. Harry Owens includes this poem on the first page of the preface of his 1970 autobiography. In this account, Owens contends that he composed this poem as a child before he knew anything about Hawai‘i. He writes that years after writing this poem, he received a job offer in the islands and that “it was, indeed, a siren song.” When he arrived in Hawai‘i, he found his childhood poem to be a perfectly accurate description of island life.42 Owens featured the same poem on his television program in 1958, but in that instance, he provided a quite different story of its origin. He featured a large book on the program with the word “Onipaa” on the cover. He claimed that this is the Hawaiian word for truth, that the book was the “Polynesian Book of Life,” given to him by his “great friend Aikane, venerable last of the priests of Polynesia.” Owens contended that the book was written in Hawaiian and that he could translate from it for his audience. He claimed on this television program that the above poem is “ancient Polynesian wisdom,” translated directly from the book.43

42 Owens, c-d. 43 “Harry Owens Show-1958-Hawaiian Music-1 Hour Long,” YouTube (YouTube, February 19, 2016), accessed October 15, 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XjyP72x1Nsw. Harry Owens’ program was actually a half hour broadcast. The link in this footnote leads to a video that contains two episodes of the show. These are the only episodes that I could find. Hamilton Library has a VHS tape with the same two episodes. 14

In sum, the commodities of the entertainment industry shape perception and thus have the power to shape history. As Maile Arvin notes, in the case of Hawai‘i, this reality-shaping power is amplified because Hawai‘i is absent or nearly absent as a topic of study in schools throughout the world, including the .44 Simultaneously, the industry’s fantasy messaging packaged into entertainment industry commodities has fomented real-world racism and violence. For instance, Beth Bailey and David Farber detail some disturbing examples linked to the fantasies promoted in Harry Owens’ work in World War II-era Hawai‘i. The late

1930s and early saw a dramatic increase in US military personnel stationed in Hawai‘i.

These soldiers, sailors, and marines arrived with knowledge of Hawai‘i exclusively rooted in the radio show Hawaii Calls and the musical films it inspired.45 For these new arrivals, this disparity between their fantasy expectations and the reality they encountered resulted in “anger that was born not of suffering, but of disillusion and frustration” and consequently in racial conflicts with local residents.46 Bailey and Farber cite soldiers’ accounts of their disappointment with their experiences in the islands. One soldier stated, “I expected…hula girls running around.”47

Another commented, “Believe me if Paradise is anything like this I’ll take my chances in Hell.

Honolulu in itself is about the dirtiest town I’ve ever been in…Japs, Chinks, Hawaiians all run about.”48 In 1945, V. Cabell Flanagan interviewed fellow military personnel stationed in Hawai‘i and found similar attitudes and expectations. One Army sergeant noted his disappointment, “I

44 Maile Arvin, Possessing Polynesians: The Science of Settler Colonial Whiteness in Hawaii and Oceania (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019), 1. 45 Beth L. Bailey and David R. Farber, The First Strange Place: The Alchemy of Race and Sex in World War II Hawaii (New York: Free Press, 1992), 32-39 and 150. 46 Ibid., 38. 47 Ibid., 39. 48 Ibid., 32 15 expected it to be primitive…I can’t say I have grown fonder of it as the months went by.”49

Another soldier summarized his feelings about Hawai‘i, “Back where I come from, we're not used to associate with anybody but white people. If you could clear everybody off of the Island and move all whites over here, it would be a lot better.”50

The distorted image of Hawai‘i has continued to cause conflict in the postwar years as well. In Waves of Resistance, a work that details the history of surfing with an emphasis on

Native Hawaiian efforts to preserve this form of cultural heritage and use it as a means to resist colonialism, Isaiah Helekunihi Walker provides an example of the ways that tourism’s distortion caused violence. He notes the strategy to depict Hawai‘i as “a white man’s sexual fantasyland” not only involves depicting the islands as a feminine space, but also portraying Native Hawaiian men as content, docile, and passive. In his examination of surfing on Oahu’s North Shore in the

1970s, Walker argues that acceptance of this misrepresentation led many visitors to behave in ways that Kānaka Maoli found deeply disrespectful and destructive, which occasionally prompted Native preservationists to resort to violence to mitigate this destruction. He notes this resistance shocked visitors who had believed Native Hawaiian men incapable of anger and violence.51

These examples resulted from misreading commodities of commercial culture and because the commodities of commercial culture associated with Harry Owens play a large part in this dissertation, it is essential not to misread them. As cultural Historian George Lipsitz

49 V. Cabell Flanagan, “Servicemen in Hawaii—Some Impressions and Attitudes Toward Hawaii,” Social Process in Hawaii 9-10 (July 1945): 83. 50 Ibid., 78. 51 Isaiah Helekunihi Walker, Waves of Resistance: Surfing and History in Twentieth-century Hawaiʻi (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2011), 91-92 and 148. 16 reminds us, entertainment industry commodities can provide historians great insight into the times in which they were produced and the audience to which they were marketed, but they

“should not be read as guides to the actual political stances and beliefs of the artists who create them.”52 These commodities may reveal strategies that industry executives believed would bring them profit and power, but they cannot be accepted as characterizing specific artists.

Just as the myths that have been created to promote the tourism industry are disseminated through commodities, tourism itself is a commodity and also a form of distortion.

In Legendary Hawai‘i and the Politics of Place, Cristina Bacchilega argues that colonial actors with interests in the Hawaiian Islands created something she labels “legendary Hawai‘i” by presenting Hawaiian histories as legends and myths. She explains that this strategy relegated

Hawaiians to the past and also distorted their stories to make them conform to Western forms of storytelling. “Legendary Hawai‘i” assisted in the effort to depict the islands as an exotic, but safe destination for tourists. She builds much of her argument on the consequences of the act of translation. Bacchilega astutely explains, “Translation facilitates communication, but is not synonymous with it.” After illustrating ways linguistic translation could mangle Hawaiian stories, she insightfully identifies tourism “as a form of translation” and notes that the industry’s needs determine its portrayal of history, nature, and culture.53

This dissertation aims to view tourism and its associated commodities, particularly those with links to Harry Owens, through the lens of cultural translation as described by Bacchilega.

52 George Lipsitz, Footsteps in the Dark: The Hidden Histories of (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 42. 53 Cristina Bacchilega, Legendary Hawai‘i and the Politics of Place: Tradition, Translation, and Tourism (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 13 and 16. 17

When goals such as building tourism and gaining statehood emerged for white elites in the

1920s and 1930s, these elites put enormous effort into widely disseminating long-standing colonial fantasies through the promotion of tourism, most effectively through the music industry and most prominently through Harry Owens. The identification and analysis of the fantasies within these commodities constitutes a form of translation that yields insight into both this specific period of history and to the enduring nature of certain notions of white supremacy. In the 1930s, music and other messaging built around nineteenth-century racist and misogynistic ideas about Hawai‘i seared these fantasies into the global imagination. These same old fantasies still drive profits in the entertainment industry today—almost one hundred years after their global spread and nearly two hundred years after the fantasies first emerged.

Partnership of Tourism and the Music Industry

While this dissertation discusses musicians and artists along with performance and music as art forms, it highlights American Empire’s effective use of the music industry in achieving colonial capitalist goals. Advocates of American imperialism utilized the colonial capitalist music industry that developed throughout the twentieth century and the technological advancement of recording and broadcasting made this industry very effective at spreading messages globally. In the modern world, music as an art form is often wrongly regarded as synonymous with the music industry. Like so many capitalist ventures, the music industry’s commodity, like that of tourism, is largely fantasy. Unsurprisingly, the two industries have long enjoyed a profitable, symbiotic partnership.

Music can be used to entertain tourists and encourage them to return for subsequent visits and tourists serve as patrons to musicians. Both industries’ reliance on similar colonial 18 fantasies furthers their compatibility with the efforts of the white settler colonial elites. Adria L.

Imada writes “Settler colonialism—the displacement of Indigenous peoples through the expropriation of land and institutions by foreign settlers—relies on and produces an investment in uncomplicated, ahistorical fantasies. Specifically, the settler colonial experience in Hawai‘i produced the gendered, nostalgic fantasy of nonviolent, romanticized stewardship over Native cultural practices.”54

The selling of white supremacist and misogynist fantasies through the music industry and tourism functions as a potent tool of colonial capitalism. Psychologist and marketing professor Americus Reed notes that companies create and attach world views to the commodities they sell and convince consumers to incorporate those views into their personal identities. Reed explains that the consumer then uses these commodities “like flags; they tell the world who you are or who you want to be.”55 Reed breaks down how merit is not required in a commodity for a consumer to perceive value in it,

If a consumer connects with a brand or a product in terms of an identity argument instead of an argument about how better the features are of the product compared to something else they could buy, then what is happening is that there is an insulation from the brand's competitive attacks because once a person believes that a brand is part of who they are, then asking them to go to another brand is essentially asking them to change who they are. And that is an incredibly powerful psychological gravitational pull that is really hard to overcome.56

54 Adria L. Imada, “‘Aloha Oe’: Settler-Colonial Nostalgia and the Genealogy of a Love Song,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 37, no. 2 (2013): 36. 55 Shankar Vedantam et al., “I Buy, Therefore I Am: How Brands Become Part Of Who We Are,” NPR.org, July 1, 2019, accessed July 19, 2020, https://www.npr.org/2019/06/28/736942500/i-buy-therefore-i-am-how- brands-become-part-of-who-we-are 56 Ibid. 19

Reed notes that these connected consumers feel that their favorite commodities imbue them with mystique and then these consumers tend to become “evangelists” for these commodities.57

These marketing tools have aided colonial capitalist industries in selling a wide variety of commodities by using mystique and fantasy to appeal to consumers “in terms of an identity argument.”58 In the case of Hawai‘i, the music industry was particularly effective in selling long- standing colonial fantasies and this effective salesmanship helped white elites achieve long- standing settler colonial goals such as growing the tourism industry and gaining statehood for

Hawai‘i.

Hapa haole is the genre of music that was most commonly used by the tourism industry to generate its promotional fantasies. Hapa haole is a term that Amy Ku‘uleialoha Stillman translates as “half foreign.”59 Thus, the term implies that the other half is Hawaiian. George S.

Kanahele writes that although all non-Hawaiians are technically haoles,60 in the twentieth century the term hapa haole became more commonly thought of as “half Caucasian” because the word haole became equated with white.61 The term hapa haole identifies a style of music that was the most popular style associated with Hawai‘i during the period this dissertation focuses on. This style of music features significant Western influences, particularly from the

57 Ibid. 58 Ibid. 59 Amy Ku‘uleialoha Stillman, “Published Hawaiian Songbooks,” Notes, Second Series, Vol. 44, No. 2 (December 1987): 226 60 The term haole is a Hawaiian word that has a complex set of meanings in modern Hawai‘i. Pukui and Elbert define the word as “White person, American, Englishman, Caucasian; formerly any foreigner, foreign, of foreign origin.” The term is most commonly used as a synonym for white person and I use those two terms interchangeably. 61 George S. Kanahele, ed., (revised and updated by John Berger), Hawaiian Music and Musicians: An Encyclopedic History (Honolulu, HI: Mutual Publishing, 2012), 244. 20 genres of ragtime and . It also tends to feature English language lyrics. The term has other meanings and applications, but it will be used in this dissertation only to describe this specific style of music and that style is explained in more detail in chapter two.

Literature Review on Music and Tourism as Fantasy

This project follows upon the work of a number of significant scholars in the analysis of the tourism and music industries’ dissemination of fantasy. Scholars such as Trask, Buck,

Walker, Bailey, Farber, and Bacchilega have analyzed how fantasy has been used to sell tourism in Hawai‘i. As Adria L. Imada notes, statehood advocates in the first half of the twentieth century used hula troupes touring the continental US to erase Asians from thoughts of Hawai‘i and present the islands as “exotic but not too foreign, and worthy of national inclusion.”62

Likewise, DeSoto Brown notes the tourism industry at this time promoted Hawai‘i as a tropical paradise with “American plumbing.”63 Brown, like Haunani Kay-Trask and many other scholars, also notes that gender became foundational to this marketing as it was always built on depicting Hawai‘i as “a beautiful woman” who is “charming and alluring and always hospitable, especially to any Caucasian man.”64 Maile Arvin argues that this depiction functions as an appeal to white American men to do “their heterosexual reproductive duty for the United

States in turning Hawai‘i whiter.”65 Jane C. Desmond’s insight in Staging Tourism links closely with insight from various scholars on music as fantasy. She divides her book into two separate, but related studies: 1) the staging of cultural tourism through human bodies; and 2) the staging

62 Adria L. Imada, Aloha America: Hula Circuits through the U.S. Empire (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), 182 and 185. 63 DeSoto Brown, Hawaii Recalls (Honolulu, HI: Editions Limited, 1982), 119. 64 Ibid., 57. 65 Arvin, 118. 21 of natural tourism through animal bodies. She argues that both types of performances serve the same basic purpose of designating the viewer as a sophisticated elite distinct from the natural, primitive performer.66

A long line of scholars and artists including Bill Yousman, George Lipsitz, Tricia Rose,

Graham Lock, Robin D. G. Kelley, Wynton Marsalis, and Langston Hughes have criticized the music industry for exploiting and propagating a fantasy that sexualizes, exoticizes, and dehumanizes non-white peoples, particularly African Americans, and women of all races.67

Echoing Desmond’s argument from Staging Tourism, Graham Lock notes that The Cotton Club in New York, which in the 1920s and 1930s featured black artists performing jungle themed or southern plantation themed performances for white only audiences utilized “a racist framing of blacks as ‘primitive’”68 Langston Hughes writes that The Cotton Club attracted white patrons who wished to view black people “like amusing animals in a zoo.”69

Wynton Marsalis argues that “Rap has become a safari for people who get their thrills from watching African-American people debase themselves” and that this is the continuation of a long music industry practice that dates back to the nineteenth century when “Old school minstrels used to say they were 'real darkies from the real plantation'. Hip-hop substitutes the

66 Jane C. Desmond, Staging Tourism: Bodies on Display from Waikiki to Sea World (, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1999). 67 I cite all, but Rose and Yousman in this chapter. Tricia Rose, Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1994); Bill Yousman, “Blackophilia and Blackophobia: White Youth, the Consumption of Rap Music, and White Supremacy,” Communication Theory, Volume 13, Number 4, November 2003: 366-391. 68 Graham Lock, Blutopia: Visions of the Future and Revisions of the Past in the Work of Sun Ra, , and Anthony Braxton (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), 123. 69 Langston Hughes, The Big Sea, an Autobiography (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993), 224-225. 22 plantation for the streets.”70 Robin D. G. Kelley analyzes how gangsta rap is marketed to middle-class white males and writes that the genre “attracts listeners for whom the ‘ghetto’ is a place of adventure, unbridled violence, erotic fantasy and/or an imaginary alternative to suburban boredom.”71 He notes that the best-selling gangsta rap group of that era, NWA, openly discussed that their songs were not intended to be “representations of reality ‘in the hood,’” but rather were often inspired by big budget action adventure films starring white male actors.72 Kelley also analyzes the “erotic fantasy” aspect of the genre’s appeal further noting that “they construct male fantasy scenes of uncontested domination…essentially about the degradation and complete domination of women.”73 Outside of the elements of physical violence in gangsta rap, the characteristics used to sell music that are described by the scholars and artists above are all present in the music industry commodities examined in this dissertation. As Marsalis notes, these traits both predate the era that this dissertation focuses on, the 1930s, by almost a century and have endured into the twenty-first century. This speaks to the durability of white supremacist notions and underscores a core argument in this dissertation that the entertainment industry creates profitable, enduring templates through the incorporation of long-standing colonial fantasies.

70 John Lewis, "Shock of the New: Wynton Marsalis Almost Explodes with Rage When He Talks about Hip- hop," The Guardian, March 02, 2007, accessed September 23, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/music/2007/mar/02/jazz 71 Robin D. G. Kelley, Race Rebels: Culture, Politics and the Black Working Class (New York: The Free Press, 1996), 198, 199, and 218. 72 Ibid. 73 Ibid., 218. 23

Methods, Methodologies, and Theoretical Frameworks

At its core, the theoretical framework of this dissertation is historical studies. The fields of tourism studies and settler-colonial studies provided important frameworks as well as the emerging field of militourism. I also drew upon the field of historic preservation because examination of the built environment and the preservation of both tangible and intangible cultural heritage were central to this work. Scholars in the fields of memory studies, political science, and cultural studies have also influenced this work.

George Lipsitz’s scholarship on the music industry shaped the methodology at the core of this work. He notes that the music industry often portrays its commodities as antithetical to racism, but in reality “one of the core functions of the music industry is to produce and reproduce racism every day.”74 This dissertation explores how the colonial capitalist music industry “produced and reproduced” long-standing settler colonial fantasies of Hawai‘i in order to help accomplish settler colonial goals ranging from white settlement to statehood. Haunani-

Kay Trask’s writings on tourism and settler-colonialism provided valuable frameworks for analyzing my research. I was also particularly influenced by scholars working in the field of memory studies, particularly David W. Blight’s argument in Race and Reunion regarding how

Hollywood films shaped the modern American view of the American Civil War.75 In the field of memory studies related to Hawai‘i, I was very influenced by John P. Rosa’s work in Local Story regarding how popular culture commodities shaped the memory of the Kahahawai/Massie

74 Lipsitz, 103. 75 David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2001). 24 incident in Hawai‘i.76

For my primary research methods, I used an interdisciplinary American Studies lens to interweave textual, aural, and visual cultural analyses of the music industry. In each instance, I explored ways in which popular white supremacist ideas grounded cultural production in ways that often served to extend global tourism and American settler colonialism. I used historical research methods to locate and situate primary sources in historical context, to analyze the intertwined development of the music and tourism industries, and to reconstruct relationships among music industry commodities, new musical styles, and specific musicians and bandleaders. I also utilized historical methods to verify the accuracy of core sources such as the autobiography of Harry Owens. After primary sources led me to the conclusion that the autobiography was mostly a work of fiction, I identified within it the popular white supremacist tropes utilized in fiction popular in the period in which Owens created the work. In my discussions of music, I compared musical features from various recordings relevant to this history. A close analysis of audio-visual sources such as motion pictures most notably Waikiki

Wedding (1937), Song of the Islands (1942), and Blue Hawaii (1964) along with television series

Harry Owens and His Royal Hawaiians (1949-1958) and Hawaii Five-0 (1968-1980 and 2010-

2020) shed light on these commodities' elaboration of American racism and misogyny. I found the same through my analysis of visual sources such as album artwork and tourism promotional material mostly accessed through Matson’s website and the Hawai‘i State Archives.

76 John P. Rosa, Local Story: The Massie-Kahahawai Case and the Culture of History. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2014. 25

I drew upon a wide variety of primary sources produced between the late nineteenth century and today. Newspapers, magazines, academic journals, transcribed oral histories, and student papers provided significant coverage of many of the people central to this work and also provided many of these people with a forum for their writings. Album and sheet music artwork along with motion pictures also provided valuable insight for this work. I relied on many recordings of both interviews and music to inform this work. Government documents such as senate resolutions, correspondence between officials, along with tourism industry promotional materials such as posters and promotional videos accessed mostly through the

Hawai‘i State Archives and Hamilton Library also proved valuable to this work.

Chapter Synopses

This dissertation’s first chapter demonstrates that white elites in Hawai‘i have recycled long-standing colonial fantasies to help achieve goals such as white settlement, annexation, statehood, and growth of the tourism industry. This chapter argues that these fantasies became the core elements of the persona that Harry Owens first assumed as a Matson employee in the tourism industry and continued to assume throughout his career. This section contains a brief overview of the history of Hawai‘i with an emphasis on the influence of

American racism, the annexationist movement, the development and promotion of the tourism industry, and the pro-statehood movement that gained the support of the islands’ white elites in the mid-1930s leading directly to the development of Hawaii Calls. This chapter demonstrates that the colonial fantasies that largely define the global perception of Hawai‘i originated in the early nineteenth century. By the latter half of the nineteenth century, these fantasies had developed into the dominant tropes to this day distributed by the tourism and 26 the entertainment industries. When white elites’ efforts to make Hawai‘i into a white space through annexation and settlement failed, they turned to constructing a white Hawai‘i within the colonial imaginary. A core element of this consisted of a destruction and reconstruction of the built environment in downtown Honolulu and Waikīkī. Government documents make explicit that the territory of Hawai‘i’s ruling oligarchy decided that converting Waikīkī into a location where white visitors would vacation and potentially settle, required the removal of “all objectionable features and neighbors.”77 The resulting built environment projected whiteness through architecture and luxury and eventually served as the physical space from which the tourism and entertainment industries, most spectacularly through Harry Owens, constructed this fictional Hawai‘i within the American and global imagination.

In chapter two, I argue that as the American music and tourism industries grew in power in 1930s Hawai‘i, these industries worked to silence and render invisible musicians who did not conform to popularized racist and misogynist fantasies and ideas, while elevating haole musicians like Harry Owens. These same tendencies erased from history important Native

Hawaiian innovators whose contributions were vital to the development of many globally popular modern musical styles. This chapter details the history of a vibrant musical culture that developed in the Kingdom of Hawai‘i and continued to flourish after US occupation, producing artists that resisted the growing influence of the American music industry. Matson brought

Harry Owens into the heart of this situation in 1934 and the following year through Hawaii

Calls, tourism industry and statehood advocates redefined how the world outside of Hawai‘i

77 L. E. Pinkham, Reclamation of the Waikiki District of the City of Honolulu, : Recommendations, Maps, Plans and Specifications (Honolulu: Hawaiian Gazette Co., Ltd., 1906), 7. 27 thought of Hawaiian music, replacing the distinct sound of the Kingdom era culture with the popular US continental style of Harry Owens that had strong associations with whiteness. The popularization of this radio show and its ability to correlate Owens’ style with the islands set the stage for a series of popular films that seared the tourism industry’s distortion of Hawai‘i into the global imagination.

Chapter three focuses on the career of Harry Owens. Unlike anyone before him in tourism and entertainment, Hawaii Calls and the films it inspired put Owens on a platform that allowed his work to disseminate colonial fantasies about Hawai‘i with unprecedented global reach. The evidence overwhelmingly indicates that Owens was a highly skilled salesperson and that this fact greatly benefitted his career. An in-depth review of his self-published autobiography serves as a vehicle that both guides us through his career and reveals the strategies he used for selling his brand. I argue that his autobiography requires Bacchilega’s lens of translation in order to gain accurate insight into this history and in this chapter, I attempt to provide that translation by identifying literary tropes within the book and scrutinizing the book’s assertions through other primary sources. Along with looking at Owens’ autobiography, this chapter examines his musical compositions, lyrics, cover art, and episodes from his 1950s television series that demonstrate how Owens manufactured a fantasy of authenticity and authority, by inventing both a relationship to Hawaiian/Polynesian characters and a deep knowledge of ancient Hawaiʻi. Throughout his work, Owens mobilizes popular colonial, racist, and misogynist fantasies long rampant in both the tourism industry and the

American entertainment industry, while assuming the archetypal entertainment industry persona of “white messiah/mediator.” 28

The fourth chapter examines Harry Owens’ persona and the fantasies he distributed through his music. Owens’ archetypal persona conformed to consumer expectations thus granting Owens a sense of authenticity and authority and validating the fantasies in his commodities in the minds of consumers. Although Owens did not create these fantasies, like so many others employed in tourism and entertainment, he disseminated them dutifully to the great benefit of his career, his employers, and their sponsors. The multi-sensory nature of music industry commodities provided a potent mechanism for introducing and reinforcing tourism’s vision of Hawai‘i to consumers.

The fifth chapter examines the immediate aftermath of Hawaii Calls and the films it inspired. This history demonstrates the profound impact that tourism and statehood advocates had through turning their efforts to marketing through the music industry: tourism grew, Harry

Owens style Hawaiian music gained more traction, and the film industry increasingly looked to profit from musical films inspired by Hawaii Calls. Even before the seismic shift sparked by

Hawaii Calls, Hawaiian artists and preservationists found ways to create opportunities within the emerging tourist industry to better their lives and practice their culture. After the shift, even larger numbers of Hawaiians identified and seized opportunities both in Hawai‘i and in the entertainment industry on the US continent. This chapter discusses how the changes sparked by the 1935 debut of Hawaii Calls came at the expense of Hawaiian music by Hawaiians while examining the agency of Hawaiian and other non-white musicians who both participated in and resisted these new developments. Specifically, I examine how these musicians made their living, but also how Hawaiian artists sought to sustain their own musical heritage amidst the considerable and growing power of the American music and tourism industries’ lasting impact 29 on American touristic fantasies of Hawai‘i.

The conclusion demonstrates the enduring impact of Hawaii Calls upon the American entertainment industry through a brief examination of prominent Hawai‘i themed commodities that have been produced between the 1935 debut of the show and the 2020 writing of this dissertation. The conclusion also examines the physical residue of the pre-1941 elite sector of the music industry in Hawai‘i and how that residue is still mobilized by the tourism and entertainment industries to disseminate the tourism industry misrepresentation of Hawai‘i.

30

Chapter 1: Mythmaking and the History of Hawai‘i

In 1920, white continental US writer Robert Neal framed Hawai‘i’s challenges in reaching statehood thusly: “How to get rid of that portion of the population, especially the Oriental element, which cannot be Americanized, and how to make loyal Americans out of that portion which cannot be got rid of [Kānaka ‘Ōiwi]?”1

WHEREAS, Harry Owens, composer of island melodies, has over the years written many beautiful songs…which have effectively communicated the beauty and charm of the islands to millions of listeners all over the world; and WHEREAS, Harry Owens…is unselfishly devoting his talents to espouse the cause of statehood, and it is with such devoted help that Hawaiian statehood is about to become a reality. —Territory of Hawai‘i Legislature Resolution Commending Harry Owens for His Efforts on Behalf of Statehood for Hawaii 2

We know that you’ll be happy When Hawaii falls in line We sing a song of gladness as we Join the forty-nine Hawaii is the fiftieth star in the U.S.A. —Harry Owens3

The opening epigraph details the significant obstacle that American racism posed to the goals of statehood advocates. The following two epigraphs speak to the potency of the music industry as a marketing arm of the statehood movement. Harry Owens became the most visible figure globally in this movement prompting statehood and tourism advocates to label him as their “ambassador” noting, “innumerable mainlanders have learned about the islands

1 Dean Itsuji Saranillio, Unsustainable Empire: Alternative Histories of Hawai'i Statehood, (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), 76. Roger J. Bell, Last Among Equals: Hawaiian Statehood and American Politics (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1984), 50. Bell is cited here because he used the same quote, but without specifying “[Kānaka ‘Ōiwi]” as Saranillio did. Bell included the biographical information on Neal. 2 “RESOLUTION COMMENDING HARRY OWENS FOR HIS EFFORTS ON BEHALF OF STATEHOOD FOR HAWAII.” Senate Journal-The Thirtieth Legislature of the Territory of Hawaii, 1959: 135. 3 “Hawaii is the fiftieth star in the U.S.A.” from Harry Owens, Harry Owens' Great Songs of Hawaii (Pacific Palisades, CA: Royal Music Publisher, 1964), 28-29. 31 from Owens’ music.”4 While employed by Matson, a company allied with Statehood advocates,

Owens first assumed a persona built around his employer’s marketing. He continued in this persona because subsequent employers such as CBS recognized this persona’s commercial value. Thus, Owens advocated statehood as host of a television series on that network from

1949 to 1958.5 In 1953, Owens published his composition “Hawaii is the 49th Star (In the Flag of the U.S.A.)” to promote statehood and his own ability to profit from such an outcome. After

Alaska was granted statehood just before Hawai‘i in 1959, Owens reworked the title to “Hawaii is the 50th Star (In the Flag of the U.S.A.).”6

Owens’ work exposed “innumerable mainlanders” to statehood and tourism advocates’ marketing about the islands, but similar messaging about Hawai‘i had been spread long before

Owens’ career as the fantasies that pervaded his work originated before his birth. Europeans and Americans began crafting fantasies about Hawai‘i almost immediately after Captain James

Cook brought the islands into the European and American gaze in the late eighteenth century.

These fantasies developed through the nineteenth century, crystalizing into their current form by the last quarter of that century. This chapter surveys the history of Hawai‘i with an emphasis on the influence of American racist ideas. This survey provides historical context in which Harry Owens fashioned a musical career that capitalized on white supremacist notions of

Hawai‘i as a touristic space. This chapter demonstrates that white elites have reused long- standing colonial fantasies to foster and reinforce white settlement, annexation, statehood, and

4 “Our Ambassador of Music,” The Honolulu Star-Bulletin, September 4, 1940, page 8. 5 Mark Williams, “Entertaining ‘difference’: strains of Orientalism in early Los Angeles television,” in Sasha Torres, ed., Living Color: Race and Television in the United States (Durham, NC, Duke University Press, 1998), 19. 6 Owens, 28. 32 growth of the tourism industry from the nineteenth century to the present day. At the dawn of the twentieth century, white elites destroyed the existing built environment in Waikīkī in order to displace Kānaka Maoli and Asian residents and built a new Waikīkī intended to be a whites- only enclave that projected whiteness to visitors. This built environment hosted the music industry’s efforts to project whiteness to the world. Initially this messaging was spread to and through tourists, later through Hawaii Calls on radio to the world, and eventually through movies and television. Owens shot to global superstardom in 1930s Waikīkī. This superstardom was built upon old fantasies that have continued to be profitable long after the world largely forgot Harry Owens.

American Racism and Hawai‘i

Until relatively recently, existing studies of the islands’ history approached the topic through a Eurocentric bias. Most began with the 1778 arrival of British Captain James Cook, excluding the centuries of Hawaiian precolonial history. In his study of eighteenth and nineteenth century Hawaiian music, James Revell Carr declares James Cook to have been the first tourist in the islands.7 As tourism is one of this dissertation’s primary focal points, the history detailed here commences with this first tourist. If Cook indeed qualifies as the first tourist, he likely also qualifies among the most destructive. His encounter with the Kānaka

Maoli spread knowledge of their location throughout the globe, which drew an increasing number of foreigners including Protestant Christian missionaries from New England arrived in

7 James Revell Carr, Hawaiian Music in Motion: Mariners, Missionaries, and Minstrels. (Urbana, Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2014), 5. 33

Hawai‘i in 1820. 8 The effects of foreign contact, particularly the introduction of foreign diseases to which Kānaka Maoli had no immunity, devastated Hawaiian society and reduced the

Native Hawaiian population from more than one million in 1778 to 40,000 in 1890.9 In the wake of this devastation, foreigners settled in the islands, gained political influence and used that power to seize land.10

Noelani Arista traces the origins of the modern misrepresentations of Hawai‘i to the early nineteenth century when “Americans were becoming well acquainted with images of

Hawai‘i and Hawaiians that they themselves produced.”11 These images encouraged foreign settlers, particularly missionaries, as they depicted Hawai‘i “as a seemingly known, albeit exotic, place” and inspired a belief that “Hawaiians were reputedly ‘friendly’ as opposed to warlike or bloodthirsty, and the openness of the natives would only facilitate the work of the mission.”12

Settler goals evolved and expanded throughout the nineteenth century. Noelani Arista argues that, at least during the 1820s, these missionaries were rather atypical Americans and did not see themselves as the vanguard of imperial acquisition.13 The children and grandchildren of these missionaries were a different matter entirely. Noenoe K. Silva writes,

The missionary sons and grandsons had been imbued from birth with a sense of their own superiority to the natives; their parents and grandparents had come to Hawai‘i in order to bring enlightenment and civilization. The sons and grandsons had been sent to

8 Noelani Arista, The Kingdom and the Republic: Sovereign Hawaii and the Early United States (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), 9. 9 David E. Stannard, Before the Horror: The Population of Hawaiʻi on the Eve of Western Contact, (Honolulu, Hawaii: Social Science Research Institute, University of Hawaii, 1989). 10 Jonathan Kay Kamakawiwoʻole Osorio, Dismembering Lāhui: A History of the Hawaiian Nation to 1887. (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2002), 3. 11 Maile Arvin, Possessing Polynesians: the Science of Settler Colonial Whiteness in Hawaii and Oceania (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019), 78. 12 Ibid., 55 and 83. 13 Noelani Arista, The Kingdom and the Republic: Sovereign Hawaii and the Early United States (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), 9. 34

the United States to be educated in East Coast colleges, where racism, even in the abolitionist north, was the norm.14

These missionary descendants joined forces with other white elites and imposed the Bayonet

Constitution on King David Kalākaua in 1887. This constitution restricted rights based on class, race, and gender. This constitution stripped citizens of Asian ancestry, who were predominantly Japanese and Chinese, of their Hawaiian citizenship and right to vote. The document also allowed most white male residents, citizens and noncitizens, to vote, as long as they met specified wealth requirements. This constitution marked the first time in the history of Hawai‘i that race marked the boundaries of democratic rights.15

By the middle of the nineteenth century, many haole elites in the islands wished to see the Kingdom of Hawai‘i annexed by the USA. These whites worked to create an image of

Hawai‘i that would avoid triggering American racist fears.16 As a result, they pushed the idea that the islands were a white space and emphasized claims that New England missionaries had thoroughly converted Kānaka Maoli into New England style Christians.17 Mark Twain’s widely read 1866 account of his visit to the Kingdom greatly angered annexationists in the islands as

Twain accurately predicted that the rise of sugar plantations would result in Asian immigration.

The annexationists recognized that an Asian population in the islands would make the USA, which had enacted laws to exclude Asian immigrants, far less likely to consider acquiring the islands and thus denounced Twain’s writing as “lies.”18

14 Noenoe K. Silva, Aloha Betrayed: Native Hawaiian Resistance to American Colonialism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 126. 15 Osorio, 243-244. 16 Silva, Aloha Betrayed: Native Hawaiian Resistance to American Colonialism, 126. 17 Christine Skwiot, The Purposes of Paradise: U.S. Tourism and Empire in Cuba and Hawai'i (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 21-22. 18 Ibid., 30-32. 35

The Kingdom of Hawai‘i began promoting the islands as a tourist destination in the

1870s.19 In the 1880s, annexationists encouraged the perception of Hawai‘i as a white space because they believed that image would prompt white tourism and that many of these white tourists would choose to buy land on which to live permanently. They believed that the illusion of Hawai‘i as a white place could be powerful enough to make the islands into a white space in reality that would be accepted by the USA.20

Anti-Asian racism has remained at the core of the white supremacists’ endeavors in

Hawai‘i. In 1889, the predominantly white Cabinet that seized political power through the

Bayonet Constitution met to discuss the “Chinese Problem” and issued the following statement:

In the light of history, with the experience of what has happened and is now happening in other countries, the Ministers feel justified in saying that unless adequate measures are adopted, Oriental civilization will extinguish, and be substituted for the Anglo-Saxon civilization of this country. The second proposition above stated is, that the perpetuation of Anglo-Saxon civilization is essential to the continuance of a free government and of the political independence of this Kingdom.21

Haole elites who wished to see the islands annexed by the USA understood that achieving this goal depended on both convincing the United States’ government that Hawai‘i was a white space and on overthrowing the Hawaiian monarchy. Much like the imposition of the Bayonet

Constitution in 1887, anti-Asian racism also fueled the desire to overthrow the rightful Native

Hawaiian government. The Hawaiian monarchy had welcomed Asian immigrants and granted them democratic rights during the same period the US government was enacting racist anti-

19 James Mak, “Creating ‘Paradise of the Pacific’: How Tourism Began in Hawaii,” Working Paper No. 2015-1 for University of Hawai‘i Economic Research Organization dated February 17, 2015, accessed November 21, 2019. http://www.uhero.hawaii.edu/assets/Paradise_Mak.pdf, 18. 20 Skwiot, 36 and 43-44. 21 As quoted in Mak, 24-25. 36

Asian immigration laws.22 These laws appealed to many haole elites and contributed to their determination to overthrow the Hawaiian Kingdom. Thirteen of these haole elites formed a group called the Committee of Safety, which both engineered the overthrow of the monarchy and formed the government that replaced the Queen. Most of these men were steeped in

American racist ideas. At least ten of these thirteen men had lived in the USA. Some were born and raised in the USA, while others, including haole citizens of the Kingdom of Hawai‘i, received their college educations in the USA and often began their careers in that nation.23 In January

1893, these elites illegally conspired with US officials and the US military to overthrow Queen

Lili‘uokalani.24 Ironically, these white elites then saw American racism thwart their plans for the

US Congress refused to annex the nonwhite territory of Hawai‘i. Their goal was later realized when the 1898 Spanish-American War caused imperialist sentiment to rise in the US leading to

American occupation of the islands in 1898.25 In the years between the overthrow and the

American occupation, a white oligarchy formed an undemocratic government that became known as the .26

Various political, geographical, and economic realities complicated white supremacists’ efforts to make Hawai‘i into a white space. A shift in land ownership from Kānaka Maoli to

22 Skwiot, 30-32; “The Chinese Exclusion Act.” Directed by Li-Shin Yu and Ric Burns. American Experience. PBS, 2018. Amazon Prime Streaming Video. 23 Ralph Thomas Kam and Jeffrey K. Lyons, “Remembering the Committee of Safety: Identifying the Citizenship, Descent, and Occupations of the Men Who Overthrew the Monarchy,” The Hawaiian Journal of History, vol. 53 (2019): 31-50; John William Siddall, ed., Men of Hawaii: A Biographical Reference Library, Complete and Authentic, of the Men of Note and Substantial Achievement in the Hawaiian Islands, (Honolulu, HI: Honolulu Star-Bulletin, 1921), 89 and 133. 24 Silva, 129-130. 25 JoAnna Poblete, Islanders in the Empire: Filipino and Puerto Rican Laborers in Hawai‘i (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2014), 1-9. 26 Tom Coffman, Nation Within: The History of the American Occupation of Hawaii (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 149-165. 37 white elites along with the increasing profitability of sugar, particularly in the years of and immediately following the American Civil War, gave rise to a plantation economy in the islands.

The United States Civil War erupted in 1861, disrupting the North’s sugar purchases and the

South’s sugar production. As a result, the price of sugar soared and the Hawaiian Kingdom’s economy increasingly became dominated by sugar production.27 Sugar production required large numbers of laborers to produce maximum profitability. Disease had left the Hawaiian

Islands with an insufficient population to constitute the necessary labor force, which resulted in the sugar planters and the government desperately encouraging immigration from many diverse parts of the world. In the late nineteenth century, these immigrants primarily came from Japan and China.28 Puerto Rican and Filipino workers arrived in Hawai‘i in the early twentieth century just after the US empire took possession in 1898 of the Hawaiian Islands along with the former Spanish colonies Puerto Rico and the Philippines.29

Race and ethnicity became central to the organization and operation of the sugar industry. An early twentieth-century Hawaiian Sugar Planters’ Association report claimed that white people were “constitutionally and temperamentally unfitted” for sugar plantation manual labor whereas dark skinned peoples were “peculiarly adapted to the exactions of tropical labor.”30 Sugar planters used many strategies to divide the various ethnic groups that

27 Gavan Daws, Shoal of Time: A History of the Hawaiian Islands, (Honolulu: University Press of Hawaii, 1968), 174-175. 28 Gary Y. Okihiro, Cane Fires: The Anti-Japanese Movement in Hawaii, 1865-1945, (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991). 29 Poblete, 6. 30 As quoted in Jonathan Y. Okamura, From Race to Ethnicity: Interpreting Japanese American Experiences in Hawai‘i. (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2016), 22-23. 38 worked for them and even created animosity between them to minimize the possibility of labor organizing.31

Many white elites in Hawai‘i, frustrated by both these demographic changes and the fact that this nonwhite labor force resisted oppression through organizing, attempted to bring white settlers into the islands. Encouraged by a German physician who had lived many years in the Kingdom of Hawai‘i, Portuguese people began to arrive in the islands in 1878 with nearly

25,000 total arriving in the islands in the late nineteenth century.32 Even as they excluded the

Portuguese from white status in the islands, white elites have presented the Portuguese to the world at large as white, in order to make Hawai‘i appear to be a whiter place.33 Other groups were more prized by local haole elites. For example, a few thousand Scottish people immigrated to Hawai‘i over the last half of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth century. White plantation owners often enticed these immigrants through offers of high paying managerial positions at sugar plantations.34 These positions were almost entirely off limits to non-haoles. Workers accorded “white status” avoided doing fieldwork, which was difficult, demeaning, and reserved almost exclusively for Asians.35

White elites’ efforts to make Hawai‘i into a white space were constant and varied. Just after American annexation, sugar planters informed the territorial government that they were

“willing without reserve to employ all the Caucasian workers the government can bring to the

31 Ibid., 31. 32 Jim Tranquada and John King, The ': A History (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai'i Press, 2012), 34- 36. Pukiki: the Portuguese-Americans of Hawai'i. Directed by Luis Proença. Hope Media Productions, 2003. 33 Judy Rohrer, Haoles in Hawaiʻi (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2010), 40 and 55-56. 34 Rhoda E. A. Hackler, ed. The Story of Scots in Hawaiʻi (Honolulu, Hawaiʻi: Caledonian Society of Hawaiʻi, 2001), 115-116. 35 Carol A. MacLennan, Sovereign Sugar: Industry and Environment in Hawaii (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2014), 197-198. 39 islands, at a wage one-third larger” than what they paid to Asian workers.36 One result of this push culminated in the Hawaiian Board of Immigration deceiving about 1,500 Russians as to their prospects of land ownership upon immigrating to the islands. Upon discovery of this duplicity, few of these Russians remained in Hawai‘i.37 Another haole elite scheme involved grants of land to white settlers. Shortly after the illegal overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy, one of the architects of the coup, Sanford B. Dole, became president of the Republic of Hawai‘i and devised an idea to attract thirty white farming families to Hawai‘i by dividing 1,800 acres in central O‘ahu, known as Wahiawā, amongst them.38 As Wahiawā sits inland and at about 900 feet above sea level, its climate differs slightly from many sugar plantations. This fact was used to uphold previous claims that white people were “constitutionally and temperamentally unfitted” for sugar plantation manual labor while they simultaneously beckoned white settlers with the claim that “the climate of Wahiawa is peculiarly adapted for white men to labor in.”39

In spite of the fact that the white oligarchy that overthrew the Queen “backed the Wahiawa settlement, fought its battles, assisted its members in every possible way,” the white settlers of

Wahiawa returned to the continental US with only one original settler remaining in 1939.40

36 Alina Simone, “For a Group of Siberians, Hawaii Was Far from a Tropical Paradise,” Public Radio International, January 28, 2015, accessed November 21, 2019, https://www.pri.org/stories/2015-01- 28/group-siberians-hawaii-was-far-being-tropical-paradise 37 Ibid. 38 “Wahiawa History,” The Honolulu Advertiser, February 20, 1939, page 10. 39 “Diversified Agriculture,” The Honolulu Advertiser, January 17, 1902, page 9. 40 “Wahiawa History,” The Honolulu Advertiser, February 20, 1939, page 10. Among the names listed in this article of the “businessmen of Honolulu” who championed the white settlement are both Sanford B. Dole and Lorrin A. Thurston, two of the architects of the overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom. 40

US military expansion in the islands brought an influx of southern US racism.41 This is well-reflected in the opening line of an article entitled, “Hawaiians are Relaxed” from the April

26, 1937 LIFE Magazine, “Hawaii, like the southern U.S., is a place where the white American is a ruling race.”42 This article sits in the middle of three Hawai‘i themed works in this issue. The preceding work, titled “Hawaii Makes the U.S. an Empire: The U.S. Gets the Profits and the

Alien Races Have the Fun,” proudly celebrates the fact that the U.S. occupation of Hawai‘i confirms the fact that the U.S. is an imperial power.43 The concluding article, “White Man’s

Hawaii,” lauds the fact that “U.S. business men have done a good business job in Hawaii.”44

American racism increasingly affected life in the islands. Writing in 1945, Shirley Abe argued, “The very fact that discrimination toward the Negroes in Hawaii, has so quickly become standardized and is like that of the Mainland is an indication that it is a carry-over from the continental United States.”45 That carry-over has a long history and examples of anti-blackness abound in the history of Hawai‘i. Lloyd L. Lee, writing in 1948, described a social ladder in

Hawai‘i which places haoles at the top with other races at lower rungs and facing increased racism. Lee argued that black residents faced even more racism in the islands than Filipinos, who were generally considered to be at the bottom of the islands’ racial hierarchy.46

41 David E. Stannard, Honor Killing: How the Infamous "Massie Affair" Transformed Hawai'i (New York, NY: Viking, 2005), 1. 42 “Hawaiians are Relaxed,” LIFE Magazine, April 26, 1937, page 46. 43 “Hawaii Makes the U.S. an Empire: The U.S. Gets the Profits and the Alien Races Have the Fun,” LIFE Magazine, April 26, 1937, page 40. 44 “White Man’s Hawaii,” LIFE Magazine, April 26, 1937, page 49. 45 Shirley Abe, “Violations of the Racial Code in Hawaii,” Social Process in Hawaii, Volume IX-X, July 1945: 36. 46 Lloyd L. Lee, “A Brief Analysis of the Role and Status of the Negro in the Hawaiian Community,” American Sociological Review, Vol. 13, No. 4 (August 1948): 420-421. 41

Anti-blackness was evident in the islands long before the 1940s. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, discussion emerged in the islands about importing black laborers from the American South. In 1897, The Friend writes of the proposal that

negroes…removed from the controlling and civilizing influence of the white race, and placed in a tropical climate will simply deteriorate like the population of Hayti…Let the posterity of the native Hawaiians breed upwards into higher grades, not downwards to be condemned as “n-----s.” [n-word appears in original]47

In 1903, The Hawaiian Planters’ Monthly responds to the possibility of black laborers living in the islands,

Hawaii will never tolerate any scheme that aims at colonizing them here. Our native Hawaiians are a different race entirely, and are capable of becoming assimilated in all branches of modern civilization with Anglo-Saxons; but, with negroes as a class— never.48

In spite of abundant evidence of a long history of anti-blackness in the islands, the annexationists’ and tourism industry’s myth of Hawai‘i as a racial paradise was so powerful that during World War II, the initial attempts to establish an NAACP branch in Hawai‘i were dismissed by continental US NAACP officials who believed the islands to be virtually free of racism.49

The injustices of the Kahahawai/Massie incidents in the early 1930s temporarily shattered the racial paradise myth. In 1931, Thalia Massie, a white woman, accused five nonwhite locals of rape. Although the evidence overwhelmingly indicates their innocence, the men went to trial, which ended in a hung jury. In response, Massie’s family and friends

47 “Proposed Negro Settlement Undesirable,” The Friend, Honolulu, Vol 55, September 1897, page 71. 48 As quoted in Merze Tate, “Decadence of the Hawaiian Nation and Proposals to Import a Negro Labor Force,” The Journal of Negro History, Vol. XLVII, No. 4 (October 1962): 262-263. 49 Albert S. Broussard, “The Honolulu NAACP and Race Relations in Hawai‘i,” The Hawaiian Journal of History 39 (2005): 115-33. 42 kidnapped and murdered one of the accused, Joseph Kahahawai. The white killers were convicted of manslaughter, but sentenced to an hour in the governor’s office and then freed.50

The alarmist national press coverage of the Kahahawai/Massie incidents of 1931-1932 had convinced much of the American public that Hawai‘i was a dangerous place for white people due to the aggression by non-white population. This was precisely the opposite image that the haole elite wished to promote.51 The marketing for an emerging industry provided these white elites with a way to remedy this image problem.

The Emergence of Tourism

The colonial capitalist economy began a long slow shift in focus that started in the late nineteenth century and progressed throughout the twentieth. The government of the Kingdom of Hawai‘i began promoting the islands as a tourist destination in the 1870s by distributing photographs to exhibitions in North America and Europe.52 Newspaper editor Henry M.

Whitney, born on Kaua‘i to missionary parents in 1824, published the first tourist guide to the islands in 1875, titled The Hawaiian Guidebook for Travelers.53 In 1888, King Kalākaua granted a royal charter for the publication of Paradise of the Pacific, a monthly magazine intended to encourage tourism to the Kingdom based around the idea that Hawai‘i was a health resort.54

King Kalākaua’s motivation to promote tourism primarily came from a desire to diversify the economy of the Kingdom, but Lorrin A. Thurston and many other haole elites during this period

50 Stannard, Honor Killing. 51 Arvin, 98. 52 Mak, 18. 53 Ibid., 18. Silva, 55. Whitney published a second, expanded guidebook in 1890 titled The Tourists’ Guide through the Hawaiian Islands. 54 Mak, 18. 43 saw tourism as a means to entice white settlers to live in the islands and this objective increasingly became the impetus to building the industry.55

Lorrin A. Thurston, who was to become one of the 1893 overthrow’s principal architects, was a major advocate of tourism from the 1890s through his death in 1931.56 In

1892, Thurston, already a member of an organization called the Annexation Club, created an agency to promote tourism called the Hawaiian Bureau of Information (HBI).57 According to an

1892 pamphlet titled, The Hawaiian Bureau of Information. The Objects and Proposed Basis of

Organization the objective of HBI was

to encourage and induce tourist travel; the immigration of desirable population; the settlement of the country; the creation of new industries; to encourage the establishment of hotels, sanitariums and other resorts in the Hawaiian Islands for the entertainment of tourists, the care of invalids and others seeking recreation or health.58

The HBI did not have much success in its promotion of tourism. In 1903, Thurston replaced the

HBI with another agency, that will be discussed later in the chapter, that oversaw the industry as it grew significantly.59

The overthrow of the monarchy and the subsequent scramble by those responsible to convince the USA to annex Hawai‘i, prompted the annexationists to ramp up their efforts at mythmaking and tourism to bolster their cause. In 1892, Thurston became president of the

Volcano House Company that managed the Volcano House hotel on Hawai‘i Island.60 Thurston

55 Ibid., 23-24. 56 Ibid., 21-22. Robert C. Allen’s book celebrating the white people who built the tourism industry in Hawai‘i credits Thurston as the person who built the foundation.- Robert C. Allen, Creating Hawai'i Tourism: A Memoir (Honolulu, HI: Bess Press, 2004), 196. 57 Skwiot, 38. 58 As quoted in Mak, 20. 59 Mak, 20. 60 Ibid., 22 44 spearheaded the design an elaborate exhibition for the 1893 World’s Colombian Exposition in

Chicago, Illinois. This exhibition was funded by the Volcano House Company along with private investors.61 This exhibition’s primary attractions were a volcano cyclorama and a musical ensemble called the Volcano Singers, who performed in a new style called hula ku‘i that included quite recent Western influences.62 Thurston had included the Volcano Singers largely because the ’s refusal to participate because of their loyalty to the recently deposed Queen. Christine Skwiot notes that Thurston instructed the ensemble to perform

“patriotic U.S. tunes, intended to demonstrate the success of the conversion of heathens to

Christianity and civilization and paper over the fact that virtually all Native Hawaiians opposed annexation.”63 Thurston’s exhibition celebrated the efforts of New England Missionaries in

Hawai‘i and lobbied for annexation to the USA all while distributing pamphlets encouraging white people to visit the islands as tourists and to consider relocating their families as settlers to the islands.64 After the Chicago Exposition concluded, the cyclorama exhibition continued to serve Thurston’s purposes as it toured the US continent as a feature at many fairs and expositions throughout the country.65 The cyclorama exhibit marked the first prominent use of

Hawaiian music to further the interests of American empire.

Nearly two decades later, the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition in San Francisco functioned as one of the most successful early efforts for promoting tourism to Hawai‘i in large part due to its mobilization of hapa haole music, which was considered accessible to listeners

61 “The Cyclorama,” The Honolulu Advertiser, Saturday, April 15, 1893, page 5. 62 Tranquada and King, 55-56. 63 Skwiot, 40. 64 Ibid. 65 “Hawaii on the Coast,” The Hawaiian Star, Wednesday, September 6, 1893, page 5. 45 who were unfamiliar with Hawai‘i and Hawaiian music. According to Elizabeth Tatar, hapa haole songs were rather new at the time and “created to incorporate current musical trends on the mainland and adapted to hula ku‘i melodies, were probably the initial musical responses of

Hawaiians to the tastes of American tourists.”66 Jim Tranquada and John King argue that the grim global climate created by the First World War contributed to the massive acclaim of the

Hawaiian Building at San Francisco’s 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition. Hawaiian music and dancing provided a joyful escape from the gloom of the war and this historical context provided a springboard for both the promotion of tourism and the value of Hawaiian music as a commodity of commercial culture.67

The tourism industry utilized hula, which elites had previously worked to suppress, in tandem with music. Noenoe K. Silva argues that while it is to believe that the late nineteenth century suppression of hula was motivated by Christian desires to repress sexuality, in actuality, the desire to establish colonial capitalism motivated the suppression of the hula.

She demonstrates that proponents of banning the hula consistently argued that hula diminished the willingness of Kānaka Maoli to labor on sugar plantations.68 Just after the overthrow of the Monarchy, many colonial capitalists had a change of heart on the hula. In an early twentieth century account of the history of tourism in Hawai‘i, the author writes that island businessmen realized that “to insure a steady flow of tourists it was necessary

66 Elizabeth Tatar, Strains of Change: The Impact of Tourism on Hawaiian Music (Honolulu: Press, 1987), 11. 67 Tranquada and King, 97-98. 68 Noenoe K. Silva, “He Kānāwai E Ho'opau I Na Hula Kuolo Hawai'i: The Political Economy of Banning the Hula,” The Hawaiian Journal of History 34 (2000): 29-48. 46 to…broadcast the witchery of Hawaii’s native life.”69 Silva notes that lawmakers eased restrictions on the hula in 1896, when they turned their attention to promoting tourism and believed that certain forms of hula could be valuable to that cause.70

The fact that the tourism industry has embraced hula does not mean that hula performers embrace the colonialism that drove tourism. Adria L. Imada argues that hula performers engage in “counter-colonial tactics.”71 For example, during the 1890s when restrictions on hula were being eased, troupes worked at major expositions across the US where annexationists promoted their agenda to American audiences while hula troupes performed pieces that honored the deposed queen and sold photos of her along with her sheet music.72 In addition to hula providing opportunities to resist colonialism, Imada argues that hula offered opportunities for colonial subjects to exploit colonialism for personal betterment.

She notes that for more than one hundred years, hula has provided women with opportunities that would likely not otherwise be available to them.73 Throughout the book, she provides examples of women utilizing this avenue for enrichments ranging from extensive international travel to substantial economic betterment. This is also true of the musicians that will be discussed in later chapters.

After Hawai‘i became an American territory at the turn of the twentieth century, the territorial government along with various private interests intensified the promotion of

69 As quoted in Tatar, 7. 70 Nanette Naioma Napoleon, “Hula's Outlaw Past: An Integral Part of Daily Life until 1820, Hula Was Restricted for 76 Years,” Honolulu Star-Bulletin, April 16, 2006. 71 Adria L. Imada, Aloha America: Hula Circuits through the U.S. Empire (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), 17. 72 Ibid., 101-102. 73 Ibid., 19. 47 tourism.74 The Merchants’ Association and the Honolulu Chamber of Commerce collaborated to form the Hawaii Promotion Committee (HPC) in 1903.75 This organization changed its name to the Hawaii Tourist Bureau in 1919, then to the Hawaii Visitors Bureau in 1945, and ultimately to the Hawaii Visitors and Convention Bureau, the name under which it continues today.76

Lorrin A. Thurston spearheaded the effort to create the HPC and headed the organization.77

The HPC’s mission was to

advertise the attractions of the Territory of Hawaii, promote tourist travel, disseminate literature and, by correspondence with tourist agencies, steamship and railroad companies, endeavor to enlist their aid and assistance in directing travelers and tourists to the Territory.78

Territorial Governor Sanford B. Dole convinced the Territorial Legislature to match the $15,000 contribution from the business community to the HPC. This organization was far more effective than its predecessor, the HBI. The HPC gained political traction and, by 1906, both the

Republican and Democratic parties prioritized its funding within their platforms. The Territorial

Legislature funded the HPC biennially and steadily increased the amount allocated for the agency topping out its pre-World War II funding for 1937 to 1939 at $175,000.79 It is of note that this most highly funded biennium was also the first to follow the global sensation caused by Hawaii Calls. In fact, the organization’s website notes, “The Bureau took part in many promotional activities over the years, but the most enduring and successful was launched in

74 Mak, 43-60. 75 Ibid., 27. 76 “History,” Hawaii Visitors and Convention Bureau, Accessed November 29, 2019, https://www.hvcb.org/corporate/history.htm 77 Mak, 22. 78 Ibid., 27-28. 79 Ibid., 29-30. 48

1935 as the radio program, Hawaii Calls…Listeners grew up with the sounds of Hawaii from that popular show and developed lifelong desires to see and hear the real thing.”80

Transportation, the Built Environment, and Tourism

One of the hidden histories of racism in the United States lies in the loss of neighborhoods and the support structures they provided to communities of color. —George Lipsitz81

Throughout this period of growth in the funding for the promotion of tourism, transportation improved greatly. In 1861, it took sailing ships over fourteen days on average to travel the nearly 2,400 miles from San Francisco to Honolulu. By the 1880s, steamships could complete the voyage in seven days and the fastest ships of the 1930s could make the trip in just over four days.82 The Matson Company played a central role in the rise of tourism in Hawai‘i.

The vast majority of tourists who visited the islands before 1941 arrived via Matson ships. In

1908, Matson added a new ship to their fleet that could transport up to fifty-one passengers to

Honolulu. Only nineteen years later tourism to the islands had increased to the point that the company debuted the 693-passenger luxury liner S. S. Malolo in 1927.83 To capitalize on the investment in this passenger ship, Matson turned its attention to enticing tourists to use these ships to travel to Hawai‘i.

80 “History,” Hawaii Visitors and Convention Bureau, Accessed November 29, 2019, https://www.hvcb.org/corporate/history.htm 81 George Lipsitz, Footsteps in the Dark: The Hidden Histories of Popular Music (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 108. 82 Mak, 9 and 51. Mak also notes that journeys by steamships were more consistent in length whereas the nineteenth century sailing vessels took anywhere from eight to twenty-four days to make the journey from San Francisco to Honolulu. 83 “About Us - History,” Matson, accessed November 23, 2019, http://www.matson.com/corporate/about_us/history.html. Mak, 51. 49

In 1925, Matson decided that a luxury hotel and a golf course would attract tourists and planned to open both to coincide with the debut of the S. S. Malolo. Matson became a major stockholder in the Territorial Hotel Company that owned the Moana Hotel (built in 1901 and located on Waikīkī Beach) and the Seaside Hotel (built in 1906 and also located on Waikīkī

Beach). The Territorial Hotel Company razed the Seaside in 1925 and, in 1927, replaced it with the Royal Hawaiian Hotel and at the same time opened the Waialae Golf Club.84 By the late

1920s, Matson largely controlled the Moana Hotel, Royal Hawaiian Hotel, and Waialae Golf

Club and these three spots reigned throughout the 1930s as the most prestigious venues for hapa haole dance orchestras. In September 1933, the Territorial Hotel Company filed for bankruptcy and Matson gained full ownership of these properties.85 By the dawn of the 1930s,

Matson’s investment in tourism was immense.86 Between 1930 and 1932, Matson added three other ships comparable in speed and capacity to the S. S. Malolo: Lurline, Mariposa, and

Monterey. These four ships became well-known as Matson’s “White Ships” and brought the vast majority of tourists to Hawai‘i in the 1930s.87

84 Thomas Kemper Hitch and Mary Ishii Kuramoto, Waialae Country Club: The First Half Century (Honolulu, HI: Waialae Country Club, 1981), 9. Don Hibbard and David Franzen, The View from Diamond Head: Royal Residence to Urban Resort (Honolulu, HI: Editions Limited, 1987), 62-63. Mak, 28. 85 Hitch and Kuramoto, 11. 86 The Moana Hotel is on the National Register of Historic Places and the Hawai‘i Register of Historic Places.- "Asset Detail: Moana Hotel," National Parks Service, accessed November 24, 2019, https://npgallery.nps.gov/AssetDetail/NRIS/72000417. The Alexander Young Building was on the National Register and the State Register.-Don Hibbard, "In Memoriam: The Alexander Young Building," Hawaii Architect, November 1981, 6 and Kenneth L. Ames, On Bishop Street: Avenue of Hawai‘i Pioneers (Honolulu, HI: First Hawaiian Bank, 1996), 178. The Royal Hawaiian Hotel and Waialae Country Club are on neither register. 87 Duncan OBrien, The White Ships: Matson Line to Hawaii, New Zealand, Australia via Samoa, Fiji, 1927-1978 (Victoria, BC: Pier 19 Media, 2008), 14. 50

In 1903, the von Hamm-Young Company built the Alexander Young Hotel in downtown

Honolulu rather than in Waikīkī. This venue, which housed the HPC offices, ranked as the fourth most prestigious hapa haole dance venue throughout the 1930s. This hotel was the only premier venue not owned by Matson.88

The desire to encourage white visitors and settlers and the increasing financial gains in the tourism industry prompted the destruction and subsequent rebuilding of Waikīkī and downtown Honolulu. Tourism advocates in Hawai‘i were well aware that as a destination for tourists, the islands faced competition. Depending on which part of the continental US a visitor called home, a trip to Hawai‘i took as long or longer than a voyage to Europe. Europe had an entire continent to offer visitors along with wealthy residents and large numbers of wealthy visitors. Only the wealthy could afford vacations to places such as Hawai‘i and Europe in the early twentieth century not only due to the expense of travel, but also because the duration of the voyages required lengthy absences from gainful employment. The opportunity to network with or just be seen with other wealthy people provided a powerful motivation to wealthy travelers of the day. Tourism advocates in Hawai‘i recognized that they needed to construct a place that would appeal to these white elites’ desires in order to compete in a global tourism industry.89 This resulted in downtown Honolulu and Waikīkī having built environments that projected whiteness on many levels.

88 “Alexander Young Hotel’s Founders; Anniversary Celebration Tonight,” Honolulu Star-Bulletin, July 31, 1935, page 14. 89 Stan Cohen, The Pink Palace: The Royal Hawaiian Hotel, A Sheraton Hotel in Hawaii (Missoula, MT: Pictorial Histories Pub. Co., 1986), 16. 51

Throughout the first three decades of the twentieth century, elites transformed Waikīkī from a muliwai, agricultural marshland that nurtured Kānaka Maoli and Asian families to a resort playground for wealthy whites (both visitors and island residents). Aided by the streams that flowed down from the Ko‘olau Mountains, Kānaka Maoli had converted Waikīkī into a productive site of both agriculture and aquaculture by the fifteenth century.90 Also, into the early twentieth century, many royal residences of ali‘i dotted the area. As the processes of dispossession and the epidemics of foreign disease progressed, fewer and fewer Kānaka Maoli lived in Waikīkī. The last of the royal families remaining in Waikīkī left in 1922.91

This built environment in downtown Honolulu and Waikīkī that emerged in the 1920s and 1930s replaced important physical features of the Kingdom Era and in doing so, communicated to residents of the islands an enduring statement of American imperial power.

Architectural historian Adrian Tinniswood argues that architecture is four-dimensional design and that the fourth dimension is time in that the built environment endures often for generations. Tinniswood argues that while enduring, architecture reinforces imperial power by unifying diverse geographies much in the same way that language serves this imperial goal. He also notes that architecture “creates a sense of awe and an image of power.”92 The architectural styles appearing in this new built environment speak to European and American ideas of tropical elegance.

90 Gaye Chan and Andrea Feeser, Waikīkī: A History of Forgetting and Remembering (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2006), 5, 25, and 43. 91 Hibbard and Franzen, 38. 92 “Architecture and Power,” In Our Time, October 31, 2002, accessed August 1, 2020, https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00548k0 52

The opening volley in the destruction and reconstruction of Waikīkī occurred with the construction of this area’s first luxury hotel, which occurred in the immediate wake of annexation. Oliver G. Traphagen, a renowned architect, moved his family from Duluth,

Minnesota, to Honolulu in October 1897. He only remained in the islands for nine years, but in that time designed many prestigious buildings including the Moana Hotel.93 The building was completed in 1901 at a cost of $150,000.94 The original structure remains today, but the modern incarnation has been greatly expanded. Regarding the building’s style The Pacific

Commercial Advertiser writes, “O.G. Traphagen, the architect of the building, spent much time in studying the features of colonial architecture best adapted to the climate of the Hawaiian

Islands. The building was designed for Honolulu alone. It was difficult to adhere to any strict method of architecture for such a climate and there is no hotel on the face of the globe which is similar in outline.”95 The Evening Bulletin reports that the Moana Hotel celebrated its March

11, 1901 opening with “specially invited guests” including “representatives of the English speaking newspapers of the city.” The article highlights the beauty of the roof garden that “is lighted at night by a mass of red, white, and blue lights” and notes that the Van Praag & Sharp

Orchestra performed a selection of European and American pieces concluding with “The Stars and Stripes Forever.”96 This music builds on a tradition established with the Volcano Singers in

Chicago in 1893, built on again by the Harry Owens’ composition “Hawaii is the fiftieth star in

93 Glenn E. Mason, "Oliver G. Traphagen, FAIA 1897-1907 In Hawaii," Hawaii Architect, December 1980, 6-7 and 24. 94 Derek Paiva, “A Look Back at Hawaiʻi's Earliest, Most Historic Hotels,” Hawaii Magazine, December 23, 2016. Accessed November 29, 2019. https://www.hawaiimagazine.com/content/look-back-hawaiis-earliest- most-historic-hotels 95 “The Moana Hotel Opened Last Evening with Glitter and Good Cheer,” The Pacific Commercial Advertiser (Honolulu, HI), March 12, 1901, 2. 96 “Moana Magnificent in Tasteful Luxury,” The Evening Bulletin (Honolulu, HI), March 12, 1901, 3. 53 the U.S.A.” that is quoted to open the chapter, and this practice continues to the present day: the packaging of American patriotic messaging into entertainment industry commodities to obscure imperial endeavors.97

The Alexander Young Hotel, the next major piece of construction designed to lure visitors to the islands, was completed in 1903 outside of Waikīkī in downtown Honolulu. The

Pacific Commercial Advertiser predicted that, along with the Moana Hotel, the Alexander Young would “draw tourists here by assuring them of all the hotel comforts that can be found on the mainland” and that this will bring Honolulu “special benefits.”98 This hotel was built on Bishop

Street, which is a prominent downtown thoroughfare in modern Honolulu that did not exist prior to Hawai‘i becoming a US territory in 1900.99 During the period of the Hawaiian Kingdom, modern day Bishop Street was primarily a residential neighborhood filled with significant buildings including Haleʻākala, which had been the childhood home of Queen Lili‘uokalani and later became the home of Princess Bernice Pauahi Bishop and her husband Charles Reed

Bishop. Haleʻākala was demolished in 1900 and the Alexander Young Hotel was built over the space it had occupied on the mauka-Diamond Head corner of Bishop Street and King Street.

This was part of the greater project of the making of Bishop Street. In the same year that

Hawai‘i became a US territory, significant Kingdom of Hawai‘i buildings were demolished and this street named for haole elite Charles Reed Bishop was constructed in their place. In the years that followed, this street became lined with massive buildings named for haole elites,

97 The 2010 reboot of the television series Hawaii Five-0 is a particularly audacious example of this phenomenon. 98 “Hotels and Tourists,” The Pacific Commercial Advertiser (Honolulu, HI), July 25, 1903, 4. 99 Kenneth L. Ames, On Bishop Street: Avenue of Hawai‘i Pioneers (Honolulu, HI: First Hawaiian Bank, 1996), xi. 54 many of whom had participated in the illegal overthrow of the Queen, whose childhood home gave way to their monuments in the rebuilding of this neighborhood.100 Like the destruction of agricultural Waikīkī, the reconstruction of Honolulu’s downtown in the wake of the illegal overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom served the purposes on haole elite while coming at great cost to Kānaka Maoli.

American architects employed European styles of architecture in much of this emerging built environment and the Alexander Young Hotel served as an example of this phenomenon.

Alexander Young hired Oakland architect George W. Percy to design his hotel, but Percy died in

1900 shortly after completing his designs.101 As a result of Percy’s untimely death, Young hired

Oliver G. Traphagen to serve as supervising architect for the construction process. Glenn E.

Mason believes it likely that Traphagen “made some significant contribution to the design of the Alexander Young Hotel.”102 The hotel was enormous, cost over two million dollars to build, and tourists often mistakenly believed it to be a palace.103 Kenneth L. Ames describes it as “a colossal urban palace in the Italian Renaissance Style.”104

The “special benefits” that The Pacific Commercial Advertiser argued that wealthy white visitors and settlers could bring to Hawai‘i were very much on the minds of island politicians and businessmen. By 1906, the investment in the Moana Hotel signaled the fact that a plan to convert the demographics of Waikīkī was in motion. At that time, eighty-five percent of

100 Ibid., 1-19. 101 Don J. Hibbard, Designing Paradise: The Allure of the Hawaiian Resort (New York, NY: Princeton Architectural Press, 2006), 33. Some sources list Percy as a San Francisco architect. He lived in Oakland and maintained an office in San Francisco.-Alan Michelson, "George Washington Percy," Pacific Coast Architecture Database (PCAD), accessed November 25, 2019, http://pcad.lib.washington.edu/person/2004/. 102 Mason, 10 and 24. 103 Don Hibbard, "In Memoriam: The Alexander Young Building," Hawaii Architect, November 1981, 6. 104 Ames, 27. 55 modern Waikīkī was underwater and that water was utilized by Native Hawaiian and Asian families for their systems of agriculture and aquaculture.105 Powerful haoles decided that the physical transformation of Waikīkī could bring about their desired demographic shift along with creating valuable new real estate. Lucius E. Pinkham, president of the territorial Board of

Health, issued the following statement in 1906, which acknowledged and advocated an existing

American system of displacing poor people of color,

Honolulu desires a population, omitting the consideration of agriculturists, such as has made Los Angeles and other towns of Southern California what they are. Persons and residents of private fortune, who seek an agreeable climate and surroundings, and who expend large already acquired incomes rather than those who expect the community to furnish them the opportunity of earning a livelihood and even that of the accumulation of wealth.

Such persons as we seek desire to find attractive and charming residential districts free from all objectionable features and neighbors. In all cities of refinement such districts exist, and from the residents thereof come the lavish expenditure and patronage that make the general prosperity of the merchants and all classes dependent on their own exertions.

Waikiki, to the extent the beach front will permit, is the choice part of the city of Honolulu, for it offers the close attraction of the sea. The land bordering on the sea commands high prices and little can be secured.106

In this document, Pinkham proposed the creation of a canal to remove water from the area and create high priced commercial and residential real estate. Pinkham and his allies claimed that the agricultural systems in place in Waikīkī were a public health hazard, in particular due to mosquitos breeding in the fresh water. Little evidence supports the health

105 Hibbard and Franzen, 86. Chan and Feeser, 25. 106 L. E. Pinkham, Reclamation of the Waikiki District of the City of Honolulu, Territory of Hawaii: Recommendations, Maps, Plans and Specifications (Honolulu: Hawaiian Gazette Co., Ltd., 1906), 7. Pinkham acknowledges that “agriculturists” also known as plantation owners do not wholly agree with his strategy. This is because the plantation owners’ business model depended upon poor immigrants for labor and upon keeping those immigrants poor to compel them to remain part of the plantation labor force. In 1913, Pinkham was appointed Governor of the Territory of Hawai‘i and remained in that post until 1918. 56 hazard claim whereas the racist and economic motivations are well-documented. Walter S.

Dillingham, who once testified to the United States Congress that “God made the white race to rule and the colored to be ruled,” had been a prominent supporter of the project from its earliest stages.107 Dillingham’s Hawaiian Dredging Company was awarded the job of constructing the canal.108

Construction on the Ala Wai Canal began in 1921 and was completed in 1928 and forced many resentful people from their homes.109 In April 1924, the canal had reached the home of

Mrs. Haalou Paia, described by The Honolulu Advertiser as “the last Hawaiian Waikiki kuleana.”

Mrs. Paia’s ancestors Chief Kamualii and his wife Kaaikuala along with their children Luluu and

Kailiuli were buried in the path of the canal dredger. She dressed in a black holoku and witnessed the exhumation of her ancestors, who were reburied at Kawaiaha‘o cemetery. Mrs.

Paia and her family demonstrated their reluctance to leave their home by remaining in it “until the dredge was literally at their door.”110

The original plans for the canal linked to the ocean at both ends, so that it could flush and not become a polluted health hazard.111 These plans were abandoned upon the discovery that ocean currents would spread debris flushed on the Kapahulu end of the canal on to Waikīkī beach. Thus, the canal builders chose to create a health hazard rather than burden the area’s resorts, tourists, and wealthy residents. Essentially these haole elites used dubious claims that

107 Stannard, Honor Killing, 1-2. 108 Chan and Feeser, 25. 109 Chan and Feeser, 26-27. 110 “Bones of Hawaiian Chief Reverently Exhumed For Improvement in Waikiki,” The Honolulu Advertiser, April 16, 1924, page 1. 111 Hibbard and Franzen, 212. 57 existing food production systems created an unhealthy environment as a justification to create a canal so polluted that falling into it can be deadly.112

The pinnacle piece in the transformation of Waikīkī occurred in the construction of the

Royal Hawaiian Hotel. On March 16, 1925, the Matson Company announced that a new luxury hotel would be constructed in Waikīkī at a cost of two million dollars. A month later, Matson hired world renowned New York architects Warren & Wetmore to build that hotel and purchased 600 acres of the Waialae Ranch with the intention of converting that land into a golf course for use by the hotel guests.113 The Royal Hawaiian Hotel was built on eighteen acres along Waikīkī beach that had been a royal garden dating back to before Kamehameha captured

O‘ahu in 1795. In order for construction to commence, Princess Kawānanakoa signed documents that lifted the kapu on the land.114 Charles D. Wetmore served as primary designer on the luxury hotel project as he did with his firm’s other hotels.115 Peter Pennoyer and Anne

Walker write that of the Warren & Wetmore resorts, the Royal Hawaiian “was the most distinctive.”116 The architects followed through on Matson’s goal to create luxury as they hired famous landscape architect R. T. Stevens to transform the grounds and imported building materials from Persia, Spain, Italy, and Holland to create the hotel’s ornate interior.117 Don J.

112 “Ala Wai Canal - Hawaii's Biggest Mistake? Historical Photos and an Interview with Historian DeSoto Brown Tell the Story of the Ala Wai Canal,” Honolulu Civil Beat, October 29, 2015. Accessed November 29, 2019. https://www.civilbeat.org/2013/05/19082-video-ala-wai-canal-hawaiis-biggest-mistake/ 113 “Hotel Project was Announced in 1925,” Honolulu Star-Bulletin, January 31, 1927, 9. 114 "Royal Hawaiian Hotel Is Eight Years Old On Feb. 1," Honolulu Star-Bulletin, January 25, 1935, 8. The Seaside Hotel had become an icon in the nineteen years that it operated. Don Hibbard describes it as “Waikīkī’s most glorious cottage style hotel.” It sat on a small portion of the eighteen acres that the Royal Hawaiian Hotel resort was built upon.-Hibbard and Franzen, 64. 115 Peter Pennoyer and Anne Walker, The Architecture of Warren & Wetmore (New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company, 2006), 118. 116 Ibid., 213. 117 Ibid., 216. 58

Hibbard describes the hotel as “a highly competent, albeit rather straight-forward, Spanish

Colonial building.”118 By the time the resort was completed in 1927, the final cost of construction was four million dollars.119

On February 1, 1927, the hotel celebrated its opening with a dinner attended by 1,200 guests and a ball with 1,800 guests that exemplified the effort to recreate Waikīkī as a white space.120 That evening, the hotel held a ceremony to honor , longtime director of the Royal Hawaiian Band who came to Hawai‘i from his native Germany in 1872 to lead that band. For the occasion, Berger also conducted a performance by the Royal Hawaiian Band.121

Stan Cohen writes of this evening, “With the exception of Princess Abigail Kawananakoa and a few other native Hawaiians, the party was a strictly Caucasian affair.”122

Matson hoped its two Waikīkī hotels would tap into separate high-end markets as the company viewed the Royal Hawaiian as providing “elegance and service” and the Moana as catering to those who desired “Old World hospitality” in a less formal setting.123 DeSoto Brown describes the Royal Hawaiian as an innovative hotel in that previous hotels aimed only to offer

“bed and board in pleasant surroundings.”124 Matson hired the Von Hamm-Young Company in

1927 to construct a massive refrigeration plant for the newly constructed Royal Hawaiian Hotel in Waikiki. The plant had many purposes that added to a luxury experience in the tropics, in

118 Hibbard, Designing Paradise, 41. 119 Cohen, 24. 120 "Royal Hawaiian Hotel Is Eight Years Old On Feb. 1," Honolulu Star-Bulletin, January 25, 1935, 8. 121 “Berger to be Honored at Opening of Hotel,” Honolulu Star-Bulletin, January 31, 1927, 12. 122 Cohen, 42. 123 Mak, 51. 124 DeSoto Brown, Hawaii Recalls (Honolulu, HI: Editions Limited, 1982), 98. 59 particular Honolulu Star-Bulletin notes that the plant could produce six tons of ice per day.125

Brown writes that the Royal Hawaiian offered many recreational options including souvenir shops, tennis, badminton, croquet, archery, “wee golf” on the hotel grounds, and traditional golf at the affiliated Waialae Golf Club. Live music and dancing were available at the golf club as well as the hotel.126

Shortly after Hawaii Calls began its run in 1935, statehood advocates quite directly utilized the Waialae Golf Club and the Royal Hawaiian to achieve their goal. In 1937, the US

Congress held hearings on the possibility of statehood for the islands. As part of this process,

Congress sent a special committee headed by Representative John Conover Nichols of

Oklahoma to Hawai‘i.127 While in the islands, the Voice of Labor reported that “The Senators and Congressmen…will be entertained at the Royal Hawaiian, at the Waialae Club, at the homes of the ‘big shots.’”128

The Moana Hotel, the Alexander Young Hotel, and the Royal Hawaiian Hotel functioned as internationally recognized beacons for tourists through appearing in various commodities and other promotional items, but most notably by serving as the most common venues for the radio show Hawaii Calls as the show’s popularity exploded during its first two years on the air.

125 “Ice Facilities in Hotel Amply Taken Care Of,” Honolulu Star-Bulletin, January 31, 1927, 12. The article notes that the director of the von Hamm-Young company was R. Alex Anderson. Anderson was grandson to hotel owner Alexander Young and he was born in Honolulu in 1894. He became a well-known hapa hoale composer, most famously penning “” along with “Lovely Hula Hands” (discussed in the introduction).-"R. Alex Anderson," in Spectrum Hawaii, Hawaii Public Television, 1989. UH Mānoa Streaming Video. In 1977, Anderson wrote a song called “Waialae” in honor of the Waialae Golf Club.- Hitch and Kuramoto, 146. The Von Hamm-Young Company also owned the Alexander Young Hotel. 126 Brown, 98. 127 Saranillio, 90; Todd J. Kosmerick, “Nichols, John Conover (1896-1945),” Oklahoma Historical Society, accessed August 3, 2020, https://www.okhistory.org/publications/enc/entry.php?entry=NI004 128 As quoted in Saranillio, 90. 60

During the show’s forty-year run on the air, the vast majority of episodes were broadcast from the Moana Hotel and most histories of the show only list that venue as hosting the show or erroneously claim that the Moana hosted the first episode.129 The program originally alternated on weekly basis between Matson’s premier property the Royal Hawaiian Hotel and the von Hamm-Young company’s Alexander Young Hotel.130 About six months into the show’s run, Matson decided to switch their portion of the shows to their other hotel, the Moana, because the company along with KGMB deemed it “a better acoustical spot to broadcast from.”131 The Hawaii Tourist Bureau also decided to broadcast Hawaii Calls from various other locations that they thought could inspire tourists to visit including ‘Iolani Palace, the Volcano

House and the city of Hilo on Hawai‘i Island, Lihue on Kaua‘i, and the SS Matsonia while the ship was at sea.132

The investments in destroying and reconstructing Honolulu’s built environment began to drive tourism in the late 1920s, when tourism began to be referred to as an “industry” in

Hawai‘i. In a 1928 report, Hawai‘i Governor Wallace Farrington wrote “caring for and catering to the tourist has been characterized as Hawaii’s fastest and most interesting means of

129 For a few examples see: Bob Sigall, “Webley Edwards Hawaii Calls Radio Show changed how people saw the islands,” Honolulu Star-Advertiser, April 24, 2020, page B4; Allison Schaefers, “Everything after a century should be celebrated,” Honolulu Star-Advertiser, March 6, 2016, page D1; Jim Thielges, “‘Hawaii Calls’ (1935- 1975),” accessed January 27, 2021, https://www.musicofaloha.net/hawaii_calls_page.html; “Hawaii Calls,” Wikipedia (Wikimedia Foundation, March 5, 2019), accessed January 27, 2021, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawaii_Calls. 130 “KGMB to Broadcast Island Programs Over CBS Hookup,” Honolulu Star-Bulletin, October 4, 1935, page 12. 131 Snooper, “KGMB Radio Rumors,” Honolulu Star-Bulletin, March 21, 1936, page 56. 132 “Hawaii Calls from the Big Island,” Hawaii Tribune-Herald, November 9, 1936, page 8; “Big Island Hawaii Calls Program Proves Success,” Hawaii Tribune-Herald, November 10, 1936, page 1; George S. Kanahele, ed., (revised and updated by John Berger), Hawaiian Music and Musicians: An Encyclopedic History (Honolulu, HI: Mutual Publishing, 2012), 269. 61 livelihood.”133 That same year, just over 20,000 visitors arrived in the islands marking the first time Hawai‘i had received 20,000 or more visitors since the 1850s when the whaling industry was at its zenith.134 Like most other industries, tourism’s profitability tumbled with the onset of the Great Depression.

Marketing

Economist James Mak concludes his essay on the history of tourism in Hawai‘i before

1940 by noting that this industry conclusively demonstrates the importance of marketing in establishing a locale as a profitable tourist destination.135 In the 1930s, a series of events occurred in Hawai‘i that made the interests of the tourism industry align perfectly with those of powerful haoles in other fields. As the decade began, pineapple and sugar were both at peak production and more profitable industries than ever before.136 The Depression hit both industries, but hit pineapple much harder than sugar, which remained profitable into the

Depression. Most members of the haole elite opposed statehood for Hawai‘i prior to the mid-

1930s because territorial status limited democracy thus bolstering the power of the elite. For example, the Territorial Governor was appointed by the US President rather than elected. A major shift in sentiment began in 1934 with the Jones-Costigan Act and intensified in 1935 with the passage of the Wagner Act.137 Many white elites who had long opposed statehood began

133 Mak, 59. 134 Hibbard and Franzen, 103. 135 Mak, 65-66 136 Maclennan, 201. 137 Dean Itsuji Saranillio, Unsustainable Empire : Alternative Histories of Hawai'i Statehood, (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), 68; Noel J. Kent, Hawaii: Islands under the Influence (Honolullu, HI: University of Hawai'I Press, 1983), 90. 62 to support it because as historian John Whitehead notes, “Discrimination against people was one thing, but discrimination against sugar was another matter.”138

Tourism and statehood advocates viewed their problems as shared and agreed upon marketing as the solution. In 1935, the Hawaiian Sugar Planters’ Association, the Hawaii Tourist

Bureau, and Matson Navigation Lines teamed up and enlisted the services of San Francisco advertising firm Bowman, Deute, Cummings to rehabilitate American ideas of Hawai‘i.139 In the same year, the territorial legislature created the Hawaii Equal Rights Commission, which Dean

Itsuji Saranillio describes as a “propaganda commission” dedicated to statehood advocacy.140

Many haole elites had long believed that creating a white Hawai‘i in the American imagination would quickly lead to a whitening of Hawai‘i. While these haoles may have clung to long-term hopes of whitening the islands, they now focused their efforts on achieving financial and political gains through creating this white Hawai‘i within the American imagination.

Most people in the islands who were concerned with statehood for Hawai‘i were well aware of at least some of the obstacles in their path. In 1935, Kamehameha School for Boys student newspaper Ka Moi addressed this issue noting “Statehood has become a great problem for the people of the Territory of Hawaii and also faculty members of Kamehameha School for

Boys.” The article quotes teacher Alfred M. Church, “The only thing holding us back is the percentage of our population which is of Oriental extraction.”141 A.G.M. Robertson makes a

138 State of Aloha. Directed by Anne Misawa. Academy for Creative Media/University of Hawai'i, 2010. DVD. 139 Skwiot, 142. 140 Saranillio, 66. 141 “Statehood Discussed by Alfred M. Church,” Ka Moi (Honolulu, Territory of Hawaii, U.S.A.), October 11, 1935, page 3. Church was born in Michigan in 1901. He earned a BA at Colombia and a PhD at Harvard. He taught English at Kamehameha School for Boys and remained in Hawai‘i until his passing in 1982.-“Alfred Church,” Honolulu Star-Bulletin, April 8, 1982, page 41. 63 similar point in his argument for statehood in the 1936 edition of The Hawaiian Annual when he states that only the “Japanese Problem” obstructs the path to statehood, but even his dismissal of this issue is written with significant racism, “While we should not expect too much of the first generation of Hawaiian-born Japanese, such evidence as is available, to my mind, indicates that they can be trusted.”142

Anti-Asian racism was a significant obstacle to statehood, but not the only major barrier.

In 1935, the Honolulu Star-Bulletin provided a more complete picture, “The people of the mainland are not in favor of statehood for Hawaii…because of two reasons, first, because of the fear of oriental domination, and secondly, because of the satisfaction of the present system of government.”143 At the core of the second reason was American anti-blackness. As the discussion for Hawai‘i statehood progressed, white Southern congressmen distributed photographs of Asians and Kānaka Maoli to drive home the fact that the territory had a non- white majority that could support civil rights legislation.144 This fear remained potent among white supremacists throughout the debate on statehood.145

142 A.G.M. Robertson, “Hawaii-The 49th State?,” The Hawaiian Annual 62 (1936): 68. 143 “Statehood for Hawaii Argued at University,” The Honolulu Star-Bulletin, January 11, 1935, page 3. 144 Saranillio, 9. State of Aloha. These white supremacists’ fears became reality after Hawai‘i became a state and their congressional representatives consistently supported civil rights legislation.- “First Asian in U.S. Senate Broke Barriers,” The Honolulu Advertiser, August 19, 2004, page A1. John Nichols, “Dan Inouye's Epic Civil Rights Championship.” The Nation, June 29, 2015. Accessed December 1, 2019. https://www.thenation.com/article/dan-inouyes-epic-civil-rights-championship/. “Patsy T. Mink Papers at the Library of Congress.” Patsy T. Mink Papers (Manuscript Reading Room, Library of Congress). Accessed December 1, 2019. https://www.loc.gov/rr/mss/mink/mink-about.html. “Spark M. Matsunaga Papers.” University of Hawaii Manoa Library. Accessed December 1, 2019. https://manoa.hawaii.edu/library/research/collections/archives/hawaii-congressional-papers- collection/spark-m-matsunaga-papers/. 145 The legendary Native Hawaiian performer Hilo Hattie was working in Montgomery, Alabama in 1959 when news broke that Hawai‘i had become a state. She recalls phoning both local television stations and offering to do free performances to celebrate the event. She remembers racial hatred in the South being intense at this time, so the stations’ response of “No Thanks” was not surprising to her.-Milly Singletary, Hilo Hattie, a Legend in Our Time: A Biography (Honolulu, HI: Mutual Publishing, 2006), 75-76. 64

To counter these racist trepidations, statehood and tourism advocates settled on a strictly defined imaginary Hawai‘i and aggressively promoted it. Christine Skwiot writes that by

1935, Hawai‘i was promoted “as a South Sea paradise peopled solely by caring whites and carefree natives or just by whites acting out fantasies of native culture.”146 For example, the advertising firm Bowman, Deute, Cummings pushed these images in publications throughout the nation and had their agents meet personally with congressmen to advocate statehood. The firm was particularly supportive of the launching of the 1935 radio show Hawaii Calls.147

The investment of the Hawaii Tourist Bureau and the Territorial Legislature in Hawaii

Calls seems to have sparked their desired outcomes. The program debuted on Monday,

October 14, 1935 from 7 to 7:30 pm Hawaiian time and had an immediate impact.148 Revenue from tourism had been declining each year in the early 1930s, but rose each year in the last half of the decade.149 In 1936, The Hawaiian Annual reported that tourism had grown into being the islands’ third largest industry following only sugar and pineapple.150 The tourism industry brought in $6.3 million (16,161 total tourists) in 1934 at its low point of the 1930s, but then grew steadily to $16.4 million (31,846 tourists) in 1941.151 The messaging of Hawaii Calls

146 Skwiot, 142. 147 Skwiot, 142. Regarding the origin of the show’s name, Bob Sigall writes, “A ‘call’ is a shortwave radio term for the transmission that preceded a broadcast, Edwards explained. The ‘call’ reassured the network that the show was about to begin and that it was actually going to come through.”-Bob Sigall, “Rearview Mirror: Webley Edwards' 'Hawaii Calls' Radio Show Changed How People Saw the Islands,” April 24, 2020, accessed August 10, 2020, https://www.staradvertiser.com/2020/04/24/hawaii-news/rearview-mirror/rearview- mirror-webley-edwards-hawaii-calls-radio-show-changed-how-people-saw-the- islands/?HSA=1c8752dff9e1b82cff4d3cf70eeb99d90441ab99 148 “KGMB to Broadcast Island Programs Over CBS Hookup,” Honolulu Star-Bulletin, October 4, 1935, page 12; George S. Kanahele, ed., (revised and updated by John Berger), Hawaiian Music and Musicians: An Encyclopedic History (Honolulu, HI: Mutual Publishing, 2012), 267-271; “Hawaii Calls to Celebrate Anniversary,” Honolulu Star-Bulletin, October 10, 1936, page 39. 149 Robert C. Schmitt, Historical Statistics of Hawaii (Honolulu, HI: The University Press of Hawaii, 1977), 273. 150 “Hawaii's Tourist Industry,” The Hawaiian Annual 62 (1936): 70. 151 Schmitt, 273. 65 worked in tandem with the transformation of Waikīkī. The radio show convinced wealthy, influential white people to visit based on the deception that the islands were a white space.

Upon arrival, these haole elites were lodged in a Waikīkī that had been converted into a playground for wealthy whites. Hawai‘i became a US state in 1959.

Conclusion

Dean Itsuji Saranillio writes, “If we think of forms of white supremacy, such as settler colonialism and capitalism, as emerging from positions of weakness, not strength, we can gain a more accurate understanding of how the United States came to occupy Hawai‘i.”152 This is key insight at the heart of the historical events charted in this chapter. White fear, a definite position of weakness, drove actions at every turn in this history ranging from fear of Native

Hawaiian cultural traditions undermining colonial capitalism, fear of Asians dominating society, fear of Native Hawaiian men attacking white women, to fear of Kānaka Maoli and Asian

Americans supporting African Americans in the struggle for civil rights.

Fear led haole elites to try to build a white-dominated Hawai‘i any way they could. They used a variety of strategies to render Asian residents invisible while trying to depict Kānaka

Maoli as docile and thoroughly assimilated. In projecting the islands to the outside world, they created a racial paradise while maintaining a strict and oppressive racial hierarchy within

Hawai‘i that included a strict Northern European protestant definition of who could prosper as haole. Haole elites even feared other groups of whites such as the Portuguese and Spanish.

This fear is evidenced by the fact that these groups were excluded from haole status within

Hawai‘i, while at the same time being incorporated into white status when haole elite reported

152 Saranillio, 9. 66 population statistics to those outside of the islands in the hope of making Hawai‘i appear more white.

As the three quotes that open this chapter portend, fearful haole elites working from a position of weakness focused on marketing to achieve their goals and found a potent tool in the music industry, specifically in Harry Owens’ work. These entertainment industry commodities were built upon and marketed through white supremacist, misogynistic colonial fantasies that had crystalized long before Harry Owens was even born. These fantasies brought great commercial success to Harry Owens along with the causes promoted through his work: statehood and tourism. Hawai‘i became the fiftieth US state in 1959. With the exception of the

Second World War, tourism has grown almost continuously since 1935 as part of a trend that persists to the present day.153 The music industry played a key role in bringing about all of these outcomes.

153 Ben Gutierrez, “Hawaii Could Have More than 10M Annual Visitors for 1st Time.” Hawaii News Now, November 29, 2019. Accessed November 29, 2019. https://www.hawaiinewsnow.com/2019/11/29/hawaii- could-have-more-than-m-annual-visitors-st-time/ 67

Chapter 2: The Music Industry and Hawaiian Music

From within the walls of a roughly built, and unpainted, one-story, wooden structure, behind the corner stores of a busy intersection comes bizarre music—American jazz with a Filipino accent. —Virginia Lord and Alice W. Lee1

Radio made its first appearance in Honolulu on May 12, 1922, when station KGU was opened in the Honolulu Advertiser building, located at that time on King street near Alakea…The inauguration of radio in Hawaii was a big event, but none of us guessed the great developments that would come with the years, and the effect of radio on development of music. —Johnny Noble2

In 1930s Hawai‘i, the statehood movement allied with the tourism industry to use the music industry to disseminate messaging on a global scale that presented the islands as a feminized and exoticized, yet white-dominated space. This chapter explores a key component of this process to argue that the tourism industry worked with the US continental music industry to replace an island industry and culture innovated largely by Kānaka Maoli. Not only did continental styles of music increasingly pervade the upscale sector of the island industry throughout the 1930s, but during this period, tourism replaced many island musicians with white musicians from the continent already proficient in those styles. Despite this, Native

Hawaiian musicians continued to find ways to create and perform—sometimes within the continental style orchestras such as Harry Owens’ and sometimes in ensembles perpetuating older traditions.

1 Virginia Lord and Alice W. Lee, “The Taxi Dance Hall in Honolulu,” Social Process in Hawaii, Volume 2, May 1936: 47. 2 Johnny Noble, “Moana Pier, Fond Memory of Kamaainas,” Paradise of the Pacific, January 1944: 30. 68

By the 1930s, Hawaii had a rich and complex musical history whose influence extended well beyond the islands. Native Hawaiian innovators enriched popular genres of music such as jazz and country in profound ways. The American music industry, however, often silenced and rendered invisible musicians who did not conform to popularized racist and misogynist fantasies and ideas. As a result, standard histories have often erased the contributions of

Native Hawaiian innovators. By the 1930s, these same tendencies of the American music industry infected the islands, evidenced in practices such as the refusal to hire Asian musicians and hiring women only as singers and dancers. Many Native Hawaiian artists in the 1930s had been nurtured in a musical culture that developed during the Kingdom era which had values that stood in stark contrast to those of the American industry and some of these artists resisted the changes brought about through the growing influence of the tourism industry.

This dissertation’s primary period of focus, the late 1930s, necessitates examining the

Dance Band Era and its music industry. Prolific jazz historian Albert McCarthy’s classic book on the period, The Dance Band Era-The Dancing Decades from Ragtime to Swing: 1910-1950, places its temporal boundaries between 1910 to 1950. McCarthy writes that while orchestras made it possible for the wealthy classes to dance for centuries, the 1910s saw the rise of orchestras that played syncopated music and had the ability to perform to wider, more economically diverse audiences.3 The 1920s and 1930s were the zenith of this phenomenon.

Abundant scholarship exists on the dance band era, but very little of it discusses Hawai‘i.4 A

3 Albert McCarthy, The Dance Band Era-The Dancing Decades from Ragtime to Swing: 1910-1950 (Philadelphia/New York/ London: Chilton Book Company, 1971), 9. 4 Albert McCarthy does not mention the islands at all and Gunther Schuller only minimally in his exhaustive nearly 1000-page classic The : The Development of Jazz, 1930-1945. Schuller’s focus is on jazz, but he covers popular music generally along with detailing various local music scenes throughout the United 69 dance band industry developed in Hawai‘i at the same time as one developed on the continent.

This chapter examines the deeply intertwined histories of both the continental music industry and its island counterpart.

Hawaiian Music

In 2019, reflecting on his forty years as host of the radio show Territorial Airwaves, which had just surpassed Hawaii Calls as Hawai‘i’s longest running radio program, Harry B.

Soria, Jr. commented, “Hawaiian music is always a reflection of the Western musical influences of the decade.”5 Soria’s assessment does not paint the complete picture of the intertwined evolutions of Hawaiian musical styles and those of the West over the past two hundred years.

James Revell Carr argues that scholars have underrecognized the duration and the extent of

Native Hawaiian influence in many genres of music around the world. He demonstrates that since 1778, Kānaka Maoli have influenced music outside of the islands and been influenced by music from beyond their shores. Starting in the late eighteenth century, Kānaka Maoli worked on ships that traveled the globe and performed music as they journeyed. During this same period, sailors from around the world disembarked in the islands and settled. Indeed, by the mid-nineteenth century, writes Carr, “Honolulu possessed one of the most vibrant and exciting

States. Schuller mentions Hawaii or Hawaiian eleven times and always in superficial references to style.For example, he writes that made a wide variety of recordings including some with “a Hollywood Hawaiian group” and that saxophonist recorded “Harry Owens’ Hawaiian hit ‘Sweet Leilani’” in the late 1930s. Schuller and McCarthy both discuss Lawrence Welk and Guy Lombardo, the white artists whose styles came to be associated with Hawaiian music during the 1930s through white bandleaders like Owens who were brought to the islands by the tourism industry.Ibid.; Gunther Schuller, The Swing Era: The Development of Jazz, 1930-1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 373 and 887. 5 Leslie Wilcox, “Long Story Short-Harry B. Soria Jr.,” PBS Hawai'i, October 1, 2019. Accessed December 5, 2019. https://www.pbshawaii.org/long-story-short-with-leslie-wilcox-harry-b-soria-jr/ 70 musical soundscapes in the world.”6 In the years that followed, Hawaiian music became a rapidly evolving, innovative global art form. In George S. Kanahele’s view, aside from African

American and African Caribbean music, Hawaiian music has shaped mainstream American music more than any other music of non-European origin.7 The reciprocal influence of music and the music industries in Hawaiʻi and on the continent have long been overlooked. The music industry, with the assistance of Eurocentric historians, has long marginalized the contributions of non-white musicians, including Africans and descendants of Africans in the Americas and

Europe, to many genres of music ranging from classical to tango to American country and western.8 George Lipsitz notes that this marginalization becomes near erasure within standard histories for groups not fitting into the American black/white binary conception of race.9

While Asian Americans from Hawai‘i and Kānaka Maoli are among those whose contributions went unacknowledged in Ken Burns’ well-known epic documentary on jazz,

Burns makes a more glaring omission in order to conform to the black-white racial binary in his newest film .10 Richard Carlin asks in Country Music: A Biographical Dictionary,

6 James Revell Carr, Hawaiian Music in Motion: Mariners, Missionaries, and Minstrels (Urbana, Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2014), 5. 7 George S. Kanahele, ed., (revised and updated by John Berger), Hawaiian Music and Musicians: An Encyclopedic History (Honolulu, HI: Mutual Publishing, 2012), 27. 8 For more information, see Michael Denning, Noise Uprising: The Audiopolitics of a World Musical Revolution (London: Verso, 2015), George Lipsitz, Footsteps in the Dark: The Hidden Histories of Popular Music (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), and Lisa Mullins, “Exploring The Life Of Chevalier De Saint-Georges, The ‘Black Mozart’,” Here & Now. WBUR, August 19, 2019. Accessed December 13, 2019. https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2019/08/19/black-mozart-chevalier-de-saint-georges 9 Lipsitz, 89-90. For example, he critiques Ken Burns’ nearly twenty-hour-long documentary Jazz for depicting the genre “as the binary creation of Black and white Americans” while expunging all stories of significant contributions from both other American racial groups and all non-Americans. 10 For more information see Kanahele along with Gabe Baltazar Jr. and Theo Garneau. If It Swings, It’s Music: The Autobiography of Hawaiʻi’s Gabe Baltazar Jr. (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2012) and John William Troutman, KīKā Kila: How the Hawaiian Changed the Sound of Modern Music (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2016). 71

“What would a classic country recording of the late 1950s and early 1960s be without the sound of a crying pedal steel guitar?”11 The steel guitar found its way into American country music when Native Hawaiian musicians began collaborating with American country singers in the 1920s.12 The pedal steel guitar is a later development and became the instrumental sound most commonly associated with American country music. This is an instrument based on the original Hawaiian steel guitar, which was created in the 1890s by , a lone Native

Hawaiian innovator, who also developed a style of playing which is foundational for nearly all steel guitarists in the world today. The pedal steel guitar and the modern way of playing it both largely came about through technological and artistic innovations made by Native Hawaiian musicians in the 1930s through the 1950s.13 Kānaka Maoli have affected the development of

American country music in many ways beyond just the innovations of the steel guitar. James

Revell Carr writes

Jazz, blues, country-western, rock and roll, — all have drawn on innovations and techniques that emerged from Hawaiian music, yet this fact is left out of most popular music textbooks. Hawaiians gave the world a unique combination of sliding steel guitar, driving ukulele, falsetto yodels, and loping, syncopated rhythms that have influenced American music since the 1890s at least.14

11 Richard Carlin, Country Music: A Biographical Dictionary, (New York, NY: Routledge, 2014), 309. 12 Ibid., 175-176. Denning, 161. 13 Troutman, 311. Troutman notes that many of the most important innovations made in the development of the modern pedal steel guitar came from the brothers Ernest and Freddie Tavares. These Native Hawaiian brothers were born in Paia, Maui around 1910 and both spent decades collaborating on and off with Harry Owens, beginning in Honolulu in the 1930s and continuing onto the US continent through the 1940s, ‘50s, and ‘60s. These brothers, particularly Freddie, will be discussed in greater detail in this dissertation’s fourth chapter. 14 Carr, 2. 72

Ken Burns spends about sixteen hours detailing the history of American country music, yet manages to omit these significant contributions made by Native Hawaiian artists.15

Kānaka Maoli established rich musical traditions prior to Western contact and a vibrant musical culture emerged in the nineteenth century Kingdom of Hawai‘i. Amy Ku‘uleialoha

Stillman writes that during the nineteenth century, American Protestant hymnody exerted more influence on Hawaiian music than any other Western source. She notes that in the twentieth century, American pop music became the most powerful Western influence on

Hawaiian music.16 Stillman describes two genres that emerged through this pop music influence. Hula ku‘i developed in the late nineteenth century when practitioners of hula began to incorporate Western ideas of dance and music. Hula ku‘i songs are often just called hula songs and are always choreographed and have an “unabashed identification with Hawaiian practices.”17 Hapa haole music came about slightly later than hula ku‘i becoming the most popular Hawaiian genre in the early twentieth century. Stillman describes this genre as largely

“English-language songs whose texts are about Hawaii.”18

Hawaiian music proved an effective marketing tool for haole annexationists and tourism proponents in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The hapa haole genre quickly became the centerpiece of this effort. George S. Kanahele labels the 1888 composition “Eating of the Poi” as the first hapa haole song. He notes that the composer of this tune is unknown,

15 Stephen Deusner, “At 16 Hours, Ken Burns' 'Country Music' Ain't Nearly Long Enough,” Stereogum, September 13, 2019, accessed December 13, 2019, https://www.stereogum.com/2058155/ken-burns- country-music-review/franchises/sounding-board/ 16 Amy Ku‘uleialoha Stillman, “Published Hawaiian Songbooks,” Notes, Second Series, Vol. 44, No. 2 (December 1987): 223. 17 Ibid., 224-225. 18 Ibid., 226. 73 but that it predates the career of (1879-1933), so it is not strictly accurate to credit Cunha as the creator of the hapa haole genre. Kanahele argues that while Cunha did not single-handedly create the genre, “he is without a doubt the first to have composed, arranged, published, performed, and disseminated-in effect, popularized-hapa haole music.”19 Albert R.

“Sonny” Cunha was a Native Hawaiian composer and pianist who was born in Honolulu in 1879 and died in his home town in 1933.20 He graduated from Yale around 1900 where he was exposed to African American musical innovations of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and began to incorporate them into the Hawaiian music he performed. He traveled widely on the US continent performing this music. 21 Cunha mentored Johnny Noble. In a 1943 article Noble penned for Paradise of the Pacific, he details the development of the hapa haole genre with specific attention to his mentor’s artistic innovations. Noble writes that Cunha, while studying at Yale around 1900, became the first artist to incorporate ragtime and jazz concepts into Hawaiian music. Noble summarizes the impact of Cunha’s work, “The hapa-haole music that he created changed Hawaiian music to some degree and helped the world understand it a little more.”22

Hapa haole music proved accessible to the world and the efforts to promote it proved successful. The featured article of the September 1916 issue of Edison Phonograph Monthly was titled “Hawaiian Music Universally Popular” and opened,

Two years ago what did the public know about Hawaiian Music, , Hula Hula Dances? Since then Hawaiian music and American versions of it have taken the United States by storm. Many New York restaurants have Ukulele players to entertain their

19 Kanahele, 115. 20 Ibid., 114. 21 Johnny Noble, “Hawaiian Musicians in the Jazz Era,” Paradise of the Pacific, November 1943: 21. 22 Ibid. 74

guests, theatre orchestra leaders are programming Hawaiian music, vaudeville artists are introducing it into their performance, and even the motion picture producers are reflecting the music and customs of Hawaii by filming stories of this Pacific island that has been brought into such prominence by the originality and fascination of its music and the instrument upon which it is played.23

Hapa haole music continued to reflect Western trends after Cunha, but this was not a unidirectional flow of innovation and influence. From 1900 to 1915, hapa haole songs were rooted in ragtime rhythms and harmonies. Jazz and blues shaped the period from 1916 until the 1930s, when sounds began to dominate the genre and continued to do so until the

1950s.24 In the immediate aftermath of the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition, many US who had never even visited the islands began to compose songs designed to take advantage of the Hawaiian craze sweeping the nation. Most prominently, Tin Pan Alley, the New York City based collection of songwriters and publishers, began producing massive amounts of songs in this vein.25 Johnny Noble notes that many of these songs featured nonsense lyrics presented as if they were Hawaiian language words, such as “Wicki Wacki Woo” and “Yakka Hula Hickey Doola.” Noble writes that “Mainland writers of hapa-haole songs have seldom been able to capture the true spirit of Hawaii.”26 It is not surprising then, as Kanahele notes that while these songs achieved tremendous popularity in the US, they had minimal influence on music produced in Hawai‘i. He also points out that even though nonsense song titles like those mentioned above indicate ignorance about the islands, the music of Native

23 “Hawaiian Music Universally Popular,” The Edison Phonograph Monthly, September 1916, Volume XIV, Number 9: 3. 24 Elizabeth Tatar, Strains of Change: The Impact of Tourism on Hawaiian Music, 11. 25 Kanahele, 823-824. 26 Johnny Noble, “Hawaiian Musicians in the Jazz Era,” 23. 75

Hawaiian songwriters like Sonny Cunha and Henry Kailimai (1882-1948) actually significantly influenced the work of Tin Pan Alley.27

The Music Industry

The music industry evolved dramatically in the first half of the twentieth century.

Throughout this period, the importance of the record increased exponentially, yet the industry’s lifeblood remained live performance and the sales of sheet music.28 Electricity rapidly redefined music in this period in a variety of ways. Microphones allowed singers to explore various styles at various volumes leading to the creation of the popular style of the era known as crooning. Amplification revamped the sound and sustain of instruments. Recording technology improved along with radio broadcast capabilities, both of which redefined how listeners experienced and thought about music.29 In a modern world where recordings are ubiquitous and constitute the normal means of engagement with music, listeners forget the radicalism of these technological changes.

Not long after the formation of a record industry, recordings from Hawai‘i began to hit the market. In 1905, the Victor Talking Machine Company sent employees with equipment to the islands and produced fifty-three records for release. In spite of this effort, the first top selling “Hawaiian” records were not really Hawaiian at all, but rather Tin Pan Alley recordings of the late 1910s Hawaiian craze.30 In the 1927 edition of the US recording industry journal,

27 Kanahele, 823-824. 28 Denning, 69. 29 Ibid., 70. 30 Jerry Hopkins, “Record Industry in Hawai‘i,” in George S. Kanahele, ed., (revised and updated by John Berger), Hawaiian Music and Musicians: An Encyclopedic History (Honolulu, HI: Mutual Publishing, 2012), 677-678. 76

Talking Machine World, “Hawaiian Records” became its own category alongside others such as

“Race Records” and “Instrumental Records.”31 Also in 1927, the Brunswick-Calke-Callender

Company decided to enter the recording business in Honolulu. They set up a recording studio in the Alexander Young Hotel and hired a local engineer, Young O. Kang, who had invented some of his own recording equipment. In 1928, the company hired Johnny Noble to select performers to record in this studio.32 Noble selected many of the locally best-known Native

Hawaiian artists to be recorded and this session created the first commercial recordings of traditional Native Hawaiian instruments such as the ipu (a gourd drum), the uli‘uli (a gourd rattle), and the pahu (a wooden drum).33 This Noble-arranged session stands in stark contrast to the aftermath of the initial success of Hawaii Calls, which brought haole composers and

European instruments back to the forefront of the “Hawaiian” record industry.34

Commercial radio took on a role of unprecedented and likely unequaled importance in the music industry of Hawai‘i. The first commercial radio broadcast in the islands happened in

1922 with KGU and KDYX as the first stations on the air. In 1929, KGU was first able to retransmit radio programming from O‘ahu to the US continent. In 1930, broadcasting capability in the islands became powerful enough for KGMB, the station on which Hawaii Calls began, to transmit Hawai‘i programming to the West Coast for nationwide transmission on the continent.35 Throughout the 1920s the cost of radios plummeted and their sales skyrocketed. 36

31 Denning, 161. 32 Hopkins, 679. 33 Denning, 191. 34 Kanahele, 805. Gurre Ploner Noble, 106. 35 Robert C. Schmitt, “Some Transportation and Communication Firsts in Hawaii,” The Hawaiian Journal of History, volume 13, 1979: 113. 36 A Voice, “History of the Record Industry, 1920- 1950s,” Medium, June 10, 2014, accessed December 21, 2019, https://medium.com/@Vinylmint/history-of-the-record-industry-1920-1950s-6d491d7cb606 77

By 1935, two thirds of American homes had a radio.37 For their first few decades of coexistence, commercial radio and the record industry viewed each other as competitors.38 In fact as late as 1941, Johnny Noble feared that commercial radio would destroy both the record industry and sheet music business.39 Recording quality and broadcast quality made it impractical to broadcast records due to how poor they sounded in radio receivers, thus live musicians tended to play in radio studios prior to World War II. Technological advances during the war improved both broadcast and recording quality leading to the relationship between heavy airplay and heavy record sales that dominated the music industry in the last half of the twentieth century.40

The popularity of radio gave tourism and statehood advocates the opportunity to disseminate music from Hawai‘i laden with their messaging throughout the world, but it also increased American influence on the islands. Radio brought more American styles of music into the Hawaiian homes including songs promoting American racism. For example, many islanders first heard the famous racist song “That’s Why Darkies Were Born” performed by the Doric

Quartet over the NBC Service to KGU radio March 6, 1932.41 On October 30, 1938, William

Morgan, a baritone, sang this same song as part of the Sunday afternoon concert at the Army and Navy YMCA in Honolulu.42

37 “Bing Crosby Rediscovered,” American Masters, (PBS: December 2, 2014), Amazon Prime Streaming Video. 38 A Voice. 39 “ASCAP-BMI War Just ‘Family Row’—Noble,” The Honolulu Advertiser, January 14, 1941, pages 1 and 3. 40 A Voice. 41 “Radio Programs,” Hilo Tribune Herald, March 6, 1932, 2. 42 “Army & Navy ‘Y’ Concert Sunday at 4.” Honolulu Star Bulletin, October 29, 1938, 8. 78

During the first half of the twentieth century, few popular music orchestras had the opportunity to record and even for those who did, dances generally provided their primary source of income. Dances were an extremely popular leisure activity in this era both on the islands and the continent. For continental orchestras, the ability to travel outside of their home community provided additional income possibilities by bringing the band to new dance audiences. During the 1920s, automobiles became more reliable and affordable at the same time as the US began developing a national highway system.43 Bands, often based in major urban centers, increasingly traveled the country to play dances in big cities, small towns, and barn dances on farms. These developments brought major changes to the dance band business. Orchestras began to be able to earn a living by constantly traveling from their urban center home base to perform for various small-town community dances.44 On the US continent, these advances in transportation drove the rise of the dance band industry.

US racial politics conspicuously dominated this industry. Racially integrated orchestras had been commonplace in Hawai‘i since the first half of the nineteenth century.45 By contrast, racially integrated professional ensembles on the US continent were virtually unheard of until

1936, which was the year that hired black pianist Teddy Wilson to play in his trio.46 This trio’s initial performance is generally considered the first time that a black musician

43 Michael L. Berger, The Automobile in American History and Culture (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2001), 322-323. The highway system was nearly as significant as the automobile because well-maintained paved roads were much easier to travel than muddy trails.- Nathan W. Pearson, Jr., Goin’ to Kansas City (Urbana and Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1987), 77-78. 44 Gunther Schuller, The Swing Era: The Development of Jazz, 1930-1945 (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1989), 770. 45 Bandy, 70-71. Scott C. S. Stone, The Royal Hawaiian Band: Its Legacy (Waipahu, HI: Island Heritage, 2009). Dale E. Hall, The Honolulu Symphony: A Century of Music (Honolulu, HI: G. P. Goodale Publishing, 2002). 46 Goodman integrated his small ensemble before integrating his world-famous orchestra. 79 publicly appeared on stage with a white band.47 It was only a few years prior that a Hollywood studio had obliged the lighter skinned members of Duke Ellington’s orchestra to wear dark makeup for their appearance in a motion picture due to fears that some audiences may mistake the lighter skinned musicians for white and be outraged by the existence of an integrated band.48 In 1936 on the US continent, only the most commercially successful white bandleaders could realistically expect to survive professionally if they took the risk of integrating their bands.49

Orchestras that did not fit into a Benny Goodman elite category of commercial success had to operate under a business plan shaped by race. Race generally compelled black bands to become “Territory Bands,” meaning they had to travel constantly throughout their home territory playing various community dances to earn a living, whereas white bands had more opportunities to find lucrative steady employment in hotels or upscale restaurants and had no need to suffer the rigorous travel.50 Although these black territory band musicians generally aspired to earn jobs with orchestras like and play jazz and blues, many of these territory bands rarely played these genres because they earned their living playing in small

47 Tom Vitale, “Benny Goodman: Forever The King Of Swing,” NPR, accessed December 22, 2019, http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=104713445. 48 Graham Lock, Blutopia: Visions of the Future and Revisions of the Past in the Work of Sun Ra, Duke Ellington, and Anthony Braxton (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), 90. 49 Lewis A. Erenberg, Swingin' the Dream: Big Band Jazz and the Rebirth of American Culture, (Chicago, Illinois: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 128. 50 Schuller, 770. “Territory” as a geographic unit of space varied slightly in definition, but was generally determined by a “one-day-drive” rule, meaning that any community that could be reached by motor vehicle in one day or less was part of your “territory.” There were also many white territory bands throughout the dance band era, but as noted above, the white orchestras tended to have more economic opportunities than their African American counterparts. 80 communities composed of white people who preferred marches, polkas, waltzes, schottisches, and “corn ball” or “corny” tunes.51

Regardless of the race of the band or their status as national or territory acts, these bands were businesses that thrived only in when providing the customers (the audience) what they desired. This was often not what the artists themselves would have wanted to perform, but succeeding in this reality compelled black territory bands to perform polkas instead of jazz,

Duke Ellington to perform in jungle themed shows for whites only audiences, and Harry Owens, near the height of his fame, to perform “rhumba and tango music reluctantly” because “many of the requests have come from the bluest bloods of the Island.”52

Hawai‘i’s dance band industry was also racially stratified, driven by the increasing economic influence of both tourism and the US military in Hawai‘i. On O‘ahu during the 1930s, the various segments of the industry were divided so rigidly, it may be more appropriate to say that the island had multiple dance band industries. This dissertation focuses the segment of the industry based in Waikīkī that was well-positioned to influence global perception. That said, there were other places for musicians to earn money. Taxi dance halls were extremely popular in Honolulu in this era and in 1936, the city had seven of them “clustered in a rectangle, two by eight city blocks in size, in the less elite business district.”53 Taxi dances employed

51 “Corn ball” and “corny” were terms commonly used by black musicians in the dance band era to describe Guy Lombardo, Lawrence Welk, or Harry Owens style music. Music in this style was also commonly referred to as “sweet,” as opposed to bands like Count Basie, who played “hot” music. Due to white desire for “corn ball” performances, music in the style of Guy Lombardo and Lawrence Welk made up at least fifty percent of the repertoires of Omaha’s top black dance bands of the 1930s and 1940s. Preston Love notes that white audiences in these small towns “were intrigued by the prospect of a swinging, jazzy ‘colored’ band.”-Preston Love, A Thousand Honey Creeks Later: My Life in Music from Basie to Motown and Beyond (Hanover, New Hampshire: Wesleyan University Press, 1997), 89. 52 Lock, 83. Eileen McCann, “Waikiki Promenade,” The Honolulu Advertiser, September 7, 1937, page 4. 53 Lord and Lee, 46. 81 women, known as hostesses, to dance with customers who had purchased tickets and these establishments also employed orchestras to provide the music for dancing.54 Taxi dance halls were particularly popular with immigrant plantation laborers and US military personnel stationed in the islands. Both groups were predominantly young single males. The dance halls were also segregated. Virginia Lord and Alice W. Lee write of one of the most elite halls that the venue “caters almost exclusively to service trade, its patronage being made up mostly of sailors. It prides itself in being a ‘high-class joint,’ and excludes such people as Filipinos.”55

Filipino musicians found employment opportunities at many of these venues.56 Lord and Lee note, “Dance halls that cater to Filipinos waste no money on overhead…These halls are smaller, darker, more crowded, and to a considerable degree, more odorous.”57

Orchestras often found employment performing at dances held to entertain plantation employees in plantation community halls. Community dances held at places like dance halls, gyms, and armories offered work, while clubs around Honolulu, in places like Chinatown and

Kaka‘ako, that provided jobs as well.58 Many excellent Filipino musicians lived in the islands during this period and they found themselves, along with other musicians of Asian ancestry,

54 Gabe Baltazar and Theo Garneau, If It Swings, It’s Music: The Autobiography of Hawaiʻi’s Gabe Baltazar Jr. (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2012), 6. 55 Lord and Lee, 46. They do not indicate anything about the musicians who performed in this club. Excluding Filipino clientele does not necessarily mean that Filipino musicians were excluded, but it seems likely considering the opportunities that I have found for Filipino musicians at this time rarely, if ever, included playing for white audiences. 56 Baltazar and Garneau, 6. 57 Lord and Lee, 46. Interestingly, they write that these venues feature “exceedingly ‘hot’ music” as opposed to the “sweet” or “cornball” music that Preston Love notes white audiences prefer. Harry Owens was proudly serving up “sweet cornball” music to white patrons at the very same time as these Filipino musicians across town were making “exceedingly hot” sounds. 58 Baltazar and Garneau, 4; Derek Paiva, “Swingtown: Festival Will Salute Jazz Legends of Hawai‘i’s Past,” The Honolulu Advertiser, July 24, 2004, page D5; Paiva, D5. Gae Rusk, Phillip A. Wilson, and Ed Kenney, eds. Swingtime in Honolulu. (Honolulu, HI: KHET-TV, 1991). Swingtime in Honolulu, directed by Phillip A. Wilson (USA: KHET-TV, 1988), UH Mānoa Streaming Video. 82 excluded from the islands’ top paying jobs.59 Many of these musicians, along with Native

Hawaiian and haole musicians, found employment in the venues discussed above.

There were probably less than 1000 black residents in Hawai‘i in the 1930s.60 The few

African American musicians who were living in Honolulu were barred from the top paying orchestras that catered to tourists and “the bluest bloods of the Island.” They could find work in Chinatown, particularly along Smith Street, which became known as the black section of the city in the 1930s and 1940s.61 The most prominent venue that employed black musicians was the Casino Ballroom, which was on the ‘Ewa-makai corner of Nu‘uanu and Beretania Streets.

This venue catered to all races and, between 1935 and 1942, employed some rather well- known African American jazz musicians as part of the hall’s house band, the Brown Cats of

Rhythm. Drummer Monk McFay and trumpeter Andy Blakeney worked there for that entire period and legendary trombonist Henry Coker was a member of the band from 1939 to 1942.62

The elite facet of the island dance band industry functioned geographically close to the other portions of the industry, yet in a very different world. In 1936, University of Hawai‘i student L. D. Tavares wrote a paper on Harry Owens’ orchestra for a sociology course. In

59 Baltazar and Garneau, 4 and 14-15; Gurre Ploner Noble, 108; John Connell and Chris Gibson, “No Passport Necessary: Music, Record Covers, and Vicarious Tourism in Post-War Hawai‘i,” The Journal of Pacific History 43, no. 1 (June 2008): 56. 60 Eleonore C. Nordyke, “Blacks in Hawai‘i: A Demographic and Historical Perspective,” The Hawaiian Journal of History, volume 22, 1988: 242 and 245-246. The census recorded 563 black residents in 1930 and 255 black residents in 1940. Nordyke points out that both are likely underestimates due to a few factors including the fact that Puerto Ricans were no longer counted as black in 1940 and that persistent anti- blackness motivated some black residents to identify as another race. 61 Baltazar and Garneau, 36. 62 Rusk, Wilson, and Kenney, 2. Peter Vacher, Swingin on Central Avenue: African American Jazz in Los Angeles (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2017), 19-22. Jesse J. Otto, “Contemporaries: Black Orchestras in Omaha Before 1950,” (Master of Arts thesis, University of Nebraska at Omaha, 2010), 122-123 and 165. McFay recruited Coker out of Nat Towles’ Omaha based orchestra. Coker went on to work with legendary performers including Count Basie and Ray Charles. 83 researching the paper, Tavares conducted interviews with every member of the band with the exception of Harry Owens.63 Tavares writes,

Of all the dance spots in Honolulu, including the Hotels, dance halls, clubs, .etc., the Royal Hawaiian Hotel is considered the top spot for musicians. Atmosphere provided for tourist trade, the tourist trade itself and the hotel connections with the Matson Company, are all factors which tend to make the Royal Hawaiian Hotel the top spot for musicians in Hawaii.64

As Tavares notes, the Matson Company played a central role in the rise of tourism in Hawai‘i.

The company had by this point a significant investment in hotels and the vast majority of tourists who visited the islands in 1936 arrived via Matson ships. These tourists became the audience and the economic engine that fueled this elite facet of the island dance band industry.

Thus, just like on the continent, improvements in transportation technology facilitated the rise of a dance band industry, but in the case of Hawai‘i, the transportation brought the audiences to the performers rather than vice versa.

While the Royal Hawaiian Hotel was certainly the top spot for musicians over the other venues that Tavares lists, for most musicians who played in those other venues, this elite resort could never be an employment option. Tavares quotes one musician, “This racket of getting to the top is 95 percent ‘drag’ and 5 percent good musicianship.” Tavares notes that all of the musicians agreed that politics, not musical talent, governed success or failure in the industry,

“They all stress the importance of making contacts.”65 In the case of most of the musicians

63 Tavares gives no indication why he did not speak with Owens, but the paper makes it clear that Owens was a tremendously busy person during this period and had many people vying for his time. 64 L. D. Tavares, “Musicians – A Case Study of the Royal Hawaiians,” 1936, University of Hawai‘i, Hamilton Library, Archives and Manuscripts Collection, Romanzo Adams Social Research Laboratory (RASRL) Collection, 1. L. D. might have been related to brothers Ernest and Freddie Tavares who were members of the orchestra at the time this paper was written. 65 Tavares, 4. 84 living in the Hawaiian islands, racial politics prevented them from moving into the top jobs.

American racist thought that reduces race to a binary increasingly dominated entertainment industry depictions of Hawai‘i and became rampant in the elite dance band industry of the 1930s. This framework of Jim Crow binaries has long imagined Kānaka Maoli with qualities typically associated with racist defamations of African Americans.66 American periodicals widely disseminated this depiction of Kānaka Maoli in the 1890s with a series of political cartoons that depicted Queen Lili‘uokalani as African American.67 This phenomenon of depicting Kānaka Maoli with qualities that white racists had long-assigned to African Americans became rampant in the film industry.68 In an early music industry example, George S. Kanahele writes that the 1898 annexation of Hawai‘i prompted a surge of “coon songs” within American popular music “that confused Hawaiians and their culture with stereotypical portrayals of

66 Adria L. Imada, Aloha America: Hula Circuits through the U.S. Empire (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), 55. As Gary Y. Okihiro notes, when American presentations of themselves and their own history are not purely white, America depicts itself as consisting of a racial binary. He explains this binary is most often white/black, but it has occasionally been white/native.-Gary Y. Okihiro, American History Unbound: Asians and Pacific Islanders (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015), 3 and 6-7. The term Jim Crow is used in this dissertation to describe an American view of race as a black/white binary. The term is most commonly associated with a series of racist laws that targeted African Americans that were enacted after Reconstruction ended in 1877, but the term originated in the entertainment industry in 1828 when Thomas Dartmouth Rice, a white man who was an actor and a musician, published a popular song called “Jim Crow” about an African American character of the same name. Rice darkened his face with burnt cork to perform on stage as the character “Jim Crow” in blackface minstrel shows and in doing so, he became a superstar touring widely throughout the USA throughout the 1830s and 1840s.David Pilgrim, “Who Was Jim Crow?,” Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia (2012), accessed September 26, 2020, https://www.ferris.edu/HTMLS/news/jimcrow/who/index.htm 67 There are many more examples, but a few are included in the following: “His Little Hawaiian Game Checkmated,” Judge, Volume 26, Number 641, January 27, 1894: 56-57; “Uncle Sam in Hawaii,” The Evening World, (Brooklyn, New York), November 14, 1893, page 1; “Lilioukalina,” Daily Globe, (St. Paul, Minnesota), February 3, 1893, page 1; “How Cleveland Has Been Checkmated,” The Morning Call, (San Francisco, California), November 24, 1893, page 1. 68 Delia Malia Caparoso Konzett, Hollywood's Hawaii: Race, Nation, and War (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2017), 17. 85

African-Americans.”69 Harry Owens employed the binary when he described the orchestra he first led in Hawai‘i as “one half of native musicians and singers, one half of haoles (whites).”70

This 1934 description of his orchestra as zero percent Asian is particularly audacious in light of the fact that the 1930 census recorded Hawai‘i’s population as sixty-four percent Asian.71 L. D.

Tavares interviewed each band member about their race and ethnicity and confirms Owens’ claim.72

This American racial binary results in the elite island dance band industry operating on racial politics that superficially seem radically different from the continent, but in reality differ very little. In Hawai‘i, American racism created a racial binary in the entertainment industry as

Native Hawaiian/white, but strictly defined what Native Hawaiian was to appear like. This resulted in Filipino taxi dance musicians and members of the Brown Cats of Rhythm having no chance to play in Harry Owens’ Royal Hawaiian Hotel Orchestra. The fact that Owens’ orchestra was integrated at all at the time he arrived in Honolulu in 1934 makes the island industry’s politics seem particularly different than the continent’s, but I argue this is a matter of marketing. The white American elites have projected Hawai‘i as an exotic place meaning non- white, yet white dominated. Thus, Owens’ orchestra of “one half of native musicians and singers, one half of haoles” under the leadership of the haole director Owens embodies this racist American sales pitch perfectly.

69 Kanahele, 356. 70 Harry Owens, Sweet Leilani: The Story Behind the Song; an Autobiography (Pacific Palisades, CA: Hula House, 1970), 2. 71 Robert C. Schmitt, Historical Statistics of Hawaii (Honolulu, HI: The University Press of Hawaii, 1977), 58. The Census data contained in Schmitt’s work does not group all Asians together. There are separate numbers listed for Chinese, Korean, Filipino, and Japanese. 72 Tavares, 1-2. 86

The tourism industry, in turn, shifted creative control within the elite island dance band industry away from Hawaiian artists in favor of white artists from the continent.73 Harry Owens replaced Johnny Noble as the bandleader at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel in 1934. George

Kanahele provides no explanation.74 Owens’ autobiography and Noble’s biography chalk it up to Noble’s health problems.75 None of these works explain why Matson paid the Royal

Hawaiian Hotel’s resident manager, Bert Ogilvie, to go personally to the continent to scout and hire a haole bandleader who had never even visited the islands to replace the Native Hawaiian bandleader, Noble.76 The Royal Hawaiian Hotel represented an enormous investment to

Matson, thus the resort’s manager was an important employee, to say the least. The fact that this employee personally scouted the new bandleader speaks to the importance placed on

73 Elizabeth Tatar argues that tourism changes music, but that this has largely been ignored by scholars and “understandably denied by the performers.” This is an accurate and insightful argument. In fact, even excellent and thorough scholars do not account for the depth of tourism’s impact. Although Tatar has this profound insight and Strains of Change is an excellent and important work, it is only a short booklet of twenty-nine pages containing many images. Her aim in this work appears to have been to start a discussion about this issue rather than to analyze it in great detail.-Tatar, Strains of Change: The Impact of Tourism on Hawaiian Music, 2 and 7. 74 Kanahele, 623. 75 Gurre Ploner Noble, 86. Owens, 33. 76 Gurre Ploner Noble, 86. Harry Owens claims that Arthur Benaglia personally scouted him.- Owens, 27-33. Harry Owens’ autobiography is often not factual, whereas Gurre Ploner Noble’s book is “based on the manuscripts, notes, and scrap-books of Johnny Noble” and I have found both Gurre Ploner Noble and Johnny Noble’s work to be quite accurate. In this case, I have not been able to corroborate that Ogilvie personally scouted him, but the bandleader job at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel was definitely a prominent position featured in the newspapers constantly, so the story seems realistic and both Nobles are credible. Also, Benaglia was on the continent for a few months in 1933, but returned to Honolulu about a month before the date that Owens claims they met. Benaglia left California to return to Hawai‘i in late October and Owens claims the meeting happened in late November. Benaglia was the Managing Director of Territorial Hotels, Ltd., the Matson subsidiary that managed the Royal Hawaiian. Thus, Benaglia was Ogilvie’s boss. Owens seems to have fabricated this story to make himself appear even more important. Owens did start work as bandleader at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel in May 1934, but the newspaper announcements make no mention of how he was scouted for the job.-“Prominent People Leave for Mainland,”Honolulu Star-Bulletin, August 19, 1933, page 3. “Travel-Shipping-Waterfront News,” The Honolulu Advertiser, November 3, 1933, page 13. “Legislative Highlights,” The Honolulu Advertiser, November 24, 1933, page 3. “New Bandleader for Beach Hotels,” The Honolulu Advertiser, May 6, 1934, page 4. “New Orchestra Leader Arrives,” Honolulu Star- Bulletin, May 7, 1934, page 3. 87 music in the marketing of tourism. Also, the scouting of Owens and his subsequent hiring seem to have sparked a significant trend that has received no scholarly attention. After Johnny

Noble’s tenure as Matson bandleader, the company decided to hire only white male bandleaders with a proven record of success on the US continent.77 Owens served as the bandleader at the Royal Hawaiian, Moana, and the Waialae Country Club, but after Owens’ career took off in 1937, he began to take leaves of absence from this work to tour the continent and appear in films. His replacements during these absences were all haoles from the continent.78 The von Hamm-Young Company owned the Alexander Young Hotel and throughout the 1930s, the company only employed white continental bandleaders and often brought in whole haole orchestras and dance troupes from the continent to perform at the

Alexander Young Hotel.79 In fact, this trend at the Young ended in 1941 when their bandleader of many years, Giggie Royse, a haole originally from California took over for Owens at the Royal

Hawaiian after Owens left his orchestra to pursue work in Hollywood.80 The Honolulu

Advertiser announced Royse’s replacement at the Alexander Young as “Alvin Kaleleolani and associates, formerly with Harry Owens’ Royal Hawaiians” giving a nod to the haole bandleader’s star power.81

77 Johnny Noble, “Remember Waikiki?,” Paradise of the Pacific, August 1942: 16. 78 Owens, 111. “Two Hearty Alohas From Alohaland,” The Honolulu Advertiser, September 7, 1940, page 9. “Harry Owens Will Give Up His Band,” The Honolulu Advertiser, February 22, 1941, page 9. 79 “Young Hotel is Result of Business and Civic Vision,” Honolulu Star-Bulletin, July 31, 1935, page 14. “KGMB Radio Rumors by Snooper,” Honolulu Star-Bulletin, March 30, 1935, page 6. “KGMB to Broadcast Island Programs Over CBS Hookup,” Honolulu Star-Bulletin, October 4, 1935, page 12. “Here is the Young Roof’s Next Band,” Honolulu Star-Bulletin, March 30, 1936, 3. “Dance Artists at the Young,” Honolulu Star-Bulletin, April 1, 1936, page 4. “Merle Carlson Next On Hawaii Calls Program,” Honolulu Star-Bulletin, July 18, 1936, page 42. “Former Bandleader Back,” Honolulu Star-Bulletin, January 9, 1950, page 8. 80 “Harry Owens Will Give Up His Band,” The Honolulu Advertiser, February 22, 1941, page 9. 81 “Open Saturday at Young,” The Honolulu Advertiser, April 4, 1941, page 4. 88

A similar phenomenon happened on the show Hawaii Calls. The few histories of Hawaii

Calls that have been written correctly note that Harry Owens was the first musical director, but incorrectly credit Al Kealoha Perry, who took over as musical director in 1937, as the second musical director.82 Harry Owens was the musical director for the first episode of Hawaii Calls, but not the second. The original arrangement had Owens taking turns, every other week, with

Alexander Young Orchestra leader and Oakland, California haole, Del Courtney.83 In fact, during

Owens’ two years as musical director, he took many breaks from the program, which allowed other white bandleaders originally from the US continent to fill in, sometimes to great acclaim.84 The reasons that this history has not been recorded are unclear, but it seems reasonable to speculate that Owens becoming one of the biggest music industry stars on the planet in the late 1930s eclipsed the names of these other bandleaders in public memory. The reasons for these hotels hiring white bandleaders from the continent seem much more obvious. The tourists for which these orchestras performed were overwhelmingly wealthy white people from the US continent. The dances at these hotels also drew local haole elites.

Harry Owens named his orchestra “Harry Owens & His Royal Hawaiians” not due to the hotel, but as an homage to “Guy Lombardo and His Royal Canadians.”85 Owens cites Guy Lombardo and Lawrence Welk as his greatest influences, the same artists whose songs Preston Love notes

82 Kanahele, 268. Harry B. Soria, Jr., “Al Kealoha Perry,” Territorial Airwaves, episode aired August 23, 2013, accessed December 25, 2019, https://www.territorialairwaves.com/index.php?page=30&id=181 83 “KGMB to Broadcast Island Programs Over CBS Hookup,” Honolulu Star-Bulletin, October 4, 1935, page 12. Jim Doyle, “Del Courtney -- Big Band Leader Fondly Known as ‘Old Smoothie’,” SFGate. San Francisco Chronicle, January 15, 2012, accessed December 25, 2019. https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Del- Courtney-big-band-leader-fondly-known-as-2541361.php 84 “Hawaii Calls Featuring Harry Owens Music,” Honolulu Star-Bulletin, February 29, 1936, page 10. “Merle Carlson Next On Hawaii Calls Program,” Honolulu Star-Bulletin, July 18, 1936, page 42. “Harry Owens Music on Hawaii Calls Monday,” Honolulu Star-Bulletin, November 28, 1936, page 9. 85 Owens, 37. 89

African American orchestras were required to perform in order to please white audiences.86

Owens writes that for his first island performance he arranged “ten of the oldest, finest

Hawaiian songs” for an “American-type band.”87 He claims his audience was both locals and tourists and that his performance was a smash hit with both groups.88 There is no reason to doubt Owens’ claim of success as abundant evidence confirms his popularity and he was also supremely qualified to play music that pleased white audiences. Pleasing affluent white audiences was the aim of both the hotel owners and the legislators who funded Hawaii Calls, so it is logical that they would have hired white US continental male bandleaders almost exclusively.

In addition to an increasing percentage of leadership roles going to white men, other significant changes were happening in the 1920s and 1930s in this facet of the island music industry. Hawaiian music generally, but hapa haole music particularly, began to demonstrate increasing jazz influence. Native Hawaiian artists have long incorporated foreign sounds and technologies into their own work to innovate something new. In the case of jazz and Hawaiian music, examples of this abound. Sonny Cunha, a student of jazz and an excellent pianist, became the first bandleader to incorporate piano into a Hawaiian dance orchestra bringing the instrumentation more in line with continental jazz ensembles.89 His protégé Johnny Noble writes, “There were few piano players of Hawaiian birth in those days, so when Cunha organized his own band and played the piano himself it was a popular novelty.”90 Noble,

86 Ibid., 6. 87 Ibid., 33 and 37. 88 Ibid., 38-39. 89 Gurre Ploner Noble, 43. 90 Johnny Noble, “Hawaiian Musicians in the Jazz Era,” 22. 90 commonly referred to as the “Hawaiian Jazz King,” became the first orchestra leader to incorporate drums and saxophone, but he opted not to add brass as he thought it precluded achieving the “mellowness and fluidity” he thought Hawaiian music of all kinds should retain.91

Saxophone was so uncommon in Hawaiian music when Noble added it, that finding a saxophonist proved challenging.92 He eventually recruited Andy Iona from the Royal Hawaiian

Band in 1920, which at this point was directed by Mekia Kealaka‘i. Noble considered Iona the best saxophonist in the islands “with few on the Mainland who could top him.”93 Steel guitar virtuoso Sol Hoopii copied clarinet lines from big band arrangements on the Hawaiian steel guitar to create sounds no one in the world had heard before.94 These are just a few of the many examples of these innovations.

Many tourism and statehood advocates recognized great value in these new artistic directions. Ricardo D. Trimillos argues that the fact that jazz is most commonly thought of as

American functioned as a powerful motivator for the increasing prevalence of jazz within the island music industry. He writes, “It was clear from the beginning of the twentieth century onward, the peoples of Hawaii (for better or worse) had tied their development and future to

America and her culture.”95 Jazz not only allowed for island residents to identify with and take part in American commercial culture, but during the drive for statehood, jazz served as a

91 Kanahele, 607. Michael Denning writes that within the music industry of the 1920s, “to adopt the saxophone was to link oneself symbolically with jazz.”-Denning, 182 92 Gurre Ploner Noble, 52. 93 Johnny Noble, “Origin of the Steel Guitar: Hawaiian Instrument Discovered Accidentally by a Schoolboy,” Paradise of the Pacific, October 1943: 35. 94 Harry B. Soria, Jr., “Sol Hoopii,” Territorial Airwaves, episode aired April 11, 2013, accessed December 26, 2019, https://www.territorialairwaves.com/index.php?page=30&id=214 95 Ricardo D. Trimillos, “The Jazz Experience in Hawaii: Its Social Impact on the Islands,” in Gae Rusk, Phillip A. Wilson, and Ed Kenney, eds. Swingtime in Honolulu. (Honolulu, HI: KHET-TV, 1991), 5. 91 significant marker indicating to the world that Hawai‘i “belonged” to America.96 Trimillos points to another valuable purposing of this genre, “jazz presented itself as commercial music whose context is the night club, hotel, and the dance hall. Thus, for the local and tourist consumer, it provided yet another outlet of entertainment music.”97

The tourism industry embraced these changes, which began to provide extraordinary opportunities for musicians who could work their way into the elite facet of the island music industry. Before 1922, Matson had always used US continental orchestras on their ocean liners because these orchestras provided dance music whereas Hawaiian music was not believed to be suitable for dancing. By 1922, jazz had so permeated Hawaiian music that Matson switched to Hawaiian ensembles only and hired Johnny Noble to select the musicians.98 Noble notes that this was so well received that Matson exclusively hired Hawaiian ensembles until shipping ceased with the outbreak of the Second World War in December 1941.99

The military and tourism industries in Hawai‘i provided the upscale sector of the island music industry pathways to disseminate music widely beyond the islands making the industry particularly valuable to statehood and tourism advocates. In addition to attracting the social elite of the islands, the top Honolulu venues were frequented by military personnel and wealthy tourists. All three of these groups traveled widely. The effects of these dynamics can be seen in the following three examples. The first occurred after Johnny Noble composed his first hit song, “Hula Blues,” in 1920 and debuted it at the Moana Hotel where it caught on with

96 Ibid. 97 Ibid. 98 Gurre Ploner Noble, 64. 99 Johnny Noble, “Hawaiian Musicians in the Jazz Era,” 24. 92

U.S. naval midshipmen who adopted it as a theme song. The song spread throughout the navy and became popular wherever naval personnel traveled to the point that it became common to hear cadets at the Naval Academy singing “Hula Blues.”100 In the second example, the March

30, 1935 Honolulu Star Bulletin reports that Harry Owens’ composition “Hawaiian Paradise”

“made such a hit with tourists at the Royal Hawaiian and Moana hotels that when they were back on the mainland they repeatedly requested the leading orchestras to play it.” 101 This resulted in Owens reaching a lucrative deal with Guy Lombardo and his Royal Canadians allowing them one month to feature the song exclusively before other orchestras could do so.

During this period, the Lombardo orchestra performed the song for a national audience on NBC radio.102 In the third and most dramatic example, movie stars were among the few who could afford to vacation in Hawai‘i before World War II. In September 1936, Bing Crosby arrived at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel for a five week stay during which he heard Harry Owens & His Royal

Hawaiians perform Owens’ composition “Sweet Leilani.” Crosby liked the song and asked

Owens for permission to record it. Crosby then worked his recording of it into his next movie,

Waikiki Wedding. This resulted in the song becoming one of the biggest hits in the history of the music industry up to that point in time.103 This song remains one of the most popular hapa haole songs.104 Its massive commercial success is attributable to the audience that the tourism industry brought to the venue.105

100 Kanahele, 333. Johnny Noble, “Unpublished Noble Manuscript Found in Gift to HMF,” Ha‘ilono Mele,Volume V, Number 9, September, 1979: 5. 101 "Hawaiian Paradise," Honolulu Star-Bulletin, March 30, 1935, page 6. 102 Ibid. 103 Gary Giddins, Bing Crosby: A Pocketful of Dreams-The Early Years, 1903-1940 (Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Company, 2002), 474-476, 480, and 483. 104 Kanahele, 804-805. 105 The effects of the military and tourism industries upon the audiences of the elite pre-World War II 93

Musicians in the elite sector of the island industry enjoyed the opportunity to have music broadcast internationally on Hawaii Calls, one of the most popular radio programs of all time. Tourism advocates recognized Hawaiian music’s value by the late nineteenth century and by the 1930s, proponents of tourism came to recognize the value of celebrity bandleaders. As the 1935 edition of Men of Hawaii entry on Johnny Noble notes, “Through his music, Mr. Noble has done much to promote tourist travel to Hawaii.”106 In 1928, shortly after their massive investment in resort hotels and a new fleet of ships, Matson hired Johnny Noble to travel to San

Francisco to take part in a national radio broadcast in order to promote tourism to Hawai‘i.107

In light of these developments, the 1935 decision by Hawaii Tourist Bureau and the Territorial

Legislature to fund a nationally broadcasted program featuring Hawaiian music and celebrity bandleaders was a logical step to promote tourism and statehood.108 Radio dramatically changed the development of Hawaiian music. Michael Keany writes that the first broadcast of the Hawaii Calls in 1935 “was the beginning of a global phenomenon.”109

If Hawaii Calls began the global phenomenon, Waikiki Wedding kicked it into overdrive.

Hollywood began to capitalize on the immense popularity of Hawaii Calls by producing a series

Honolulu music venues dramatically distinguished this music industry from the US continental counterpart. Some top-end continental orchestras played for wealthy audiences on occasion, but most continental orchestras, even the nationally famous acts, made their living traveling to play various community dances. The people who attended these dances were extremely unlikely to travel or have the means to spread the word about a particular song or orchestra beyond their community. 106 George F. Nellist, ed. Men of Hawaii: A Biographical Reference Library, Complete and Authentic, of the Men of Note and Substantial Achievement in the Hawaiian Islands, (Honolulu, HI: Honolulu Star-Bulletin, 1935), 337. 107 Gurre Ploner Noble, 79. 108 Kanahele, 268. 109 Michael Keany, “100 Years of Hawaiian Music,” Honolulu Magazine, December 7, 2010, accessed December 27, 2019, http://www.honolulumagazine.com/Honolulu-Magazine/November-2010/100-Years-of- Hawaiian-Music/index.php?cparticle=3&siarticle=2#artanc 94 of popular films, many of them musical, set in the islands.110 The aforementioned Waikiki

Wedding (1937) was the first and most successful of these movies. The film was Paramount’s most profitable picture in 1937 and the third highest grossing film in the world that year.111 The movie starred Bing Crosby and featured him singing the Harry Owens composition “Sweet

Leilani,” which became an enormous hit. The recording topped the sales charts for over two months and sold more than any record had since the stock market crash of 1929. Owens became the first songwriter to win an Academy Award as composer and lyricist.112 The film and song sparked an international Hawai‘i craze. Gary Giddins writes, “Within months Hollywood resembled a Hawaiian theme park.”113 John Connell and Chris Gibson note that Waikiki

Wedding sparked, “a ‘golden age’ where Hawaiian music circled the world, on radio and film, and eventually television.”114

The success of both Hawaii Calls and the commodities it inspired was the ushering in of a new order within the island music industry. As the events chronicled here demonstrate, the music industry can be deployed to great effect with great notoriety, yet go unnoticed as a tool of colonialism. Michel-Rolph Trouillot argues, “The ultimate mark of power may be its invisibility.”115 He continues, “Built into any system of domination is the tendency to proclaim

110 Kanahele, 554-555. 111 Ibid., 554. Giddins, 472. 112 Giddins, 480 and 483. Until Owens won, every Academy Award had gone to songwriting teams that divided the duties of writing music and lyrics. Irving Berlin announced Owens as winner and handed him the award. In 1943, Berlin’s “White Christmas” made him the second person to win as both composer and lyricist. Also, “Sweet Leilani” spent a record twenty-eight consecutive weeks on the radio show Hit Parade and sold more than twenty-six million copies of sheet music.-Kanahele, 624. 113 Giddins, 481. 114 John Connell and Chris Gibson, “No Passport Necessary: Music, Record Covers, and Vicarious Tourism in Post-War Hawai‘i,” The Journal of Pacific History 43, no. 1 (June 2008): 55. 115 Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), xxiii. 95 its own normalcy.”116 This is precisely what the colonial US government in Hawai‘i did through funding the radio show Hawaii Calls.117 Writing in 1948, Gurre Ploner Noble opens her chapter

“Hawaiian Blackout,” which is about the post-1937 island music industry by describing the rise of American white supremacy within the industry.

Even before 1938 it was increasingly evident that the new Hawaiian music which appeared was no longer the music of Hawaiians. As the haoles had eventually come to dominate other aspects of Island life and culture, they also controlled its musical output and performance-it was gradual, but certain. There were, of course, many Hawaiians active in Hawaii’s musical life (dancers, vocalists, and instrumentalists), but not in a creative sense. Those who did create and compose were either part-Hawaiian or entirely haole.118

Guerre Ploner Noble inadvertently exposes another facet of that white supremacist “normalcy” when she notes of the music industry in Hawai‘i that a

significant thing, and one that is difficult to understand, is that so few of the outstanding people of Hawaii’s musical world have been of Oriental descent. When one considers the preponderance of Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans in the community, for several generations, it is amazing these people have played so small a part in the development of Island music. It does not seem possible for a race to be almost entirely unmusical…and still, musically they have been almost completely unproductive.119

The music industry’s most powerful lie is that it is a meritocracy and, in this example, that lie has been used to obscure flagrant anti-Asian racism.

Hawaii Calls also reinforced colonial stereotypes of Kānaka Maoli. Gurre Ploner Noble’s first point regarding haoles as composers/creators and Hawaiians as performers fits perfectly within Isaiah Helekunihi Walker’s critiques of colonialism as he writes that colonial powers,

“regularly downplayed the intellectual abilities of indigenous men and emphasized them as

116 Ibid., 82. 117 Kanahele, 268. 118 Gurre Ploner Noble, 106. 119 Ibid., 108. 96 inherently physical.”120 Also, in 1936, Hawaii Calls referred to the Hawaiian members of Harry

Owens’ orchestra as “800 pounds of Hawaiian.”121 This depiction of Hawaiian masculinity supports another of Walker’s arguments. He agrees with many other scholars that the tourism industry depicts Hawai‘i as female, but he notes that the effort to do so has been aided by depicting Hawaiian males as unattractive, overweight, content, and passive to imply that they could not be attractive to Hawaiian females and thus, “Hawai‘i is a white man’s sexual fantasyland.”122 Hawaii Calls disseminated this tourism industry depiction of Hawaiian masculinity with unprecedented international reach.

Like the anti-Asian racism rampant in Hawai‘i’s entertainment industry, the relegation of

Kānaka Maoli to subservient, physical roles while elevating haoles to leadership positions has roots in American racism and direct parallels in the US continental dance band industry.123 This attitude began to govern the island music industry of the 1930s. During this big band period of music in Hawai‘i, the top bands had non-Hawaiian bandleaders and Native Hawaiian featured performers.124 Adria L. Imada writes, “The colonial production of hospitality demanded more than the embodied knowledge of an ‘authentic’ Hawaiian; it required a brownskinned body to perform these acts of deference and aloha.”125 She notes that hula troupes touring the US continent regularly hired brownskinned women who had never even visited Hawai‘i as dancers.

120 Isaiah Helekunihi Walker, Waves of Resistance: Surfing and History in Twentieth-century Hawaiʻi (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2011), 88. 121 Tavares, 3. 122 Walker, 91-92. 123 Maile Arvin notes that the earliest colonial beliefs about Polynesia held that “white settlers were understood to be necessary to making Polynesian lands and people productive, because Polynesians were supposedly incapable of this productivity themselves.”-Maile Arvin, Possessing Polynesians: The Science of Settler Colonial Whiteness in Hawaii and Oceania (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019), 26. 124 Tatar, Strains of Change: The Impact of Tourism on Hawaiian Music, 13. 125 Imada, 197. 97

In this process, many Cuban, American Indian, Filipina, and Mexican women took on Hawaiian names and danced hula professionally.126 According to Johnny Noble, this phenomenon had already infected the music industry by the time of the first Hawaiian music craze of the teens.

“Persons who looked like Hawaiians were hired as Hawaiian musicians and dancers,” he explains wryly, “with results most unfortunate.”127

This began to apply to composers as well. Early hapa haole music, much like previous styles of Hawaiian music, was dominated by Native Hawaiian composers, but that changed dramatically in this period. Harry B. Soria, Jr. calls R. Alex Anderson his favorite composer in hapa haole music history, because even though Anderson was haole, he was born and raised in

Hawai‘i unlike the vast majority of the most famous hapa haole composers.128

These beliefs about Kānaka Maoli stem from American Jim Crow binary views of race.

As Preston Love notes, there exists a long racist history in the US of characterizing African

Americans as naturally musical and born entertainers.129 Kānaka Maoli, like African Americans, have been labeled stereotypically as “natural-born musicians” and “natural performers.”130

Merze Tate notes that “White Americans generally believe that all Negroes are ‘happy’ all the time.”131 This image of the “Happy Hawaiian” was central to marketing tourism.132 It was also central to Harry Owens’ descriptions of Hawai‘i; for example he writes that shortly after

126 Ibid. 127 Johnny Noble, “Hawaiian Musicians in the Jazz Era,” 23. 128 Leslie Wilcox, “Long Story Short-Harry B. Soria Jr.” 129 Love, 89. 130 Imada, 218-219. For more examples and information, see Troutman, 83. DeSoto Brown, Hawaii Recalls (Honolulu, HI: Editions Limited, 1982), 48. 131 Merze Tate, “Decadence of the Hawaiian Nation and Proposals to Import a Negro Labor Force,” The Journal of Negro History, Vol. XLVII, No. 4 (October, 1962): 262. 132 Brown, 48. 98 relocating his family to the islands, “The happy, carefree Hawaiians had accepted us and taken us to their hearts.”133

After the sensation sparked by Hawaii Calls, the American music industry increasingly spread the colonial fantasy that Kānaka Maoli are physically gifted performers, but not intellectually gifted artists; instead, creativity and intelligence are solely white attributes. In

1937, two years after Hawaii Calls began broadcasting and the same years of Waikiki Wedding,

Dr. Sigmund Spaeth published an article titled “A Glance at the ” in The Etude magazine, one of the most widely consumed American music publications of the era.134 Spaeth writes that the leading composers in Hawaiian music are “white men living in Honolulu.”135 The first two of the four examples that Spaeth gives of these “white men” were actually the Native

Hawaiian composers Charles E. King and Johnny Noble. The other two composers he lists are white men: R. Alex Anderson and Harry Owens, who he notes as the most popular composer.136

He writes that Owens’ composition “’Sweet Leilani’ appears in the motion picture, Waikiki

Wedding, which, incidentally contains some excellent suggestions of the more primitive

Hawaiian music.”137

133 Owens, 42. 134The editorial note that serves as an introduction to the article describes Spaeth as a prolific author, radio celebrity known as “The Tune Detective,” and explains that he has just made his second visit as a lecturer to the University of Hawai‘i.-“Editorial Note,” The Etude, August 1937: 493. 135 Dr. Sigmund Spaeth, “A Glance at the Music of Hawaii,” The Etude, August 1937: 494. 136 Ibid. Spaeth misspells Anderson’s name as “Aleck,” which is how it is pronounced, but not spelled. Spaeth describes Owens as “a University of graduate.” Owens lived in Montana as a child, but never attended the University of Montana. 137 Ibid. 99

Spaeth’s writing tries to depict Hawai‘i as conforming not only to the American music industry’s racism, but also its misogyny. He consistently makes allegations despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Spaeth writes

the universally popular Aloha Oe, the established song of greeting and farewell, credited to Queen Liliuokalani, but [was] probably the musical creation of her band master, Professor Berger. In any case, the verse is almost identical with an old hymn tune, while the chorus merely slows up the chorus of George Root’s There’s Music in the Air.138

To further his point, Spaeth includes the musical notations of the pieces of music in question, which immediately reveals differences. His claims dismiss the possibility that a non-white woman could create great art. Spaeth’s assertion that Berger composed “Aloha Oe” becomes even more absurd when one reads the interview that Berger granted the San Francisco

Examiner in 1926. Immediately following a portion of the interview in which Berger criticizes the Queen’s political decisions and complains that she insulted him when he tried to assist her,

Berger states

You want to know whether the Hawaiian tunes are really native. The melody is pure Hawaiian, but, when it is licked into shape, barred, and, above all, sung by foreign voices, it loses something which only the native singers can give it. “Aloha Oe” is Hawaiian. Liliuokalani composed the tune herself.139

In 1926, Berger was eighty-two years old, the Queen had been deceased for nine years, and the

USA was well into its third decade of occupying Hawai‘i. Berger’s criticisms of the late Queen make it clear that he had no interest in flattering her. He clearly believed she composed the song and that Western musical notations did not accurately represent the Native Hawaiian

138 Ibid. 139 Redfern Mason, “Henri Berger, Veteran Bandmaster is Final Authority on the Music of Hawaii,” The San Francisco Examiner, July 11, 1926, page 72. 100 compositions. While I have never encountered any other denials that the Queen composed the song, some claimed that she stole the melody from other sources. Charles E. King analyzed these claims in an article for Paradise of the Pacific and writes, “After carefully studying the whole matter, I have come to the conclusion that Aloha Oe is an original composition by Queen

Liliuokalani.”140 Unfortunately, Etude provided their readers pro-statehood and tourism messaging that Hawai‘i was a white male dominated space rather than the facts.

The American music industry of this era strictly limited opportunities for female artists.141 These gender relations found their way into the elite island dance band industry and the evidence indicates that women instrumentalists faced the same obstacles in finding employment in the elite dance band industry in Hawai‘i. L. D. Tavares writes of the 1936 line- up of Harry Owens & His Royal Hawaiians, “Like most orchestras, the entire personnel of the band is made up of men.”142 With only one exception, , the female artists that receive mention in Johnny Noble’s biography and Harry Owens’ autobiography as having worked with these two prominent bandleaders were singers or dancers who were not known as instrumentalists or composers.143 Gurre Ploner Noble recounts Johnny Noble’s work with

Machado and describes Machado as a gifted composer.144 George S. Kanahele writes that

Machado was also widely respected as a gifted and innovative multi-instrumentalist.145

140 Charles Edward King, “Liliuokalani’s ‘Aloha Oe’,” Paradise of the Pacific, September 1936, page 13. 141 Lipsitz, 92; Sally Placksin, American Women in Jazz: 1900 to the Present. Their Words, Lives, and Music (New York, NY: Wideview Books, 1982); Sherrie Tucker, Swing Shift: “All-Girl” Bands of the 1940s (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000). 142 Tavares, 1. 143 Gurre Ploner Noble, 76 and 80-81. Owens, 1-3 and 150-155. 144 Gurre Ploner Noble, 76. 145 Kanahele, 518. 101

In spite of a patriarchal environment that limited opportunities, other women in Hawai‘i honed their craft as instrumentalists and strove for careers in the music industry.146 Lovey Lui

Conn, a virtuoso steel guitarist, is another prominent example of a woman instrumentalist who defied the odds and created a career. Her story provides insight into what appears to be a subculture operating beneath the elite facade of the island entertainment industry. Mentored by prominent musicians during the 1930s, her career blossomed in the 1940s. In 1938, when she was only fourteen years old, she played steel guitar in her cousin Peter Solomon’s group.147

She remembers, “Peter had patience with me. I wanted to play modern music and he forced me to play Hawaiian.”148 Peter’s encouragement brought her to the attention of Johnny

Almeida, who championed this style of music and hired her to play steel guitar in his group.

This led Conn to a long and successful career as an instrumentalist in the islands where she performed both live on stage and as a studio musician on many commercially produced records.149

George S. Kanahele’s Hawaiian Music and Musicians: An Illustrated History discusses the prominent nineteenth-century female composers such as Princess Miriam and Queen

Lili‘uokalani, but the vast majority of the women mentioned in Kanahele’s encyclopedia as

146 “Presenting Nitely for Your Listening and Dancing Pleasure: Lovey Lui and Her Kuuipo’s,” Honolulu Star- Bulletin, July 12, 1962, page 22. Harry B. Soria, Jr., “Pauline Kekahuna,” Territorial Airwaves, episode aired July 19, 2013, accessed December 20, 2019, https://www.territorialairwaves.com/index.php?page=30&id=176 147 Ben Wood, “Night Life Hawaii Style,” Honolulu Star-Bulletin, August 9, 1973, page C-12. “Elizabeth L. Lui ‘Lovey’ Helela Conn (1924-1985),” Find A Grave, accessed December 30, 2019, https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/115419495/elizabeth-l_lui-conn 148 Wood. 149 Ben Wood, “Steel Guitar Has Its Night at HIC,” August 16, 1973, page 48; Harry B. Soria, Jr., “Pauline Kekahuna.”; T. Malcolm Rockwell, Hawaiian Guitar Records: 1891-1960, (Kula, Hawai‘i: Mahina Piha Press, 2007), 618, 619, 639, 657, 775, 842, 947, 1270, 1345, and 1361. 102 gaining fame with 1930s dance bands fall into the categories of singer and/or dancer. Kanahele writes of Johnny Almeida that he was “Raised as a native speaker in a traditional Hawaiian setting, his lyrics were invariably written in Hawaiian, and his melodies are characteristically

Hawaiian.”150 Thus, Almeida came out of the same culture that nourished female artists such as Likelike and Lili‘uokalani. This culture continued to thrive and often positioned itself in opposition to the dominant island dance band industry. Champions of this older culture, such as Almeida and Charles E. King, spoke out against the prominence given to the work of Harry

Owens.151

During the late 1930s while this older Native Hawaiian tradition continued, the majority of its most prominent leaders were women. Gurre Ploner Noble writes in “Hawaiian Blackout” that after 1937, “little of the Hawaiian music emerging in this era was serious in tone,” which she defines as “music reminiscent of the period and style of Kalakaua and Liliuokalani.”152 She lists five composers who continued to create what she considered important music in this style:

Charles E. King, Niu Haohao, , Helen Beamer, and Kau‘i Wilcox.153 Unlike the hapa haole genre, all of these composers were Native Hawaiian and other than King, they were all women. Stillman makes a similar observation. While teaching a course called “American

Musical Soundscapes,” she noticed that regardless of genre, nearly all famous American composers were male. In Hawaiian music, by contrast, although famous hapa haole composers were almost entirely male, a significant portion of the most well-known Hawaiian language

150 Kanahele, 15. 151 Ibid., 269 and 475; Troutman, 208. 152 Gurre Ploner Noble, 106. 153 Ibid. 103 composers were female.154 It seems reasonable to conclude that this musical culture that thrived in the Hawaiian Kingdom offered female instrumentalists and composers far more opportunities than the American commercial culture imposed after the onset of US military occupation in the nineteenth century. Christina Bacchilega argues that there exists a large tradition of Hawaiian resistance rooted in “Native agency and ‘feminine defiance.’”155 This older musical culture with significant female participation and leadership is part of that tradition. It also seems clear that this culture that flourished in the Kingdom era continued to assert itself throughout the first half of the twentieth century, even after “Hawaii Calls took over the world.”

Conclusion

As Johnny Noble explains in an opening quote to this chapter, radio deeply affected the direction of the music industry in Hawai‘i and thus the direction of the music itself. As radio become more ubiquitous, the tourism industry worked to replace Hawaiian music and musicians with haole musicians proficient in popular genres from the US continent. The alliance formed between tourism and statehood advocates ventured into radio in 1935. The smashing success of Hawaii Calls and the entertainment industry commodities it inspired further suppressed a Native Hawaiian musical culture that had flourished in the Kingdom and many of the artists who had thrived in that culture. Harry Owens and “music of the Harry

154 Amy Ku‘uleialoha Stillman, “Gender and Hawaiian Music,” Hawaiian Music for Listening Pleasure, June 3, 2013, accessed December 29, 2019, https://amykstillman.wordpress.com/2013/06/03/gender-and-hawaiian- music. Stillman states in this blog post that she doesn’t have an explanation for this phenomenon and concludes the post “just thinking aloud . . .” 155 Cristina Bacchilega, Legendary Hawai‘i and the Politics of Place: Tradition, Translation, and Tourism (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 134. 104

Owens type” became ubiquitous in the commercial culture produced both to promote tourism to Hawai‘i and to profit from the reliably profitable archetype that the imaginary Hawai‘i had become within the entertainment industry.

105

Chapter 3: The Biography and “Autobiography” of Harry Owens

My dear George: You may be interested in learning that I heard many favorable comments during my stay on the mainland, concerning the weekly Hawaiian radio programs originating here and rebroadcast in California. These appear to me to be an effective method of bringing Hawaii to the attention of great audiences and arousing interest concerning the Islands. — Joseph B. Poindexter, Governor of the Territory of Hawai‘i in a letter to George T. Armitage, Secretary of the Hawaii Tourist Bureau 1

Harry Owens, whose Hawaiian music is impressionistic rather than accurate, is drawing capacity crowds during his current San Francisco hotel engagement. — Honolulu Star-Bulletin, July 12, 19502

Mention tradewinds singing in the branches of a coco palm and I think of Harry Owens. Mention moonlight, rippling waters, a million stars and steel guitars—again, Harry Owens. Speak of lovely, brown-skinned, hula maidens and I think of…Well, enough of that! What I mean is, the guy is Mister Hawaii. —Bob Hope3

The statehood movement joined forces with the tourism industry in 1930s Hawai‘i to enlist the music industry to market their causes on a global scale that presented the islands as an exoticized and feminized, yet white-dominated space. This sparked a second Hawaiian music craze that swept the globe in the latter half of the 1930s and the most prominent figure, by far, in the second Hawaiian music craze was Harry Owens. Statehood and tourism advocates made Owens the face and the voice of many prominent business ventures and launched him to international superstardom in the entertainment industry. As a result, Harry

Owens’ music, performances, and other associated commodities both conformed closely to the

1 Governor of the Territory of Hawai‘i Joseph B. Poindexter to George T. Armitage, Secretary of the Hawaii Tourist Bureau, August 26, 1936. Letter in Hawai‘i State Archives. 2 “Harry Owens Is Booming Hawaii Music on Coast,” Honolulu Star-Bulletin, July 12, 1950, page 13. 3 Don Hibbard and David Franzen, The View from Diamond Head: Royal Residence to Urban Resort (Honolulu, HI: Editions Limited, 1987), 122. 106 longstanding distortions of Hawai‘i marketed by the tourism industry and shaped global perceptions of the islands to a significant degree. These marketing messages were modeled upon longstanding racist, misogynist tropes from the American entertainment industry that had often been applied to African Americans and Native Americans before being applied to Kānaka

Maoli. American consumers became accustomed to this popular white/other binary form of storytelling. This chapter argues that the formulaic nature of these distortions fueled the spread of tourism and pro-statehood marketing as it granted spokespeople like Harry Owens a sense of authenticity and authority that Americans find credible because it conforms to and confirms their false notions of what Hawai‘i and Hawaiian culture and music are.

This chapter’s primary focus is Harry Owens’ extraordinary autobiography, Sweet

Leilani: The Story Behind the Song, published in 1970 when Owens was five years into his retirement from the music industry. For decades, Harry Owens was a household name and a megastar in the entertainment industry, but his name has faded from cultural memory far more than many of his successful contemporaries. While his music and acting are no longer discussed, the limited scholarship on Hawaiian music in the first half of the twentieth century frequently cites his autobiography as a source of historical fact.4 Yet Owens’ book is not a

4 A few examples include Michael Denning, Noise Uprising: The Audiopolitics of a World Musical Revolution (London: Verso, 2015); Gary Giddins, Bing Crosby: A Pocketful of Dreams The Early Years 1903-1940 (Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Company, 2002); Lorene Ruymar, ed., The Hawaiian Steel Guitar and Its Great Hawaiian Musicians (Anaheim Hills, CA: Centerstream Publications, 1996); Milly Singletary, Hilo Hattie, a Legend in Our Time: A Biography (Honolulu, HI: Mutual Publishing, 2006); Bryan C. Stoneburner, Hawaiian Music: An Annotated Bibliography (New York, NY: Greenwood, 1986); Susan Smulyan, “Live from Waikiki: Colonialism, Race, and Radio in Hawaii, 1934-1963,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television 27, no. 1 (March 2007): 63-75; George S. Kanahele, ed., (revised and updated by John Berger), Hawaiian Music and Musicians: An Encyclopedic History (Honolulu, HI: Mutual Publishing, 2012); Betty Tatar, “Additions to Bibliography-Part II,” Ha‘ilono Mele, Volume II, Number 11, November 1976: 5; Tony Todaro, Tony Todaro Presents: The Golden Years of Hawaiian Entertainment, 1874-1974 (Honolulu, HI: Tony Todaro Publishing Company, 1974); Sasha Torres, ed., Living Color: Race and Television in the United States 107 reliable source of historical facts. At its most accurate it is fiction based loosely on historical facts. Indeed, much of this alleged memoir is complete fantasy.5 I argue that this book’s veracity remains unquestioned because of the sense authority and authenticity it derives from closely conforming to formulaic entertainment industry tropes. The continued acceptance of this book as a credible historical source exemplifies the power that tourism and statehood advocates tapped into when they enlisted the music industry to spread their messaging.

The autobiography is nonetheless a fascinating work that can reveal historical insight if looked at in the way George Lipsitz analyzes pop music,

Recorded music functions within commercial culture as a commodity produced to procure monetary returns for investors. It makes no pretense of presenting historical events with accuracy. Yet, when read critically and symptomatically, popular music, like all forms of commercial culture from any era, registers change over time in important ways and serves as a vitally important repository for collective memory.6

(Durham NC: Duke University Press, 1998); Jim Tranquada and John King, The 'Ukulele: A History (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai'i Press, 2012). 5 The reviews of the book that appeared immediately after its publication are overwhelmingly positive and also accept the work as fact. I have only found one review, which appeared in the Honolulu Star-Bulletin, that questions the veracity of any part of the book and that review only questions Owens’ stories about Aikane the kahuna. A few of the reviews criticize Owens’ self-aggrandizement, but even those reviews praise the book.-John Fetler, “Current Books,” Colorado Springs Gazette-Telegraph, November 22, 1970, page 37; H. Reid, “The Story Behind a Hawaiian Classic,” Daily Press (Newport News, Virginia), October 4, 1970, page 128; Chuck Thurston, “The Hit Song Bing Crooned: The Story of ‘Sweet Leilani’,” Detroit Free Press, February 7, 1971, page 23; “‘Sweet Leilani’ Composer Sets Two-Day Isle Visit,” Hawaii Tribune-Herald (Hilo, Hawai‘i), September 3, 1970, page 24; Chuck Frankel, “Books,” Honolulu Star-Bulletin, September 18, 1970, page 19; “Montana to Hawaii,” The Billings Gazette (Billings, Montana), December 6, 1970; “There Really is a Sweet Leilani,” The Fresno Bee Republican (Fresno, California), October 11, 1970, page 80; “‘Sweet Leilani’ New Book Mixes Corn, Gold,” The Honolulu Advertiser, September 25, 1970, page 46; Paul Elder, “The Baby That Made a Hit,” The San Francisco Examiner, November 9, 1970, page 33; Jerry Hulse, “Harry’s Version of Paradise Lost,” The Los Angeles Times, Sunday, April 12, 1970, page 153; “‘Sweet Leilani’ and Composer: Both Legends,” The Tampa Times (Tampa, Florida), April 15, 1970, page 59. 6 George Lipsitz, Footsteps in the Dark: The Hidden Histories of Popular Music (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), viii. 108

As L. D. Tavares observed, one of a successful bandleader’s most important skills must be the ability to “sell himself and his band.”7 As one of the most successful bandleaders on the planet for decades, Owens clearly excelled at this skill.8 Hula House published the autobiography and this is the only book that this Harry Owens-owned company ever published. As an essentially self-published work, Owens’ book gives us an unfiltered view of what he considered the best method for selling himself after decades of experience honing his self-sales pitch. All of the most profitable commercial endeavors related to Owens involved depictions of Hawai‘i, thus

Owens branded himself as “Mr. Hawaii” and many times proclaimed himself the world’s leading expert on Hawai‘i and Hawaiian culture.9

The autobiography conforms almost perfectly with what New York Times columnist

David Brooks terms “The White Messiah Fable.” Brooks explains the formula for this fable,

This is the oft-repeated story about a manly young adventurer who goes into the wilderness in search of thrills and profit. But, once there, he meets the native people and finds that they are noble and spiritual and pure. And so he emerges as their Messiah, leading them on a righteous crusade against his own rotten civilization.10

Owens’ story fits this description precisely up until “against his own rotten civilization.” Rather

Owens claims to lead Kānaka Maoli on a righteous crusade to bring joy and comfort to his own

7 L. D. Tavares, “Musicians – A Case Study of the Royal Hawaiians,” 1936, University of Hawai‘i, Hamilton Library, Archives and Manuscripts Collection, Romanzo Adams Social Research Laboratory (RASRL) Collection, 4. 8 Labeling Owens “as one of the most successful bandleaders on the planet for decades” is far from hyperbole. As noted above, he was a superstar whose legacy has faded dramatically with the passing of time. Also, perceptions of the music industry generally limit people to viewing only famous people as participants, but this is false and was particularly false in the dance band era. Very few bandleaders ever made a living through music alone and fewer became extremely wealthy as Owens did. 9 Harry Owens, Harry Owens' Great Songs of Hawaii (Pacific Palisades, CA: Royal Music Publisher, 1964), inside of front cover. Harry Owens, Sweet Leilani: The Story Behind the Song; an Autobiography (Pacific Palisades, CA: Hula House, 1970), 200, 231-232, and 295. 10 David Brooks, “The Messiah Complex,” The New York Times, January 8, 2010, accessed January 18, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/08/opinion/08brooks.html 109 wonderful civilization because he contends “noble and spiritual and pure” Hawaiian culture is naturally suited to this role.

The autobiography depicts Native Hawaiian culture as one of subservience and hospitality while asserting that no one on the planet is more qualified to describe this culture than Harry Owens himself. This fantasy was built upon the ways in which the music industry had promoted his music since his arrival in the islands, which was built upon a fantasy of authenticity and authority. To perform this fantasy, Owens assumed the archetypal entertainment industry persona of “white messiah/mediator.” For example, a 1941 Oakland

Tribune article claims, “Harry Owens ‘Your Friend From Hawaii,’ has translated the spirit of the islands into several songs of his own. So closely do they resemble the native folk songs that even old-time inhabitants have difficulty in distinguishing Harry’s new compositions.”11 Owens’ work was regularly promoted in this way, in spite of the fact that Native Hawaiian composers like Charles E. King and Johnny Almeida had been quite vocal for years in protesting the ways in which Owens made Hawaiian music sound more and more like continental music.12

Owens publicly embraced the tourism industry and utilized its distorted narrative to sell himself.13 He writes of his arrival in the islands, “And music, in the years ahead, was destined to play a big part in the development of Hawaii’s greatest industry: the tourist trade.”14 Over and over, Owens’ writing encapsulates tourism’s fantasies ranging from alleged experiences with

11 “Harry Owens’ Songs of Hawaii Click,” Oakland Tribune, October 5, 1941, page 25. 12 Kanahele, Hawaiian Music and Musicians: An Encyclopedic History, 269 and 475. 13 Examples of the tourism tropes employed by Owens appear in scholarship including the following: Haunani-Kay Trask, From a Native Daughter: Colonialism and Sovereignty in Hawai'i (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2005), 136-137 and 144; DeSoto Brown, Hawaii Recalls (Honolulu, HI: Editions Limited, 1982), 48. 14 Owens, Sweet Leilani: The Story Behind the Song, 78. 110

“happy, carefree Hawaiians” in the 1930s or his later 1950s first encounter with Tahiti “and her people—carefree, happy, lackadaisical as their Hawaiian brothers, but more so.”15

Owens consistently referred to Hawai‘i as female; for example, he writes “about the charms of Hawaii, her music, her songs, her friendly people.”16 Strikingly, neither of the leading

Native Hawaiian composers Johnny Noble and Charles E. King assigned a gender to Hawai‘i in any of their writing, despite their advocacy of tourism.17 Owens not only gendered Hawai‘i, but he also claimed ownership over everything and everyone in the islands, “Hawaii, her loveliness and her people became my very own.”18 Also, in an article he penned for Paradise of the

Pacific, Owens writes, “My Hawaiian people had accepted me.”19 His autobiography is replete with references to “my precious islands” and “my islands regained their rightful place in the sun.”20 He concludes his book, “I am still able, several times each year, to fly to my islands whenever tradewinds whisper that the natives are growing restless. There I meet with my people; we spend many happy hours recounting earlier days and Hawaii keeps singing my songs.”21 His claim to possession of Kānaka Maoli contains an additional gendered facet. He indicates no assertion to ownership when he refers to individual Native Hawaiian men that he

15 Ibid., 42 and 273. 16 Ibid., 53. 17 Johnny Noble, “Moana Pier, Fond Memory of Kamaainas,” Paradise of the Pacific, January 1944: 29-30; Johnny Noble, “Hawaiian Musicians in the Jazz Era,” Paradise of the Pacific, November 1943: 21-24; Johnny Noble, “Remember Waikiki?,” Paradise of the Pacific, August 1942: 16; Johnny Noble, “Origin of the Steel Guitar: Hawaiian Instrument Discovered Accidentally by a Schoolboy,” Paradise of the Pacific, October 1943: 34-35; Johnny Noble, “Unpublished Noble Manuscript Found in Gift to HMF,” Ha‘ilono Mele,Volume V, Number 9, September, 1979: 5-7; Johnny Noble, “A King Who Got His Wish,” Paradise of the Pacific, August 1943: 8-9 and 31; Johnny Noble, Kanaka Musicians on Tour,” Paradise of the Pacific, September 1943: 18-19 and 31; Charles Edward King, “Liliuokalani’s ‘Aloha Oe’,” Paradise of the Pacific, September 1936: 13. 18 Owens, Sweet Leilani: The Story Behind the Song, 47, Charles Edward King, “Na Lei O Hawaii,” Paradise of the Pacific. (October 1936): 7. 19 Harry Owens, “Hawaii-My Land of Beginning,” Paradise of the Pacific, March 1959: 58. 20 Owens, Sweet Leilani: The Story Behind the Song, 174 and 178. 21 Ibid., 311. 111 worked with, but his language about individual Native Hawaiian women differs significantly.

Owens describes Lena Machado as “my Hawaiian Nightingale.”22 He characterizes Hilo Hattie, who he worked with extensively for decades, as “my devil-may-care pixie,” “my happy, laughing, talented, funny-wonderful wahine,” and “My little pixie.”23

While Owens’ work consistently lays claim to Hawai‘i and Kānaka Maoli, it erases or marginalizes Asians. Owens writes in his autobiography, “My job in Hawaii… was to help perpetuate the music of the islands…My vehicle was to be an orchestra composed, one half of native musicians and singers, one half of haoles (whites).”24 Owens’ description reinforces the message that Hawai‘i is a space open to white domination as half of the orchestra is defined as white and he, the leader, is also white. Additionally, the statement erases Asians from Hawai‘i.

The fact that he reports his 1934 orchestra was zero percent Asian is particularly audacious in light of the fact that the 1930 census recorded Hawai‘i’s population as sixty-four percent

Asian.25 In 1936, L. D. Tavares interviewed Owens’ orchestra members about their ancestry and confirms that Owens in this instance was making a rare, factual statement. Tavares reports that only three of the fourteen members had any Asian ancestry at all, and none claimed full Asian ancestry. Two of the musicians were brothers, Ernest and Freddie Tavares, who reported their ancestry as “Hawaiian, Tahitian, English, Chinese, and Portuguese.” The third musician claimed,

22 Ibid., 106. 23 Ibid., 155 and 204. 24 Ibid., 2. Owens penned an article for Paradise of the Pacific in 1959, eleven years before the publication of his autobiography. This earlier account is word for word identical to the one in the autobiography with the exception of using the word “Island” rather than “native.” I believe he became more explicit in his erasure of Asians because he had a very specific audience he hoped to please with his autobiography.-Harry Owens, “Hawaii-My Land of Beginning,”page 57. 25 Robert C. Schmitt, Historical Statistics of Hawaii (Honolulu, HI: The University Press of Hawaii, 1977), 58. The Census data contained in Schmitt’s work does not group all Asians together. There are separate numbers listed for Chinese, Korean, Filipino, and Japanese. 112

“Norwegian and Japanese descent.” The other musicians identified as having European ancestry, Hawaiian ancestry, or a mix of the two.26

Owens’ autobiography only mentions two individuals with Asian ancestry, and both fit within established entertainment industry archetypes. Cu Fleshman notes that Hollywood has traditionally allowed very few Asian characters screen time and has typically depicted Asians as

“prostitutes, maids, butlers, laundry workers and craven villains.”27 True to the stereotype, the first character in Owen’s book is a prostitute named Marcella who “is part Hawaiian, part

Chinese, part Filipino, and part angel.”28 The second character is his family’s servant, “little

Umeyo, our fine Japanese girl.”29 The other individuals whom Owens describes in Hawai‘i conform to the Native/haole binary. In one particularly striking example, he details a party thrown in his honor at the Royal Hawaiian at which his compositions were performed by an orchestra composed of “all natives” while he and his wife listened at a table with “all our people.”30 His comprehensive list of friends includes only Kānaka Maoli and haoles.

In his autobiography, Owens details an approach to performing music about Hawai‘i that seems precisely engineered to provide maximum enjoyment to white elites. He claims that his music proves the fact that “the marriage between the music of Hawaii and the music of the mainland has, at last, been consummated.”31 Owens defines his vision of “the music of the

26 L. D. Tavares, 1-2. I have not been able to establish whether or not L. D. was related to Ernest and Freddie, but it seems likely due to the access to the band that L. D. got in writing this student paper. 27 Cu Fleshman, “Legends: Take A Look Back At Asian American Hollywood History,” Character Media, July 5, 2019, accessed January 15, 2020, https://charactermedia.com/legends-a-look-back-at-asian-american- hollywood-history-asian-american-actors-timeline-asian-american-actresses-sessue-hayakawa-anna-may- wong-merle-oberon-jadin-wong-keye-luke-philip-ahn-richard-loo-j/ 28 Owens, Sweet Leilani: The Story Behind the Song, 52. 29 Ibid., 114. 30 Ibid., 151-152. The emphasis on “all” is in the original text. 31 Ibid., 40. 113 mainland” as he cites Guy Lombardo and Lawrence Welk as his biggest musical influences.32

Legendary jazz musician Preston Love notes that learning the repertoires of Lombardo and

Welk and emulating their styles was an unpleasant requirement for any black dance band of the

1930s if they were to succeed with white audiences.33 Harry Owens writes that he, Lombardo, and Welk are among the very few artists who have “chosen to stay with the melody…in a pure and unadulterated manner. Addicts of jive, rock ‘n’ roll and modern jazz have given the label

‘cornball’ to these musical ‘purists.’”34 Whites commonly considered melody to be the intellectual facet or white facet of music and rhythm to be the primitive. For example, upon the 1929 death of Omaha, Nebraska black bandleader Dan Desdunes, a white newspaper commented, “There were other Negro instrumentalists in Omaha, but he went in for melody rather than the usual tin-panning.”35

Regarding the other party in Owens’ musical marriage metaphor, he explains that it took him most of two weeks to master Hawaiian music. By his account, an eighty-year-old Native

Hawaiian woman named Auntie Pinau taught him the “ancient” songs in his first week on the job in Hawai‘i. Auntie Pinau already knew his name upon their meeting, but pronounced it “Ha- lee Oven” as he claims many Kānaka Maoli did. In her first statement to him, Owens claims

Pinau said, “the tradewinds told me of your mission. You are here to do good things for the music of my people.”36 He arranged the songs she taught him in a Guy Lombardo style and

32 Ibid., 6. 33 Preston Love, A Thousand Honey Creeks Later: My Life in Music from Basie to Motown--and Beyond (Middleton, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1997), 89. 34 Owens, Sweet Leilani: The Story Behind the Song, 6 35 Father Flanagan’s Boys’ Home Journal, “Homeless Boys Mourn Dan Desdunes’ Death,” June, 1929, 3. 36 Owens, Sweet Leilani: The Story Behind the Song, 34. 114 performed them with his orchestra to an enthusiastic reception from an audience composed of both tourists and locals. Owens claims Auntie Pinau prayed through the first song and at the song’s conclusion, she told Owens, “The Gods of my people, high on their celestial thrones in the Valley of the Moon, salute you and bless you with Royal Aloha.”37 Both the music Owens describes and the process by which he claims to have created it reflect the image of Hawai‘i as a space where passive Kānaka Maoli facilitate active white enjoyment. Sonically, his “marriage” presents the “mainland” as a white space and Hawai‘i as a feminized space welcoming white domination.

Early Life and Arrival in the Islands

Harry Owens writes that he was born in O’Neil, Nebraska on April 18, 1902.38 Owens family moved to Montana, eventually settling in Missoula, when he was a young child.39 Owens claims to have attended elementary school in “an Indian school at St. Ignatius Mission Indian

Reservation” where the bandleader was Joe Ninepipes “full-blooded Indian of the Flathead

Indian tribe.” He credits Ninepipes with buying him his first cornet and starting his musical career.40 I have found no other sources to confirm Ninepipes existed.41 Owens’ book included

37 Ibid., 37-39. 38 Ibid., 5-6. Owens claims, “Recently it has come to my attention that this still-quiet hamlet with the Irish name is erecting some sort of edifice honoring me, the ‘Irish-Hawaiian.’” I was born and spent most of my childhood in a small Nebraska town sixty miles east of O’Neil. I have been to O’Neil many times. My uncle was born and raised in O’Neil and assures me that nothing honoring Harry Owens has ever been built in that town. 39 Ibid., 7. 40 Ibid., 10-11. 41 In 1987, Missoula journalist Evelyn King became fascinated by Harry Owens’ autobiography and ironically writes of it, “Truth, truly, is often stranger than fiction.” Owens’ book is most definitely not evidence in support of this claim. In a series of articles, King asked for people who remembered Harry Owens and Joe Ninepipes to contact her. She received correspondence from some people about Owens, but not about Ninepipes. Her push for information came about 70 years after Owens claims Ninepipes passed away, so the lack of response about him certainly does not prove he did not exist.-Evelyn King, “Kind Hearts and Cornets and Harry,” The Missoulian (Missoula, MT), February 8, 1987, page 34; Evelyn King, “Still Thinking of Music,” 115 a photograph of someone he labeled as Joe Ninepipes, whereas the book did not contain photographs of two Native Hawaiian characters that he almost certainly invented and who are featured prominently later in the book. Owens writes of Ninepipes in the same manner that he discusses these Hawaiian characters,

Dear Gods of my Hawaiian people, high above on your thrones in the Valley of the Moon—Great Lono, Ruler of all things Polynesian—do this for me, I pray of you: Journey to the Indians’ Happy Hunting Ground, seek out the personal Gods of the great American Indian Joe Ninepipes and, together with these Gods, bless him forever, wherever he may be among you.42

Owens and his family moved to Los Angeles, where he boasts—accurately in this case— of his great success in the music industry.43 While working in LA, Matson sent the Royal

Hawaiian Hotel’s resident manager, Bert Ogilvie, to the continent to scout and hire a haole bandleader. Ogilvie convinced Owens to relocate his family to Honolulu and work for Matson.44

In May 1934, Owens arrived in Honolulu to begin work as Matson’s bandleader.45 As

Matson’s bandleader, Harry Owens’ orchestra performed regularly at both the Moana Hotel and the Royal Hawaiian along with the Waialae Golf Club, which Matson had built to accommodate hotel guests and island elites. Pleasing these rich and powerful patrons was

Owens’ primary responsibility and providing music that entertained them was only part of that

The Missoulian (Missoula, MT), February 15, 1987, page 40; Evelyn King, “Early Morning Caller Offers the Right Answer,” The Missoulian (Missoula, MT), February 22, 1987, page 35. Chief Joseph Ninepipes (1820-1871) was a famous Bitterroot Salish leader who lived very close to Missoula and for whom many places in the area are named. If Owens invented this character in his book, this may be the origin of the name.-“About Us,” Ninepipes Museum, Accessed January 17, 2020, https://www.ninepipesmuseum.org/about-us/ 42 Owens, Sweet Leilani: The Story Behind the Song, 12. 43 Ibid., 20. “Missoula Boy Now is Famed For His Music,” The Missoulian (Missoula, MT), September 28, 1924, page 13. 44 Gurre Ploner Noble, 86. 45 Ibid. 116 job. Owens, like most bandleaders of this period, was expected to spend many hours of each workday expertly engaged in activities such as small talk, shaking hands, telling jokes, and smiling in the right way at precisely the right times. L. D. Tavares writes of Owens,

The leader’s qualifications differ a great deal from the members of the organization. First of all he must be an average musician, he must be able to command respect from the rest of the band. Besides these things he is the contact man. He must be able to flatter, scheme and barter. He must be constantly on the alert for choice spots. He must be a diplomat. He must be able to get along with every class of people, especially his employers. I observed the leader one night after one of the dances. He spent about 2 hours after the dance, talking, shaking hands, holding ladies’ hands, and telling jokes to the managers. His wife sat calmly waiting in the lobby of the hotel for him. “Aren't you tired of waiting?” asked one of the musician's wives. "Yes,” she smiled and answered, “but he's still working.” His qualifications are those of a trader. The leader must sell himself and his band. The rest of the orchestra members never come in contact socially with their employers, that is, the people they play for.46

Owens’ talents as a charmer were clearly extraordinary. Most accounts of Owens’ time in the islands mention the large number of influential friends he made during this period.47

Owens writes of this arrival, “My job in Hawaii, as new musical director at the Royal

Hawaiian Hotel, was to help perpetuate the music of the islands which had, to a degree, been passed along from generation to generation by word of mouth and, in many cases had never been committed to written form.”48 It seems unlikely that any aspect of his job description related to perpetuating the music of Hawai‘i; indeed, many in Hawai‘i accused him of doing the opposite. Furthermore, by 1934, many generations of Native Hawaiian composers had committed their compositions to written form. This part of Owens’ statement, as it relates to

46 Tavares, 4. 47 Tavares, 4. Gurre Ploner Noble, Hula Blues: The Story of Johnny Noble, Hawaii, Its Music and Musicians (Honolulu, HI: E. D. Noble, 1948), 109. George S. Kanahele, ed., (revised and updated by John Berger), Hawaiian Music and Musicians: An Encyclopedic History (Honolulu, HI: Mutual Publishing, 2012), 616. “Our Ambassador of Music,” Honolulu Star-Bulletin, September 4, 1940, page 8. There are many, many more such accounts. 48 Owens, Sweet Leilani: The Story Behind the Song, 2. 117 written music, served to mark Hawaiian culture as primitive by depicting Hawaiian culture as

“oral and performance based.”49 Such representations construct a sense of Hawai‘i as safe for white visitors by depicting Kānaka Maoli and their culture as stagnant and stuck in the past—a historical relic.50

Owens claims that of the “ten old Hawaiian songs” that Auntie Pinau taught him on his first day on the job and that he first committed to paper, the “one that the world knows best is the ancient Tahitian/Samoan/Fijian/Raratongan/Hawaiian song called ‘Tu Ha Ua’,” which he writes eventually became known as “Hawaiian War Chant.”51 By contrast, George S. Kanahele credits Johnny Noble, a Native Hawaiian composer who could read and write music from a young age, with composing the song in 1936. Noble based the song on a piece composed around 1875 by Prince William Pitt Leleiohoku II, another Native Hawaiian composer formally trained in Western musical notation. Kanahele notes that “shortly after Noble published his new song, Harry Owens put a different set of lyrics to the melody and dubbed the resulting song ‘The Laughing Song’.”52

Owens’ story of how he finalized his orchestra’s line-up through the “discovery” of the two best-known members of his early ensemble expands his self-defined role of white messiah.

49 Mark Williams, “Entertaining ‘difference’: strains of Orientalism in early Los Angeles television,” in Sasha Torres, ed., Living Color: Race and Television in the United States (Durham, NC, Duke University Press, 1998), 20. 50 Cristina Bacchilega, Legendary Hawai‘i and the Politics of Place: Tradition, Translation, and Tourism (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007); Houston Wood, Displacing Natives: The Rhetorical Production of Hawaiʻi (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1999). 51 Owens, Sweet Leilani: The Story Behind the Song, 35. 52 Kanahele, Hawaiian Music and Musicians: An Encyclopedic History, 283-284. Owens claims he called it “The Laughing Song” because Auntie Pinau would laugh wildly while singing and chanting. Owens asked her why she laughed and she responded, “Hawaiian people happy, laughing people.”- Owens, Sweet Leilani: The Story Behind the Song, 35. 118

He writes, “I set out to find and hire the best male voice in Hawaii. Working in a taro chip factory and singing as he worked, I came upon , Irish-Hawaiian tenor.”53 I found no evidence to corroborate this story, and much that casts serious doubt upon it. Tony Todaro writes over the last half of the 1920s, Ray Kinney “became the most popular male singer in

Hawaii.”54 In 1928, when Brunswick-Balke-Collender Company made a major investment in producing Hawaiian records and hired Johnny Noble, predecessor to Owens as Royal Hawaiian bandleader, to select artists to be recorded, Kinney was one of Noble’s picks for this famous session.55 In the time immediately preceding Owens’ arrival in Honolulu, Kinney was receiving significant airtime on the radio along with much print publicity for his work as a singer and orchestra leader while regularly performing at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel.56 Kinney became even more famous, particularly beyond Hawai‘i, through his collaboration with Owens along with his later career as a bandleader.

Freddie Tavares, guitarist, inventor, and electronic engineer, is likely the best- remembered Owens collaborator globally in the twenty-first century. Owens writes of Freddie

Tavares, “From a job of sacking onions, down at the pier, came Freddie Tavares who, in the years ahead, was to become top master of the steel guitar.”57 Owens does not claim that

Tavares was playing guitar while sacking onions and gives no indication how he “discovered” the guitarist. He also does not mention that Freddie’s older brother Ernest was a very well-

53 Owens, Sweet Leilani: The Story Behind the Song, 39. 54 Todaro, Golden Years of Hawaiian Entertainment, 205. 55 Gurre Ploner Noble, 75-76. 56 “Bermuda and Hawaii Music on Ether Lanes,” Honolulu Star-Bulletin, January 13, 1934, page 10; “Henry G. Laphams Give Two Affairs During Week at Beach Hotel,” Honolulu Advertiser, April 1, 1934, page 19; “It is Worth Hearing Ray Kinney Singing Orchestra KGMB,” Honolulu Star-Bulletin, May 15, 1934, page 10. 57 Owens, Sweet Leilani: The Story Behind the Song, 39. 119 known and successful Honolulu musician by the time Owens arrived and that the brothers joined Owens’ band at the same time.58

Owens claims that at the end of his first year in the islands, Auntie Pinau arranged for him to meet someone who was to become one of the most important figures in his life: Aikane the Kahuna. According to his story, Auntie Pinau sent a car to pick Owens up from the Royal

Hawaiian Hotel, but mysteriously did not inform him where they would be going. Owens describes a journey to a place that anyone familiar with O‘ahu geography can recognize that this place could not exist,

Through Nuuanu Valley, up over the Pali, we then left the main highway, took a side road—it was more like a trail—and headed into the mountains. Weaving and turning, we continued, up, up, until I thought we’d touch the sky. It had grown cold. The first time I had felt cold since leaving California. The driver handed me a heavy jacket, closed the car windows. After much more twisting and turning we were now driving along a torch-lighted avenue and this led to a courtyard. We stopped and there, before me, stood a palm-thatched A-frame hut of tremendous size. I learned later that the Polynesians call them “long houses” and that the largest, tallest is always the house of the High Chief.59

Auntie Pinau led Owens into the edifice where he saw an elderly man in a “silken robe” sitting at a massive, ornate table and writing in a “sizeable, tapa-bound book” with large letters on the cover that spelled “ONIPAA.”60 She introduced the elderly man, “This is my great uncle, Ha-lee.

58 Shannon Wianecki, “The Astounding, Astonishing Tavares Brothers,” Hana Hou!, Issue 15.4, August/September 2012, accessed January 18, 2020, https://hanahou.com/15.4/the-astounding-astonishing- tavares-brothers; “Rycroft Begins Extensive Radio Sked Over KGMB,” Honolulu Star-Bulletin, February 4, 1933, page 4. It seems unlikely that an extremely talented musician from an affluent family who also had a successful, well-connected musician brother with whom he was extremely close would have to sack onions at the pier, but I have found no evidence to disprove that conclusively. The Tavares brothers’ maternal grandfather was quite wealthy, and their father had a successful career in the sugar industry. The family had a nice home in a choice location, their own electric generator, an automobile, and employed a chauffeur.- Wianecki. 59 Owens, Sweet Leilani: The Story Behind the Song, 55-56. 60 Ibid., 56. Owens uses all caps in his book. 120

He is called Aikane the Kahuna. He is the last of our Polynesian priests.”61 Owens refers to

Aikane many times throughout the course of the book as “venerable last of the priests of

Polynesia” or “venerable last of the priests of old Hawaii.”62 In doing so, Owens incorporates yet another longstanding, popular trope into his book: “the vanishing Indian.”63 This myth had already been profitably applied to Kānaka Maoli about a decade before Owens arrived in the islands. Earl Derr Biggers’ hit novel The House Without a Key introduced the character of

Charlie Chan in 1925 and the novel’s first mention of a Native Hawaiian character describes this character as a “dignified specimen of that vanishing race.”64

In the July 1940 issue of Social Process in Hawaii, Charles W. Kenn notes that kahunas were not vanishing in 1935, the year Owens claims to have met the “venerable last of the priests of Polynesia.” Kenn writes, “Unquestionably there is still considerable confidence in the ancient art of the Hawaiian experts.”65 He explains that the term kahuna is commonly misunderstood and misused, but that this is to be expected. He writes that a common

Hawaiian expression is “He ala ili ke kahuna, aole e loaa i ka hookolo ia,” which he translates as

“the path of the Kahuna is so narrow, it cannot be followed.”66 If Aikane existed, he certainly was not the last kahuna when Owens allegedly met him in 1935.

61 Ibid., 57. 62 Ibid., 58, 65, 90-91, and 249. 63 Brewton Berry, “The Myth of the Vanishing Indian,” Phylon (Clark Atlanta University), Vol. 21, No. 1, 1st Qtr., 1960: 52-53. 64 Earl Derr Biggers, The House Without a Key (New York, NY: P.F. Collier, 1925), 6. 65 Charles W. Kenn, “Notes on the Kahuna and Social Work,” Social Process in Hawaii, Volume 6, July 1940: 42. 66 Kenn defines kahuna as “a definite class of people who were experts in all matter pertaining to life and religion” and explains that there were two groups within that class: one dedicated to “life-sustaining” practices and the other to “destructive activities.” Kenn notes that in 1935, the Territory of Hawai‘i passed two separate laws prohibiting the practices of the latter group.-Ibid., 40-41. 121

The evidence suggests that Aikane and Auntie Pinau are fictional. Owens’ book includes photos of everyone he called important to his life with the exception of these two Kānaka

Maoli. No accounts mention either until Owens himself in the 1950s on his and in interviews promoting the show. Not only do accounts such as Kenn’s contradict Owens’ claims, but Owens’ claims often contradict each other. Yet Owens’ book has been regarded as fact, all evidence to the contrary. In 2013, Thomas Markle penned an article, prominently featured as the lead article in the Honolulu Star-Advertiser “Features” section, titled “Life of

Influential Aunty Pinau Still a Mystery,” which pleads for information about Aunty Pinau.

Markle seems to have no doubt she existed, but expresses frustration that “searches have been unable to locate an obituary or any reference to her. She has seemingly disappeared from written history.”67 It appears his pleas for information went unanswered.

Although Owens’ autobiography is often cited in passing in scholarly works, I have only found one scholarly work that examines his book in detail and that author accepted it as fact.

In his doctoral dissertation “The Development of Waikiki, 1900-1949: The Formative Period of an American Resort Paradise,” Masakazu Ejiri dedicates a twelve-page section to a discussion of the career and impact of Harry Owens. Regarding Aikane, Ejiri writes,

Owens always showed his respect for native peoples and tried to learn something spiritual from them. For instance, during his stay in Hawaii, Owens respected Aikane the Kahuna who was believed to be the last of the Polynesian priests. He learned a good deal of Hawaiian history and legends from him, and often took his advice whenever he faced hardships or important decisions. Aikane served as a spiritual mentor for Owens, whose later success owed much to the support of the great Hawaiian priest.68

67 Thomas Markle, “Life of Influential Aunty Pinau Still a Mystery,” Honolulu Star-Advertiser, March 6, 2013, D5. 68 Masakazu Ejiri, “The Development of Waikiki, 1900-1949: The Formative Period of an American Resort Paradise,” (PhD Dissertation, Department of American Studies, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, 1996), 298. 122

This is an accurate summary of Owens’ account of Aikane, which matches quite closely David

Ikard’s definition of the “magical negro” trope,

The magical-negro trope serves a largely complementary role to…the white-messiah trope as it situates blacks as mascots, inspirations, and/or surrogates for the celebration or affirmation of white humanity. The magical negro tends to be self-sacrificial to a pathological extent, existing almost exclusively to usher whites through emotional, social, or economic crises… the magical-negro trope is designed to erase blacks’ complex humanity, authenticate white paternalism, and explain away, if not justify, white domination.69

Owens serves as an archetypical “white-messiah” in his story, and the entertainment industry’s standardized American Jim Crow binary demands a corresponding “magical negro.” The character Aikane performs Ikard’s “magical negro” description with precision.

Owens’ account of Aikane conforms to another literary trope: “the noble savage.”

Virginia McLaurin writes that indigenous characters in American media have traditionally been portrayed within a simplistic bad/good binary: “savage” or “noble savage.” As she explains,

“the ‘good’ ones led Euro-American protagonists to gold, free land, help for their injuries, spiritual enlightenment, or anything else they needed or wanted.”70 This not only fits Aikane’s character, but Owens’ descriptions of Kānaka Maoli generally depict them in a simplistic manner. His later discussions of other Pacific Island peoples demonstrate that he flattens individuals within all of these groups into a single, homogenous category of people. For instance, he describes a 1955 trip to Bora Bora, where he “accepted an invitation to spend a

69 David Ikard, Lovable Racists, Magical Negroes, and White Messiahs (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 10-11. 70 Virginia McLaurin, “Why the Myth of the ‘Savage Indian’ Persists,” Sapiens: Anthropology/Everything Human, March 16, 2019, accessed January 22, 2020, https://www.sapiens.org/culture/native-american- stereotypes/ 123 week with a venerable Polynesian priest.”71 Owens offers no insight as to how he felt when he learned that this priest’s existence disproved Aikane’s status as “venerable last of the priests of

Polynesia” nor does he take any corrective measures regarding his many assertions of Aikane’s last-ness. Instead, Owens merges the two: “He lived in a thatched long house, much like

Aikane’s home on the mountain and his philosophies were identical with Aikane’s.”72

Returning to Owens’ narrative, after Auntie Pinau’s introduction, Aikane says to Owens,

“We will visit, but first we will eat.” Owens writes, “I saw no signal given, but at that moment, a door opened at the far end of the room and in came three lovely, young wahines bearing platters of steaming food.”73 Owens notes this scene playing out many times at Aikane’s home as the “lovely, young wahines” would appear at the precise right moment “bearing goblets of mellowed ” or “bearing platters of food and a jug of warming okolehao.”74 The conversation he had with Aikane thrilled Owens because it was all about Owens, “Aikane reviewed everything I had done since my arrival in Hawaii. His knowledge of every move, important or trivial, was most thorough.” After going through a long list of Owens’ experiences that demonstrated Aikane’s profound knowledge of Owens, Owens declares, “He was an amazing person.”75 After dinner, Aikane took Owens to the “sizeable, tapa-bound book” he had been writing in when Owens arrived and opened the tome to show it to the bandleader.

Aikane explains, “The word Ha-lee is pronounced ‘oh-nee-pá-ah’. It means solid, firm, immovable. It means ‘the truth’. Here in Onipaa, in my own language, is the true history of

71 Owens, Sweet Leilani: The Story Behind the Song, 278. 72 Ibid. 73 Ibid., 57. 74 Ibid., 57, 58, 88, and 108. 75 Ibid., 57. 124

Hawaii. It is the gospel of my islands and my people.”76 This conversation foreshadows a major event Owens reveals later in the book: Auntie Pinau and Aikane had decided that Harry Owens was the most deserving person to become the inheritor of Onipaa and all Hawaiian knowledge, in part so he could reveal its contents on his 1950s television show sponsored by United

Airlines.77

Owens contends that Aikane “cryptically” predicted the rise of television and the usefulness of sacred Hawaiian knowledge on such a medium. Owens recounts an incident in

1937 when the tradewinds stopped and the warm, humid Kona winds blew in from the southeast. He writes that when this happens, all of the birds fly high into the mountains to escape the heat and “Lovely Island flowers—jasmine, plumeria, gardenia, pikake, ginger—fold their petals and droop their heads in silent requiem…the sea becomes black, murky, foreboding. And overnight the waters of Waikiki are swarming with horrible live globules called

‘Portuguese Men o’ War’.” Owens explains that swimming in this situation can be fatal because these jellyfish have a poison “deadly as the venom of a snake.” When Kona winds strike, “native islanders follow in the wake of the birds and flee to the coolness of the mountains.”78 Owens decided to head to Aikane’s mountain home to hear Aikane read the

“story of Koea and Nani” from the Onipaa. Owens writes, “When he had concluded he turned to me and repeated a familiar phrase: ‘Write it down, Ha-lee, in your own words.’ Then,

76 Ibid. 77 Owens opens his autobiography with an image containing the word “Onipaa” that he contends is found on Aikane’s book. The featured image from Owens’ book is a precise match to Queen Lili‘uokalani’s monogram. Onipa‘a was the Queen’s motto.- “Queen Liliuokalani’s 174th Birthday, 2012,” Nupepa, September 2, 2012, accessed January 20, 2020, https://nupepa-hawaii.com/2012/09/02/; Māhealani Perez-Wendt and Franco Salmoiraghi, “’Onipa‘a,”Mānoa, (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai‘i Press) Volume 19, Number 2, 2007: 126. 78 Owens, Sweet Leilani: The Story Behind the Song, 87. 125 somewhat cryptically: ‘Some day you may choose to tell it to the world.’ The story became one of a volume of island legends—a highlight on my television shows—in the years ahead.”79

Aikane predicting Owens’ future and providing him with advice for navigating drama becomes a recurring feature of the autobiography.

Owens claims that in addition to introducing him to the important text he would eventually inherit, Aikane had a more immediate need for Owens’ immense talents. Aikane explains, “Ha-lee, you have not yet visited our neighbor islands. Please pay your first visit to my island, the island of Maui. I’ve invited you here, Ha-lee, to tell you the story of Maui. After you have heard it, it is my hope that you will be compelled to honor my island with a great song.”80

Owens spent a week on Maui and “explored the island from bottom to top.”81 While still on

Maui, where apparently he did not need the full seven days to explore “the island from bottom to top,” Owens composed “Maui No Ka Oi,” which he translates as “Maui is the Best.” He returned to Honolulu and rehearsed the song with his orchestra before playing it for Arthur

Benaglia, who was left speechless by the power of the composition. Eventually, Benaglia spoke,

“‘Harry Owens,’ he said—and then, after quite a pause—‘dream up another ad for the newspapers. We’ll feature your masterpiece in a very special way next Saturday night at the

Royal.”82 With Auntie Pinau and Aikane in attendance, Owens debuted the composition.

Owens writes, “We concluded and the applause was deafening…I turned to get a glimpse of

Aikane. He was clasping Auntie’s hand. His eyes were closed. I thought I saw a tear trickle

79 Ibid., 88-89. 80 Ibid., 57. 81 Ibid., 61. 82 Ibid. 126 down his cheek…Not until years later was I to learn just how much this night had meant to both of them.”83 The newspaper accounts of this song do not convey the emotional effects Owens claims his work had, but they do indicate the song was very well received and particularly popular with those who had Maui connections.84

Owens claims to have become fluent in the Hawaiian language and asserts that he remained fluent decades after leaving the islands.85 He also claims that he did not begin studying the language until Aikane began teaching him after he had lived in Hawai‘i for over a year.86 His alleged expertise in Hawaiian became the foundation of a popular feature on his television show, in which he claimed to translate passages from the Onipaa, which he also refers to as the Hawaiian Book of Life, for television audiences.87 Owens spent less than four total years living in Hawai‘i. It seems very unlikely that a person in his mid-thirties with no knowledge at all of Polynesian languages could become conversant, much less fluent, in

Hawaiian in so few years. Owens’ claim and the acceptance of that claim by audiences is likely rooted in a long-standing misconception that the Hawaiian language is simple and easy to learn.

This errant idea is based on racist beliefs about Native Hawaiian intelligence along with the

83 Ibid., 63-64. 84 Waikiki Willie, “High Surf has its Perils W. Willie Warns Novices,” Honolulu Star-Bulletin, June 3, 1936, page 9. The newspapers also place the song’s composition and debut about a year later (Spring 1936) than the date Owens claims in his book (Spring 1935). The difference of one year is significant, particularly in light of the fact that Harry Owens spent less than four years total living in Hawai‘i.- Snooper, “KGMB Radio Rumors,” Honolulu Star-Bulletin, March 21, 1936, page 56; Lorin Tarr Gill, “Flood Dance Held at Royal,” Honolulu Star- Bulletin, April 1, 1936, page 10 ; Owens, Sweet Leilani: The Story Behind the Song, 55. 85 Owens, Sweet Leilani: The Story Behind the Song, 299. 86 Ibid., 66. 87 Ibid., 249. 127 misconception that a language that can be written in only twelve letters must be uncomplicated.88

Along with teaching him the Hawaiian language, Owens alleges that Aikane instructed him in Hawaiian history. In a passage Owens claims to have translated from Onipaa, he relays the history of the creation of the Hawaiian Islands,

In the Hawaiian Book of Life, it is written that Great God Lono, Ruler of all things Polynesian, dropped a gourd upon the sea and its fragments became the islands. And Great Lono molded them with his own hands, smoothing the fertile valleys, shaping the sculptured peaks, and when he had finished he smiled upon them, prayed over them and christened them the “Isles of Paradise”…Great God Lono, after creating His favorite islands, sent out word on the breath of the tradewinds, inviting peoples of all nations to come and share with him these lovely lands.89

The sentence with which Owens concludes this passage is typical of his characterizing Hawaiian culture as based in hospitality. In fact, in this instance, he appears to be claiming that Hawaiian people and land were both created to serve tourists.

Owens does discuss Kāne, but not in conjunction with any creation histories, which appear to be more appropriately connected to Kāne than to Lono.90 Also, Owens spells the name as “Kane” sometimes and others as “Kah-nay.”91 He explains Kāne was a prince who was among the first people to live on Maui,

Like the Pilgrim Fathers of a later era, Prince Kah-nay and his Princess were in search of peace—in search of a land where lovers could pray to the morning sun, where music blended with contentment at the end of care-worn hours…Many years later, I was

88 Katherine Pope, “Laying Off in Hawaii,” Grant County Vidette (Pond Creek, Oklahoma), September 10, 1914, page 9; “Hawaiian Island Group Not as Big in Area As County of S.B.,” Santa Maria Times (Santa Maria, California), February 12, 1935, page 6; Edward T. Austin, “Hawaiian Language Easy to Use,” The San Bernardino County Sun (San Bernardino, California), October 20, 1950, page 40. 89 Ibid., 43 and 45. 90 “Kāne,” Nā Wao no ka Po‘e (The Realms of the Hawaiian People), Hawaiian Hall, Bishop Museum, Honolulu, HI. 91 Owens, Sweet Leilani: The Story Behind the Song, 59 and IV. The Roman numeral pages are in the glossary, which is situated at the end of the book. 128

reading the original treatment of the Maui story as it appeared in the Hawaiian language in Aikane’s Book of Life, Onipaa. To my delight I discovered that Prince Kah-nay and his Princess were, actually , blood relatives of the great Aikane himself.92

Owens contends that Aikane’s history lessons also covered some more recent events.

Aikane read from Onipaa the story of King Kamehameha to Owens,

Picture a towering cliff at the end of a lush valley. This is Nuuanu Pali. And it was over this cliff that the army of great Kamehameha pushed the enemy, establishing, for all time, that the life of the land would be preserved in righteousness. To this code Kamehameha dedicated himself and his people...Yes, Kamehameha’s men still guard the things they fought for and won.93

Owens claims that he responded to his teacher’s story, “Keep them on guard, Aikane, as long as there’s a guitar and a beach boy to sing a happy song of welcome to a stranger.” To this,

Aikane prayed.94 Owens depicts Kānaka Maoli as a people whose creation and history to the present day has crafted them for the single purpose of hospitality.

The Launching of Hawaii Calls

The importance of radio to the music industry was growing exponentially during the

1920s and 1930s. On December 31, 1934, Harry Owens and the Royal Hawaiians became the first musical act to perform on the same day in broadcasts by the three major competitive networks. These performances were transmitted throughout the continental US and Canada.

Audience reactions were so enthusiastic that NBC opened a half-hour time slot for four weeks

92 Ibid., 59-60. 93 Ibid., 67-68. 94 Ibid., 68. 129 to feature the orchestra and CBS arranged for a national broadcast of both old and new

Hawaiian music featuring soloists Ray Kinney and Alice Johnson.95

Harry Owens claims that his late 1934/early 1935 radio success allowed him, along with

Webley Edwards, to create Hawaii Calls.96 This contention is largely corroborated by other historical sources, but even at his most accurate, it seems that Owens takes liberties with the truth. I have seen no source outside of Owens’ book credit anyone other than Webley Edwards with the creation of Hawaii Calls.

Webley Edwards was a white man who was born in in 1902 and grew up in

California before returning to Oregon to attend Oregon State College.97 He was the starting quarterback of Oregon State’s football team as well as associate editor of the college newspaper and assistant manager of the college radio station. In 1928, a Honolulu professional football team brought Edwards to the islands to play quarterback. Injuries quickly ended his pro football career, but he remained in Honolulu as assistant manager of radio station KGU.98

In early 1935, after Edwards had taken over as manager of radio station KGMD, he visited friends in San Francisco who wanted him to hear some Hawaiian music. Edwards disliked the music and bet his friends that the musicians performing it had never even visited Hawai‘i.

Edwards claims that he won this bet and decided that new shortwave broadcasting technologies could allow him to create an international hit radio program if that radio program

95 Elizabeth Tatar, “Radio and Hawaiian Music,” in George S. Kanahele, ed., (revised and updated by John Berger), Hawaiian Music and Musicians: An Encyclopedic History (Honolulu, HI: Mutual Publishing, 2012), 668. 96 Owens, Sweet Leilani: The Story Behind the Song, 73. 97 The school is currently known as Oregon State University. 98 Tony Todaro, “Webley Edwards,” Paradise of the Pacific, February 1953: 24. 130 was built on “Hawaiian music played by Hawaiians from Hawaii.”99 Intentions aside, the radio program’s first two years were built around the music of Harry Owens and a revolving cast of continental haole bandleaders working at the Alexander Young Hotel.

The exact reasons why the early show was so haole and became more Hawaiian after

Owens’ departure in 1937 are not clear, but the available sources provide some clues. Edwards was only able to broadcast the show beyond Hawai‘i because the Hawaii Tourist Bureau and the territorial legislature funded the show including the expensive shortwave broadcast fees.

For the two-and-a-half-month trial run of the show alone, the legislature appropriated $25,000.

The initial announcement of the show included that news along with the fact that the program was to feature two orchestras and alternate between these orchestras every other week. Harry

Owens’ orchestra was to be featured the first week followed by Del Courtney’s group in the second week and this rotation was to continue until the close of 1935.100 Within this pairing,

Owens’ group actually comes much closer to fitting Edwards’ philosophy. Owens had lived in the islands for a year and a half and only about half of his orchestra members were continental haoles whereas the other half were mostly Kānaka Maoli. Courtney, a white man who was born and raised in California, and his orchestra, composed entirely of continental haoles, had been in the islands less than two months when the show began airing.101 White elites, in both government and private industry, worked with the Hawaii Tourist Bureau to depict Hawai‘i as a white space and to make Waikīkī appear to be a white space to visitors. This drive led to the

99 “Hawaii is Calling,” Honolulu Star-Bulletin, September 1, 1956, page 75. 100 “KGMB to Broadcast Island Programs Over CBS Hookup,” Honolulu Star-Bulletin, October 4, 1935, page 12. 101 “Here Soon,” Honolulu Star-Bulletin, August 3, 1935, page 46; “Del Courtney Has Played At Leading Resorts On Coast,” Honolulu Star-Bulletin, August 6, 1935, page 4; Wayne Harada, “Bandleader brought his legacy to Hawai‘i,” February 14, 2006, page 9 and 12. 131 elite hotels hiring only white bandleaders from the continent to entertain their white elite guests. From 1933 until 1941 when World War II shut down the island hospitality industry, nearly one hundred percent of the bandleaders hired by these hotels were continental haole men. It seems likely that the Hawaii Tourist Bureau and territorial legislature would only fund a radio show to be broadcast to the world if that radio show produced the image of Hawai‘i as a white space, and these white continental bandleaders had been deemed a successful ingredient in that endeavor. Also, Hawaii Calls’ popularity sparked a second show featuring music more

Hawaiian in character entitled Hawaii Serenades, but the legislature ended Hawaii Serenades when they decided to put all their funding into the show featuring “music of the Harry Owens type.”102

There is additional evidence that Edwards had Owens and Courtney forced on him. In a

1949 history of Hawaii Calls, penned by Edwards, the host explains that in 1935 he set out to create a show that “featured real Hawaiian music played in an authentic Hawaiian style.”103 He dedicates only one paragraph to the first two years of the show, in which he makes no mention of Harry Owens or any musical director and writes, “At the beginning we featured different musical groups each week.”104 Edwards explains that after two years, he hired Al Kealoha Perry as musical director and credits Perry with making significant improvements to the quality of the show.105 Al Kealoha Perry had been one of the featured performers on Hawaii Serenades, the program that offered “the older version of Hawaiian music” as an alternative to “music of the

102 “Hawaii Calls, Serenades To Be Heard On the MBS,” Honolulu Star-Bulletin, January 30, 1937, page 14. 103 Webley Edwards, “Hawaii Calls,” Paradise of the Pacific, December 1949: 72. 104 Ibid. 105 Ibid. 132

Harry Owens type.”106 Edwards was only able to hire this Native Hawaiian bandleader as director when Owens’ popularity brought him new opportunities on the continent. Owens’ own popularity was in part due to the tremendous success of Hawaii Calls. As creator and host of the program, Edwards likely had the clout at the time of Owens’ departure to hire the replacement he wanted.

Although some of Edwards’ ideas may have set him apart a little bit from most proponents of tourism, he, too, was most certainly a proponent of the industry. On his television show, Edwards contends, “One of Hawai‘i’s most important commodities is romance.”107 Romance is not often referred to as a commodity, but Edwards is acknowledging that, like the music industry, tourism is selling fantasy. Edwards also demonstrated keen insight to the workings of the music industry when he stated regarding the success of Hawaii Calls,

“The songs are not so important. It’s the atmosphere we’re striving for.”108 His friend Tony

Todaro writes, “Selling the charm of the Islands to pleasure-seeking tourists has been Web’s primary interest since the day he first dreamed of a world-wide broadcast from the Islands.”109

Edwards’ work with the Hawaii Tourist Bureau spanned decades and reached beyond Hawaii

Calls, including hosting an instructional video for travel agents titled, Hawaii…Never Easier to

Sell.110

106 “CBS Taking Two Hawaii Programs,” Honolulu Star-Bulletin, page 41; “Hawaii Calls, Serenades To Be Heard On the MBS,” Honolulu Star-Bulletin, January 30, 1937, page 14. 107 “HAWAII CALLS Tv Show 1965 On the Beach at Waikiki,” YouTube, accessed January 26, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vs3YeuYyTVA 108 Kanahele, Hawaiian Music and Musicians: An Encyclopedic History, 269. 109 Todaro, “Webley Edwards,” 24. 110 Hawaii...Never Easier to Sell. Hawaii Visitors Bureau, 1961. VHS. This film is extremely dated and thoroughly fascinating, in part due to how dated it is. It includes a theme song also titled “Hawaii…Never Easier to Sell” complete with a chorus singing those words. 133

The first Hawaii Calls episode aired on seventy stations on the continent Monday,

October 14, 1935 from 7 to 7:30pm Hawaiian time—thus it aired after midnight on the East coast of the US continent. Just prior to the first episode, the Star-Bulletin described the proposed show as,

Hawaiian dance programs, featuring Harry Owens’ and Del Courtney’s orchestras playing from the Royal Hawaiian hotel and the Alexander Young roof garden… The program will be known as ‘Hawaii Calls’ and will be advertised as Hawaiian Luau (musical feast) broadcasts. Columbia has requested dance programs, but the Hawaiian music angle will be featured in the selection of dance pieces and specialty intermission numbers.111

The program’s massive popularity registered quickly after its debut.112 Hawaii Calls began receiving “unusually high” overall quality ratings for their broadcasts on the US continent. Bart Woodyard, a white bandleader originally from West Virginia whose all white continental orchestra replaced Del Courtney at the Alexander Young, “achieved a sensational record” during February 1936 while serving as musical director of Hawaii Calls and received an average percentage rating for his four Monday night broadcasts of “96.5 per cent.”113 Harry

Owens was regularly awarded a “quality excellent” rating and in June 1936, received an average overall rating from the continent of “97.5 per cent.”114 This fame bolstered sales of his sheet music on the US continent.115 During the first year, the performances by Owens’ vocalist, Ray

Kinney, proved so popular that CBS signed him to an individual contract to perform for the

111 “KGMB to Broadcast Island Programs Over CBS Hookup,” Honolulu Star-Bulletin, October 4, 1935, page 12. 112 “‘Hawaii Calls’ Is Popular In States,” Honolulu Star-Bulletin, November 7, 1935, page 14. 113 “Bart Woodyard Opens at Young on December 28,” Honolulu Star-Bulletin, December 4, 1935, page 5; “Hawaii Calls Featuring Harry Owens Music,” Honolulu Star-Bulletin, February 29, 1936, page 10. I have not been able to find out anything more about this rating system other than what is included in these newspaper reports. 114 “Merle Carlson Next On Hawaii Calls Program,” Honolulu Star-Bulletin, July 18, 1936, page 42. 115 Tavares, 8. 134 network on the continent. Upon Hawaii Calls’ one-year anniversary, CBS declared the show the most popular on the network.116 Early in Hawaii Calls’ second year, CBS recognized that their hit property could become even more popular if the broadcast time were moved two hours earlier so that East coast listeners could catch the program at 10:00pm rather than midnight.117

This enthusiasm for the radio show spread far beyond US national borders even within the first year of the show. In May 1936, the Honolulu Star-Bulletin, reported that Harry Owens was “justly proud” that he had “received a fan letter from a little place in the southwestern corner of South Africa.”118 This revelation prompted the newspaper to investigate and they found that Hawaii Calls was being broadcasted throughout South Africa “over station KKH, which is one of the short wave transmitters at Kahuku used to send the programs across the

Pacific ocean to California, whence they are sent by wire for release over the network’s stations.”119

Toward the end of the first year of broadcasting Hawaii Calls, the Hawaii Tourist Bureau devised a rather ingenious method of promoting the show and thus, promoting tourism.120 This strategy had Hawaii Calls and Hawaii Serenades dedicate single episodes to saluting individual

US states and Canadian provinces. This plan likely succeeded on many levels, but the most conspicuous and documentable way was its ability to generate press for the show in the locale being saluted.121 In a January 7, 1937, letter from George T. Armitage, Executive Secretary of

116 “Hawaii Calls to Celebrate Anniversary,” Honolulu Star-Bulletin, October 10, 1936, page 39. 117 “Hawaii Calls, Serenades To Be Heard On the MBS,” Honolulu Star-Bulletin, January 30, 1937, page 14. 118 “Recieves Fan Letter From South Africa,” Honolulu Star-Bulletin, May 9, 1936, page 42. 119 Ibid. 120 “Wyoming To Be Honored By Hawaii Serenades,” Honolulu Star-Bulletin, October 10, 1936, page 39. 121 Here are just a couple of examples, including one from Harry Owens’ birth state and another from the city where he lived his final years.-“Oregon Saluted In ‘Hawaii Calls’,” The Eugene Guard (Eugene, Oregon), March 135 the Hawaii Tourist Bureau, to Territorial Governor Joseph B. Poindexter, Armitage celebrates the large number of newspaper clippings he has received as evidence of the “very extensive…publicity which a number of Canadian newspapers gave to this popular broadcast.”122

International Superstar

Harry Owens was already a nationally known composer and bandleader before Hawaii

Calls, but this program significantly boosted his fame and spread it well beyond US national borders in the program’s first year alone.123 In addition to the publicity that his performances on the program generated, Owens composed the show’s theme song, which played regardless of his appearing as bandleader and remained with the show after he departed it, thus garnering

Owens further acclaim.124 From, the first broadcast of Hawaii Calls, dance orchestras throughout the US continent began to add songs from the show to their repertoire. A great many of those songs were composed by Harry Owens.125

Owens’ songs began to show up even in unexpected places. Louis Armstrong biographer Hugues Panassié writes, “The Decca people had the strange idea of recording Louis in California during 1936 with Hawaiian-style groups performing the exotic numbers, To You

18, 1938, page 14; “‘Hawaii Calls’ Program Will Salute Nebraska,” The Lincoln Star (Lincoln, Nebraska), April 17, 1938, page 38. 122 Executive Secretary of the Hawaii Tourist Bureau George T. Armitage, Governor of the Territory of Hawai‘i Joseph B. Poindexter, January 7, 1937. Letter in Hawai‘i State Archives. 123 “Missoula Boy Now is Famed For His Music,” The Missoulian (Missoula, MT), September 28, 1924, page 13; "Hawaiian Paradise," Honolulu Star-Bulletin, March 30, 1935, page 6; “Hawaii Calls to Celebrate Anniversary,” Honolulu Star-Bulletin, October 10, 1936, page 39. 124 Harry Owens, “Hawaii Calls: Musical Theme on the Trans-Pacific Broadcasts,” (Honolulu, HI: Royal Music Publishing Company-Royal Hawaiian Hotel, 1936); Harry B. Soria, Jr., dj, “Hawaii Calls - Revisited,” Territorial Airwaves, episode aired July 20, 2012, accessed November 04, 2019, http://www.territorialairwaves.com/index.php?page=30&id=115 125 Paul Findeisen, “Roamin’ Over The Kilocycle Waves,” Honolulu Star-Bulletin, July 18, 1936, page 42. 136

Sweetheart Aloha and On a Cocoanut Island. They followed these with On a Little Bamboo

Bridge and Hawaiian Hospitality in New York in 1937.”126 Two of these four songs, “To You

Sweetheart Aloha” and “Hawaiian Hospitality” were composed by Harry Owens and performed regularly by his orchestra.127 In the wake of this wildly popular radio program, a major record company decided that Armstrong could also profit through recording Owens’ compositions, in spite of Armstrong playing to a very different audience than Guy Lombardo style artists like

Owens.128

This was still just the start of Owens’ rise and impact. The name “Harry Owens” became synonymous with the term “Hawaiian music” for decades and during this period for much of the world, the term “Hawaiian music” was defined by Harry Owens’ sound.129 In 1954, The Los

Angeles Times notes “One researcher reports Owens has penned more than 75% of the

126 Hugues Panassié, Louis Armstrong (New York, NY: DaCapo Press, 1979), 110-111. 127 Owens is the only credited composer on “To You Sweetheart Aloha” and his authorship of that song is unquestioned as far as I know. He is credited as co-authoring “Hawaiian Hospitality” with Ray Kinney. Owens claims he did co-author it, but Kinney claims to have written it alone and that Owens received credit because he helped Kinney publish the song. This was a common practice at the time. Regardless, the song was performed by Owens’ orchestra regularly, popularized through those performances, and associated with Owens at this time, so its inclusion in the Armstrong recordings speaks to Owens’ rising prominence at this time. These four songs also exemplify the change Gurre Ploner Noble discusses in the last chapter regarding haoles dominating creative roles in the late 1930s Hawaiian music industry. “On a Little Bamboo Bridge” was written by white tin pan alley songwriters and “On a Cocoanut Island” was written by Hawai‘i born haole R. Alex Anderson. 128 These recordings did not appeal to all Armstrong fans. Krin Gabbard notes that many of Armstrong’s fans strongly disliked these recordings and “felt betrayed” by them. Exemplifying the strong reaction, nearly fifty years after the recording, Armstrong biographer James Lincoln Collier describes the Owens composition “To You Sweetheart Aloha” as “an execrable tune.”-Krin Gabbard, Jammin at the Margins: Jazz and the American Cinema (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 207; James Lincoln Collier, Louis Armstrong: An American Genius (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1985), 290. 129 Bob Smith, “Aloha, Sweet Leilani, Here’s Polynesian Pop,” The Vancouver Sun (Vancouver, British Colombia), February 5, 1970, page 41; Terry Vernon, “Aloha to this Nebraska Musician: He Gave the Hula to the World,” Independent Press-Telegram (Long Beach, California), December 26, 1954, pages 3 and 17. 137

Hawaiian music played in this country today.”130 The following year, The Oakland Tribune estimated Owens was responsible for the composition and/or arrangement of between seventy-five and ninety percent of music classified as Hawaiian and heard in the USA.131

The most crucial step in Harry Owens’ ascension in the entertainment industry happened when Bing Crosby recorded Owens’ composition “Sweet Leilani” and included it in his hit movie Waikiki Wedding. The song became one of the biggest hits of the 1930s and the most financially successful Hawaiian song of all time as of 1967.132 Crosby’s recording of

“Sweet Leilani” may have been the best-selling, but it was only one of many hit records made of this composition. In fact, even in 1937, Crosby’s version had company in the hit record category as British group, Felix Mendelssohn and his Hawaiian Serenaders, a band inspired to form by the music of Harry Owens, made a profitable recording of “Sweet Leilani.”133 By 1967, this song had been translated into fourteen different languages.134

Owens’ basic account of how his song ended up in Waikiki Wedding seems to line up with contemporary newspaper and also with an interview that he gave the Los Angeles Times

130 Walter Ames, “Harry Owens Saluted on 200th Telecast Tonight; Liberace Mimics Rapped,” The Los Angeles Times, November 27, 1954, page 21. 131 Gordon Kotecki, “Studio Briefs: Owens Offers Escape to the Blue Waters,” Oakland Tribune, November 6, 1955, page 67. 132 Paul W. Lovinger, “Daughter’s birth inspired writing of ‘Sweet Leilani’,” Honolulu Star-Bulletin, July 12, 1967, page 57. 133 Kanahele, Hawaiian Music and Musicians: An Encyclopedic History, 537-538. 134 Paul W. Lovinger, “Daughter’s birth inspired writing of ‘Sweet Leilani’,” Honolulu Star-Bulletin, July 12, 1967, page 57. Most if not all Owens’ compositions have been translated into Japanese.-Yoko Kurokawa, “Yearning For A Distant Music: Consumption Of Hawaiian Music And Dance In Japan” (A Dissertation Submitted To The Graduate Division of The University of Hawai‘i In Partial Fulfillment Of The Requirements For The Decree of of Philosophy In Music, May 2004). George H. Lewis, “: Cultural Constructions of Hawaii in Mainland American, Australia and Japan,” Journal of Popular Culture, Fall 1996, volume 30 issue 2: 123-135. 138

Sunday Magazine in 1937.135 Crosby arrived in Honolulu with his family on September 2, 1936 for a five-week vacation and stayed at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel.136 He heard Owens’ orchestra perform “Sweet Leilani” and convinced the producers of Waikiki Wedding to include his recording of it in the film.137 Owens explains that his composition then became one of the biggest hits in music industry history.138

The other details in Owens’ account of the immediate impact of Waikiki Wedding’s use of “Sweet Leilani” upon his life are not factually sound. When Bing Crosby first sings “Sweet

Leilani” in the movie, the song is interrupted by an attempt at comedy featuring the actor Bob

Burns chasing a squealing pig.139 Owens claims that he attended the premiere at the Waikiki

Theatre and describes the reaction in the theatre to this scene,

I was stunned. Bess started crying. Aikane was sputtering Hawaiian words you’ll never find in his Hawaiian Book of Life. Auntie Pinau sat with eyes closed. Many people rose from their seats and stalked out of the theatre…Next day the local newspaper columnists had nothing but words of scorn for “Waikiki Wedding.” To quote one of them: “Last night a squealing pig killed a lovely island song.” Before a week passed the theatre management cancelled its showing of “Waikiki Wedding” and shipped the film back to Hollywood.140

135 Kenneth Crist, “Hawaiian Music Came From-Where?,” The Los Angeles Times Sunday Magazine, May 16, 1937, page 13. The fact that this interview corroborates the account seems significant because this interview reveals a very different Harry Owens than the one his autobiography depicts. I think substantial evidence indicates that this interview provides a glimpse of Harry Owens the human being. This will be examined later in this chapter. 136 “Bing Crosby Here For Play, No Work,” Honolulu Star-Bulletin, September 3, 1936, pages 1 and 16. Initial reports claimed Crosby was coming to the Islands to film Waikiki Wedding, but upon his arrival, he informed reporters that the movie would be made entirely in California. Also, these early reports had his arrival date mistaken, which resulted in the Hawaii Tourist Bureau organizing a lavish welcome including “a bushel of leis.” A vacationing actor boarded the ship after all passengers had disembarked to search for Crosby and rumors “that Mr. Crosby went ashore under a false name and beard” prompted fans to search the city for the singer.-“Bing Crosby Fans Hunt In Vain For Crooning Actor,” Honolulu Star-Bulletin, July 8, 1936, page 9. 137 “Quartette of Jurors,” The Honolulu Advertiser, March 25, 1937, page 7. Owens, Sweet Leilani: The Story Behind the Song, 69-72. 138 Owens, Sweet Leilani: The Story Behind the Song, 80. 139 Waikiki Wedding. Directed by . USA: , Inc., 1937. DVD. 140 Owens, Sweet Leilani: The Story Behind the Song, 79. 139

It is certainly possible that Owens was stunned and Bess cried, but the rest of this passage is fiction. The Honolulu Star-Bulletin’s story on the premiere calls the film “scintillating,” mentions that the theatre will begin screening the film three times daily, and does not mention Owens or

“Sweet Leilani” at all.141 The Honolulu Advertiser’s review begins,

A Honolulu audience should be the severest critic of “Waikiki Wedding,” the new Bing Crosby picture which had its world premiere last night at the Waikiki theater. If so, then the production is a success…The theater was filled to overflowing. It was a smart, representative audience, and from the start until the finish of the crazy filmfare, they laughed and chuckled.142

The review congratulates Owens on his contribution to the film, mentions that Owens attended and received screen credit, but gives no hint of any consternation on the part of anyone. In fact, the article concludes by mentioning Bob Burns and the pig as a comedy highlight of the film.143 A month later when the film arrived in Hilo, the Hawaii Tribune-Herald praised the film as “fun” and also notes Burns and the pig as a highlight but does not mention Owens nor his composition.144 The film’s run at Waikiki Theatre did not get cancelled in less than a week, contrary to Owens’ claim. In fact, due to “demands from thousands of movie fans” the film was sent back to Honolulu for a return engagement at the Princess Theater.145

Waikiki Wedding launched Harry Owens into an elite class of superstars and created a

Hawaiian craze in the entertainment industry. In 1939, Decca Records’ top selling artists were

Bing Crosby, Harry Owens, Lani McIntire, Dick McIntire, and Ray Kinney.146 Owens played a

141 “Waikiki Wedding,” The Honolulu Star-Bulletin, March 26, 1937, page 6. 142 “Smart Audience Enjoys ‘Waikiki Wedding’ Premiere,” The Honolulu Advertiser, March 26, 1937, page 1. 143 Ibid., 10. 144 “Movies,” Hawaii Tribune-Herald, April 26, 1937, page 2. 145 “Return Engagement of Waikiki Wedding,” April 25, 1937, page 58. 146 Jerry Hopkins, “Record Industry in Hawai‘i,” in George S. Kanahele, ed., (revised and updated by John Berger), Hawaiian Music and Musicians: An Encyclopedic History (Honolulu, HI: Mutual Publishing, 2012), 680. Dick and Lani McIntire were Native Hawaiian brothers who were both composers, instrumental 140 prominent part in the success of all four of the other artists mentioned here. Kinney shot to international fame through his work with Owens’ orchestra on Hawaii Calls and Crosby’s biggest hit was composed by Owens. Lani McIntire and His Hawaiians were the backing band on Bing Crosby’s hit recording of “Sweet Leilani.” Dick McIntire and His Harmony Hawaiians were the backing band on Bing Crosby’s hit recording of another Owens’ compositions,

“Hawaiian Paradise.”147

Owens’ star power created prestigious new opportunities for his orchestra. On March

27, 1937, Owens and his orchestra departed the islands for a six-week engagement at the

Beverly Wilshire Hotel in Beverly Hills, California.148 Owens claims that the Beverly Wilshire

Hotel job offer troubled him because he found, “the prospect of going back to the mainland was somewhat frightening.”149 The conflicted bandleader struggled through a performance one evening as his time to decide was running out when a bellhop handed him a note. Owens writes, “I recognized Aikane’s writing. The note contained just one word, large, bold,

virtuosos, and bandleaders. Dick was born in Honolulu in 1902 and died in 1951. Lani was born in Honolulu in 1904 and passed away a couple of months after his brother in 1951.-Harry B. Soria, Jr., dj, “Dick McIntire,” Territorial Airwaves, episode aired December 6, 2013, accessed November 15, 2019, https://www.territorialairwaves.com/index.php?page=30&id=196. Harry B. Soria, Jr., dj, “Lani McIntire,” Territorial Airwaves, episode aired December 13, 2013, accessed November 15, 2019, https://www.territorialairwaves.com/index.php?page=30&id=197. 147 T. Malcolm Rockwell, Hawaiian Guitar Records: 1891-1960, (Kula, Hawai‘i: Mahina Piha Press, 2007), 179. 148 “Big Aloha Party Being Planned For Owens Band,” The Honolulu Advertiser, March 21, 1937, page 4. This hotel was built in 1928 on the corner of Wilshire Boulevard and Rodeo Drive serving as an engine driving commercial development in this rapidly growing illustrious district. Walker and Eisen, one of the premier architectural firms in Southern California, designed the building.- Christy McAvoy and Leslie Heumann, “Beverly Wilshire Hotel- National Register of Historic Places Inventory—Nomination Form,” received May 15, 1987, entered June 12, 1987, accessed January 30, 2020, https://npgallery.nps.gov/GetAsset/baa3ffa9-c663- 4734-989b-3fe96a0e9b94. Christy McAvoy and Leslie Heumann write, “From its inception, the hotel has catered to many notables, including film stars, wealthy business and social luminaries, and visiting royalty.” 149 Owens, Sweet Leilani: The Story Behind the Song, 80. 141 underlined: HOLO! Holo means ‘go’.”150 In this moment, Aikane again conformed perfectly to

David Ikard’s definition of the “magical negro” and entered the story only to guide our white hero “through emotional, social, or economic crises.”151

While in Los Angeles, MGM produced a ten-minute film called Pacific Paradise starring

Harry Owens and a few of his songs. The Honolulu Star-Bulletin reports that this film, “will play in practically every major theater in the country, thus spreading Hawaii’s name and music through the medium of the screen.”152 In the fall of 1937, Paramount signed Owens to compose new music for a film called Cocoanut Grove that he was to star in alongside Bob

Hope.153

Owens was scheduled to return to the islands in the spring of 1938, but his boss, Arthur

Benaglia, recognized that Owens could generate more business for Matson through continental performances and motion picture appearances than he could through remaining in Honolulu.

Benaglia commented to the The Honolulu Advertiser, “Hawaiian music has become the rage on the Mainland during the past few months…now would be the opportune time for the Owens

150 Owens, Sweet Leilani: The Story Behind the Song, 80. Owens’ account of this Los Angeles engagement ends with a minor factual error as he reports he and his orchestra returned to the Islands on the Matson liner Lurline, but the newspapers record it was Matson’s Malolo.- Owens, Sweet Leilani: The Story Behind the Song, 86; “Malolo Docks,” The Honolulu Advertiser, June 11, 1937, page 17. 151 Ikard, 10. 152 “Harry Owens’ Band On Waikiki Screen,” The Honolulu Star-Bulletin, October 9, 1937, page 11. 153 “Harry Owens Takes His Band To Coast Hotel November 19,” The Honolulu Advertiser, November 6, 1937, page 5. This film was produced and released in May 1938, but starred Fred MacMurray rather than .- “Cocoanut Grove,” IMDb, accessed January 31, 2020, https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0030000/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0. 142

Royal Hawaiians to take advantage of the Mainland craze.”154 Owens did not return to Hawai‘i until September 4, 1940.155

Owens describes the party thrown for his return, “The conquering heroes are back from the wars. Their exploits have been told and retold. Tonight they will bask in the glory of their victories. Yes, tonight, we of the Royal Hawaiians, are truly the Ali’i.”156 The newspapers convey that his return was a much-hyped event. The Honolulu Advertiser dedicated a full page to both Owens’ return and the departure of Malcolm Beelby, the continental haole bandleader who had been filling in for Owens. Owens’ and Beelby’s photos top the page and the rest is filled out by small advertisements in which local businesses individually welcome Owens back while bidding farewell to Beelby.157 The Honolulu Star-Bulletin’s welcome exceeds its competitor in dramatic flair, declaring Owens “ambassador of goodwill for Hawaii.”

Harry Owens made a permanent place for himself in Hawaii with his songs of Hawaii, and the manner of their rendition. At a time when the craze for crooning was reaching its heights—we’d better say its depths—and when Hawaiian singing here and elsewhere threatened to degenerate into throaty, whining moaning and mumbling, he helped to save the music of the islands from that unhappy fate. He gave to orchestral renditions a new sweetness of melody, a new appealing rhythm, an enchanting soft charm, which did far more than pack dance floors with dipsydoodle devotees. It carried the music of Alohaland afar on the waves of radio, and wafted the fame of Hawaii to millions of people to give them an intriguing introduction to the life of this land. On his tours about the mainland Harry Owens and his orchestras have further introduced Hawaii to countless people. Always it has been in a pleasing, creditable way. And innumerable mainlanders have learned about the islands from Owens’ music.158

154 “Harry Owens Takes His Band To Coast Hotel November 19,” The Honolulu Advertiser, November 6, 1937, page 5. 155 “Harry Owens Returning Soon,” The Honolulu Advertiser, August 7, 1940, page 1. 156 Owens, Sweet Leilani: The Story Behind the Song, 151. The italics and the apostrophe (rather than the ‘okina) appear in Owens’ book. 157 “Two Hearty Alohas From Alohaland,” The Honolulu Advertiser, September 7, 1940, page 9. 158 “Our Ambassador of Music,” The Honolulu Star-Bulletin, September 4, 1940, page 8. 143

Owens’ account of his homecoming party, held on Saturday, September 7, 1940, is a major moment in the book. He explains that this was the night that he first met Clara Haili

Inter, whom he claims was not yet known as Hilo Hattie. He writes that she was an elementary school teacher, “Also, she was one of forty chubby, fun-loving, singing-dancing wahines who, with their leader, Louise Akeo, comprised what was known as ‘The Royal Hawaiian Glee

Club’.”159 Owens claims that as he watched the Glee Club perform, he was captivated by one member, “front row, fourth from the left,” and decided he had to meet her.160 Owens claims that he encouraged Clara Haili Inter to perform as a soloist dancer, singer, and comedian with his ensemble. He asserts that he told Akeo a few days later and she responded, “I knew it was coming…Clara is too talented…to go on forever as one of forty girls.” Owens then writes, “And that’s how Clara Haili Inter became a solo performer. Within a week she premiered with me at the Royal Hawaiian…Her success was instantaneous. A year later, we changed her professional name to Hilo Hattie.”161

Hilo Hattie credited Owens with taking her career to a new level, which seems indisputable, but his account of her career trajectory in the entertainment industry is pure fiction.162 She first used the song “Hilo Hattie Does the Hilo Hop” as a theme in 1936.163 The headline to a 1938 front page Honolulu Star-Bulletin article reads, “Kids Say School’s Fun If Hilo

Hattie Teaches” and the piece opens, “When the crowd yells ‘Hi, Hilo Hattie,’ it’s Clara Inter the

159 Owens, Sweet Leilani: The Story Behind the Song, 150. 160 Ibid., 153. 161 Ibid., 155. 162 Milly Singletary, Hilo Hattie, a Legend in Our Time: A Biography (Honolulu, HI: Mutual Publishing, 2006), 39. 163 Noelani Mahoe, “Artist in Profile,” Ha‘ilono Mele, Volume II, Number 7, July 1976: 2. 144 comic hula dancer they want.”164 By 1938, she was headlining shows throughout the Hawaiian

Islands as a solo performer as well as performing on the continent where she recorded for

Decca Records.165 In 1939, Hilo Hattie embarked on a highly publicized tour of the continental

US and her February 1940 return to the islands was every bit as hyped as Owens’ own return was six months later. A nearly full page in The Honolulu Star-Bulletin dedicated to her homecoming includes advertisements for her popular recordings as well as messages from other entertainers like Joseph Ikeole, who calls her “Hawaii’s favorite daughter, dancer, singer, wit” and Ray Kinney, who writes, “Hawaii is Hawaii again—Clara’s home.”166

Harry Owens’ return to Hawai‘i was brief, lasting only seven months from September 4,

1940 to April 4, 1941. When Owens details his 1937 to 1940 absence from the islands in his book, he writes of the many lucrative offers his orchestra received. He had to talk the orchestra members, some of whom were quite homesick, into remaining on the continent, largely to benefit his and their careers.167 There is likely much truth to this claim, but in the context of his book’s near constant assertions of his deep and intense love for the Hawaiian Islands, his long absence is striking. After his short return, he never again resided in the islands.

During Owens brief return to Hawai‘i during this period, he claims to have felt unwell and to have sought Aikane’s advice. Aikane told Owens,

Reaction is just now setting in from those long, arduous months of grueling work on the mainland. It is a thing called fatigue…Ha-lee, I must tell you something. Something you may not like to hear…You must quit for awhile. You must get away from every facet of

164 Eugene Burns, “Kids Say School’s Fun If Hilo Hattie Teaches,” The Honolulu Star-Bulletin, October 13, 1938, page 1. 165 “Clara Inter Headlines Show Planned By Kaunakakai PTA,” The Honolulu Advertiser, November 23, 1938, page 4; “Hilo Hattie Hops Home,” The Honolulu Advertiser, July 17, 1938, page 30; Mahoe, 3. 166 “Hilo Hattie Hops Home To Honolulu,” The Honolulu Star-Bulletin, February 23, 1940, page 10. 167 Owens, Sweet Leilani: The Story Behind the Song, 131 and 138. 145

your work. And that means leaving the islands again. You must go back to the mainland, then to your retreat in the desert. There you will recover, I am sure. But it will take time. Many months, perhaps.168

Owens claims this advice left him “shaken,” but he knew that he had to follow Aikane’s instructions. He writes that on the day of his family’s departure, Arthur Benaglia told him that his bandleader position would be held for him until his return and “Aikane was on hand to bless our departure. To Bess, Leilani, Butch, and me, he presented garlands of sweet scented

Maile—leis given only to the Ali’i—the Royalty.”169 Owens assures his readers that in setting up his family’s new home in Los Angeles, he made certain that his piano was “facing west, toward my beloved Hawaii.”170 Owens claims that by November 1941, he was anxious to return to

Hawai‘i and made arrangements to resume performing at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel on

December 31, 1941.171 He contends that he received a cablegram from Arthur Benaglia hours after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor that informed him that his contract with Matson was terminated when the military commandeered the Royal Hawaiian Hotel.172

Owens may have felt generally unwell in Hawai‘i, but as usual, historical sources contradict the rest of his account. Owens’ constantly repeated adoration of the islands seems likely to have been a performance of his persona rather than sincere. A 1982 interview with

Owens points to the same conclusion. In this 1982 interview, when asked about his brief return to Honolulu in the early 1940s, Owens explained, “I got back, and it seemed like I wasn’t happy

168 Ibid., 159. 169 Ibid., 160. Butch is Harry Owens, Jr. and Leilani is his daughter for whom the hit song was written. Also, the apostrophe appears in place of an ‘okina in the original text. 170 Ibid., 162. 171 Ibid., 169. 172 Ibid., 172. 146 any more. The Islands—they weren’t beautiful to me any more.”173 The interviewer notes that

Owens played only Hawai‘i themed music from the time he arrived in Honolulu until his retirement.174 This fact likely prompted his constant proclamations during his career of reluctance to leave the islands because his career was built upon a fantasy of Hawai‘i. Owens was long retired by the time he gave this 1982 interview, so he would have had no need to perform his persona. Another conspicuous aspect of this interview strongly points to the fact that this 1982 interview is persona-less—Owens makes no mention of Aikane or Auntie Pinau in this interview, which distinguishes this interview from interviews granted in the latter part of his active career.175

Sources from the time of his 1941 departure indicate what his plans at that time actually were and make no mention of Owens taking a break, much less one suggested to him by

Aikane. Owens announced in February 1941 that he intended to give up being a bandleader in order to work in radio and compose music for motion pictures. He intended to relocate with his family to Los Angeles to pursue this new direction in his career.176

World War II, Television Series, and Tour Guide

Owens continued to find prominent work throughout World War II. In 1942, he composed a song called “Silent Ukulele” and donated all the proceeds to the Hawaiian Chapter of the Red Cross.177 He also continued to work with Hilo Hattie and lead a band called the Royal

173 Pierre Bowman, “‘Dream Merchant’ visits the land he set to music,” The Honolulu Advertiser, July 8, 1982, pages 19 and 21. 174 Ibid. 175 Ibid. 176 “Harry Owens Giving Up Baton-Will Turn to Radio, Write Tunes for Films,” The Honolulu Advertiser, February 22, 1941, page 1. 177 “In Person!,” The San Francisco Examiner, September 10, 1942, page 7. 147

Hawaiians, though it appears to have been an almost entirely new line-up of continental musicians.178 Owens also continued to find work in the motion picture industry throughout the war.179

His association with Hawai‘i, he claims in his autobiography, made working during the second World War challenging, but ultimately proved to be a boon to his career. He contends continental Americans blamed Hawai‘i for allowing Pearl Harbor to be attacked and thus, bringing the US into World War II.180 Owens writes that immediately after the Pearl Harbor attacks, Americans began to discuss Hawai‘i “not as an unfortunate victim of location and timing, but as an irresponsible public servant…who had clumsily, if not deliberately, defaulted in a fundamental duty.”181 The negative attitude on the continent toward Hawai‘i, he argues, restricted his repertoire and his ability to secure work hosting a radio show. He writes,

As it turned out, this complete and thorough shunning of all things Hawaiian was really a blessing; for, in the years ahead, the telling of the Aikane legends became an outstanding feature of my television series. A prior usage on radio would, most certainly, have made them old hat…Very gradually Hawaii’s orphan image was put aside and, thankfully, my islands regained their rightful place in the sun.182

During the final months of World War II, Bess Owens became seriously ill and died of cancer at age thirty-eight in January 1946.183 According to Owens, he descended into deep

178 “‘A Famous Band’ Every Saturday Night,” Santa Cruz Sentinal (Santa Cruz, California), April 30, 1943, page 2; “Wednesday Nite!,” Oakland Tribune (Oakland, California), December 12, 1944, page 15. 179 “Harry Owens,” IMDb, accessed February 2, 2020, https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0654374/?ref_=fn_al_nm_1 180 I do not know if there is any truth to this claim. I have not found anything to corroborate it, but I find it plausible that there might be some truth in his claim due to rampant anti-Asian racism along with the American national press’ demeaning depictions of Hawai‘i during the Kahahawai/Massie events less than a decade earlier. 181 Owens, Sweet Leilani: The Story Behind the Song, 174. 182 Owens, Sweet Leilani: The Story Behind the Song, 177-178. 183 Ibid., 190-196; “Mrs. Harry Owens,” The Los Angeles Times, January 28, 1946, page 20. 148 depression and alcoholism. In this period, Aikane began writing frequently, assuring Owens, “I pray constantly to Lono. He will help you.”184 Owens claims that Lono and Aikane helped him significantly, but when he sent his kids away to camp, he relapsed into alcoholism and other vices. At this point, “All-seeing Aikane started sending messages in parable” that got through to

Owens. Owens claims that he quit his vices and started a disciplined routine built around fitness and composing music. He concludes, “Mahalo, Aikane—you have saved me.”185

On the next page of Owens’ book, Aikane dies. Owens learns of Aikane’s death when the postman arrives with a package for which Owens must sign, “The package contained

Aikane’s Hawaiian Book of Life, ONIPAA. It could mean only one thing: Aikane was dead.”

Owens’ doctor soon arrived and diagnosed him with “extreme mental suffering.” The doctor ordered Owens sedated, which resulted in a profound experience.186 Owens writes that

Aikane came to him in a dream to tell him, “There is still a great need for your music, your message, your legends of our Golden Land.” Owens claims that he protested to Aikane, “But these legends are YOUR legends, Aikane.” Owens details Aikane’s response to his protest,

He smiles, with just a touch of melancholy, then very softly: “They belong to you now, Ha-lee…Now I go to dwell among the bowers with Kamehameha and Kalakaua, with Liliuokalani and Joe Ninepipes—and Bess. We will be listening to your music. We will be watching you and expecting many good things. You will not disappoint us, Ha-lee-my son.”187

Owens claims in his book that Aikane died in 1946. In May 1950, Owens returned to

Hawai‘i for the first time since 1941 and The Honolulu Star-Bulletin details that one of the main

184 Ibid., 194. 185 Ibid., 196. 186 Ibid., 197. 187 Ibid., 200. 149 reasons for his trip is to visit, “Aikane, 96 year old Hawaiian who lives near the black sands of

Kalapana on the Big Isle to gather more Hawaiiana to use in his mainland shows.”188 Owens’ television show on which “the Aikane legends became an outstanding feature” had debuted the previous year. It seems likely that Owens created the character for that show and had not yet developed many of the ideas he attributes to the character in his book. In 1954, Owens writes about his friend “Aikane, the Kahuna, the venerable last of the priests of Polynesia” as alive and well and living on Kaua‘i.189

Owens’ autobiography recounts that immediately after he arrived in O‘ahu on May 7,

1950,

We headed up the mountain. How urgent was my desire to see again the Long House of my friend and benefactor, Aikane the Kahuna, venerable last of the priests of old Hawaii! It was gone. Burned down. Only the huge chimney fireplace remained. The jungle had moved in.190

Owens claims that he then searched for Auntie Pinau, but no one had seen her since just after

Aikane’s death, when her neighbors saw her descend the mountain with “a package, the size and shape of a large book.” Owens consulted “the native postmistress” who informed him that

Auntie Pinau was “terribly concerned” that Harry Owens receive this package containing “a priceless book entitled ‘Onipaa’.”191 Owens then reveals that he learned that Auntie Pinau was

188 “Harry Owens to Arrive Sunday For Island Visit,” The Honolulu Star-Bulletin, May 5, 1950, page 21. This is the earliest mention of Aikane that I have found. 189 Harry Owens, “Kauai, Hawaii’s Garden Isle,” The San Francisco Examiner, February 14, 1954, page 55. This is the earliest print record I could find of anyone using the term “venerable last of the priests” and every example I have found comes from Harry Owens. 190 Owens, Sweet Leilani: The Story Behind the Song, 231. 191 Ibid. 150 likely “, the Fire Goddess” due to the fact that Pele went to the mountain to burn Aikane’s home “the very night following Auntie’s disappearance.”192

Owens’ invented Hawaiian characters and persona of authenticity and authority served him quite well in the emerging medium of television. George S. Kanahele writes, “It was Harry

Owens who put Hawaiian music on the ‘tube’ first with more success than anyone since then.”193 The program titled Harry Owens and His Royal Hawaiians debuted October 21, 1949 from the Aragon Ballroom in Santa Monica, California with a capacity crowd serving as the studio audience. Originally the show broadcasted only in southern California on CBS affiliates, but its popularity prompted CBS to create a special network of twenty-four stations to allow the show to be broadcasted throughout California, Nevada, Arizona, Alaska, and Hawai‘i.194 Tony

Todaro contends that this television series, more than any other source, popularized Hawaiian music globally.195 This may be overstating the show’s impact a bit as it was never broadcast nationally, much less internationally, nor was it syndicated. It enjoyed, nonetheless, tremendous popularity and paved the way for the “Exotica” genre that became so popular during the late 1950s.196

The show’s mass appeal appears to have been rooted in the same methods Owens used in his autobiography to sell himself as a cultural commodity. In line with the autobiography’s numerous references to “lovely young wahines,” Bill Bird writes, “Beautiful girls swaying

192 Ibid., 232. 193 Dr. George S. Kanahele, “Hawaiian Music and Television,” Ha‘ilono Mele, Volume IV, Number 4, April 1978: 3. 194 Kanahele, Hawaiian Music and Musicians: An Encyclopedic History, 814. 195 Todaro, Golden Years of Hawaiian Entertainment, 283. 196 Mark Williams, “Entertaining ‘difference’: strains of Orientalism in early Los Angeles television,” in Sasha Torres, ed., Living Color: Race and Television in the United States (Durham, NC, Duke University Press, 1998), 15-16. 151 seductively to the soft rhythmic music of the Islands. That, men, is what we’re promised tonight and every Monday night in the video edition of the Harry Owens show.”197 Another contemporary author alludes to ingredients of the television program provided through the references to the character of Aikane and the use of the Onipaa prop book. Seven years into the show, Gordon Kotecki marveled at both the show’s longevity and continuing popularity.

Kotecki explains that the show about a place “few Americans know very much about and fewer have visited” achieved its popularity because “Owens and his troupe are students of Hawaiian music…they can dig back through island history, take legends and chants nearly as old as the volcanic land itself and deck them out in modern dress…The Owens troupe are as Polynesian as poi—performers who are authorities on the South Sea culture.”198

Owens used the authenticity he claimed through his experiences in Hawai‘i, particularly those with Aikane, to great commercial effect. In his autobiography, Owens brags, “In my history of Hawaii travel, I employed a ‘soft sell’—something unique in those early days of television commercials. It was to bring tourists, by the thousands, to Hawaii, via United

Airlines.”199 Throughout the run of Owens’ shows, the commercials were performed live during the broadcast just like the rest of the show. At the time broadcast regulations permitted only two one-minute commercials per half-hour broadcast. Owens includes a script in which he demonstrates how he circumvented this rule by telling an “old Aikane legend” about “the first known journey of a Princess and her Kah-nay.” He proceeded from there to stories of “hand

197 Bill Bird, “Radio & TV,” Pasadena Independent (Pasadena, California), October 6, 1952, page 18. 198 Gordon Kotecki, “Studio Briefs: Owens Offers Escape to the Blue Waters,” Oakland Tribune, November 6, 1955, page 67. 199 Owens, Sweet Leilani: The Story Behind the Song, 250. Mark Williams’ account confirms these rather creative and technically illegal TV sales pitches. 152 carved outrigger canoes” on long journeys buoyed by “faith, born of great Polynesian Gods.”

He then moved to “the great, four-masted sailing vessels, bringing cargoes of delight to our eager Hawaiians” and finally on to “the great white bird of United!” He explained to his audience just how fast the journey is, how experienced and friendly the pilots are, and concluded, “Lucky you who will be aboard. I admit to a tinge of jealousy as I think of all the wonderful things which lie ahead of you in Hawaii, your home away from home.”200

Owens also pitched statehood for Hawai‘i on the show.201 By the 1950s, not only did

Hawai‘i’s large non-white population terrify many white Americans, but fears of communist infiltration in the islands alarmed many on the continental US. Mark Williams writes that

Owens crafted a Hawai‘i that could be sold to Congress in that Owens’ vision of the islands showed a place perfect for both “business and pleasure, unaffected by the upheavals of the rest of the world.”202

The show differed dramatically from other American television programs by featuring predominantly non-white performers in an era when few non-white performers appeared on television.203 The program also featured considerable Hawaiian language content at a time when American programming was almost entirely in English. In the first episode that I viewed, five of the thirteen featured songs were entirely in Hawaiian while in the second episode, four out of eleven were. The second episode features Hilo Hattie giving a short welcome speech in

Hawaiian while Harry Owens stands beside her nodding with approval and acting as if he

200 Ibid., 251-252. 201 Williams, 19. 202 Ibid. 203 Williams, 12-13. 153 understands, “Hele mai! Hele mai ʻoukou a pau! Hui me mākou ma ʻaneʻi nei, ma kēia ipo hoʻolele kiʻi ʻo CBS, a ma ka lokomaikaʻi o Regal Pale nō hoʻi, a hui kākou a pau loa. Hele mai!

(Come! Come, all of you! Join us here, in this television sweetheart, CBS, and also in the generosity of Regal Pale, and we will all join together. Come!)”204

Owens’ show lasted nine years and its popularity remained remarkably high throughout most of that run.205 In 1954, when United Airlines suspected that the show was waning in popularity and decided to withdraw as sponsor, fans flooded CBS with letters pleading for

Owens’ return to the airwaves. This massive fan outcry motivated the Regal Brewing Company to sponsor the show.206 Regal remained the program’s patron until the final episode in July

1958. Kanahele writes that Harry Owens and His Royal Hawaiians was, “the first and last major network program of its kind in the U.S.”207

In 1958, Owens transitioned from television host to tour guide. Harry Owens Holiday

Cruise promised guests the opportunity to sail to Hawai‘i on the “lovely S.S. Leilani.” On this ship named for his most famous composition, “Harry and his celebrated Royal Hawaiians will present their Polynesian Review nightly.” Upon arrival in the islands, the tours would be

204 “Harry Owens Show-1958-Hawaiian Music-1 Hour Long,” YouTube (YouTube, February 19, 2016), accessed February 7, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XjyP72x1Nsw; Transcribed and translated by Iāsona Kaper on February 7, 2020. 205 Of the hundreds of episodes that aired (CBS made a huge event out of the 200th episode in 1954), only a very few survive in recordings and it seems likely that the two 1958 episodes I have viewed are rather representative of the series as a whole. Owens had established a reputation even before his television run of changing very little about his performances. In his research of 1950s Los Angeles television, Mark Williams was only able to view one episode that aired at the end of 1951. The show Williams describes sounds extremely similar to the two that I have viewed. Late in the show’s run, Bob Foster claimed it was losing popularity because Owens “hasn’t varied his format one bit from his first show.”- “Harry Owens Is Booming Hawaii Music on Coast,” Honolulu Star-Bulletin, July 12, 1950, page 13; Williams, 14; Bob Foster, “Owens Show Too Slow, Repetitious,” The Times (San Mateo, California), page 23. 206 Foster, 23. 207 Kanahele, Hawaiian Music and Musicians: An Encyclopedic History, 814. 154

“conducted personally by ‘Mr. Hawaii’ himself!”208 Music continued to serve as an ingredient in this new packaging of Harry Owens the cultural commodity.

In his autobiography, Owens provides an account of how he became a tour guide.

Apparently, he had been well-aware that his nearly four-year stint living in the islands had made him “the leading authority on Hawaii and the South Pacific” including knowing “every square foot of every island in Polynesia,” but he had not realized that this knowledge could be useful in any way until a friend in the travel industry suggested it could qualify him to be a good tour guide.209 Owens left the tour business in 1962, leading his final tour in October of that year.210 Owens claims that he left the travel industry to renew the copyrights on his compositions, so the pieces would not fall into public domain.211

Conclusion

Harry Owens’ autobiography is a work of fiction and should not be cited as a conventional historical source. The book is instructive because, as a self-published work created at the end of his career, it is the culmination of everything Owens learned over his long career about selling Hawai‘i and selling himself as “Mr. Hawaii.” It is his masquerade perfected and this masquerade was used to great effect by the various private and public interests

208 “Discover Hawaii with HARRY OWENS,” The San Francisco Examiner, March 4, 1958, page 21. 209 Owens, Sweet Leilani: The Story Behind the Song, 295. According to Owens, he responded to his friend lauding his preeminent knowledge with “So what?” 210 “Make a Dream Come True in ’62,” Valley Times Today (North Hollywood, California), May 26, 1962, page 3. 211 Owens, Sweet Leilani: The Story Behind the Song, 310-311. This statement accurately reflects US copyright law of that period, thus renewing the copyrights was extremely important for his family’s financial well-being and he did renew the copyrights on many of his biggest hits around this time.- Amanda Jenkins, “Copyright Breakdown: The Music Modernization Act,” Library of Congress, February 5, 2019, accessed February 9, 2020, https://blogs.loc.gov/now-see-hear/2019/02/copyright-breakdown-the-music-modernization-act/; Harry Owens, Harry Owens' Great Songs of Hawaii (Pacific Palisades, CA: Royal Music Publisher, 1964). 155 working to make Hawai‘i into a white space. While these white elites may have failed to make

Hawai‘i into a white space, through Owens’ work they succeeded in creating a white-dominated

Hawai‘i in minds throughout the planet. A white man from Nebraska became widely known as

“Mr. Hawaii,” while his name and his Guy Lombardo/Lawrence Welk styled sound became synonymous with “Hawaiian music.” The popularity of his compositions on a government funded radio program prompted Hollywood to make a string of internationally popular musical movies (many featuring Owens and/or his music) all crafted with strict adherence to the nineteenth-century annexationist image of Hawai‘i as a white-dominated space with happy, helpful Kānaka Maoli and void or nearly void of any other race.

156

Chapter 4: Fantasy and Persona

One of the original dream merchants of Hawaii. He did his selling with his music. —Harry Owens’ 1986 obituary in The Honolulu Advertiser 1

Deception is part of the work that popular music performs. All entertainers assume personas onstage, but commercial culture offers particular monetary inducements to successful masqueraders. —George Lipsitz2

In 1930s Hawai‘i, the statehood movement allied with the tourism industry to use the music industry to market fantasies on a global scale that presented the islands as a feminized and exoticized, yet white-dominated space. The ability to manufacture spokespeople that consumers view as credible is central to the success of the music industry’s function as a marketing machine. This chapter demonstrates that Harry Owens the human being and Harry

Owens the manufactured spokesperson differed significantly and argues that the music industry powerfully incentivizes complicity in white supremacist and misogynist endeavors.

This chapter also analyzes some of the commodities associated with Owens’ career to demonstrate the many ways the music industry can package its widely disseminated messaging.

Harry Owens: The Human Being and the Persona

The music industry sells fantasy and, as this chapter’s opening epigraph indicates, the process of establishing Owens as a vendor of fantasy is much simpler than it would be for most artists in the music industry. As the Lipsitz epigraph indicates, the fact that Owens acted as a

1 “Harry Owens dies at age 84: bandleader, songwriter inspired ‘Hawaii Calls’,” The Honolulu Advertiser, December 13, 1986, page 6. 2 George Lipsitz, Footsteps in the Dark: The Hidden Histories of Popular Music (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), xvii. 157 dream merchant makes him typical of performers in the music industry. Owens was an extremely successful masquerader. I argue that exploring why he masqueraded and why he was rewarded for this deception is essential to understanding the relationship between colonial capitalism, white supremacy, and the music industry.

Lipsitz notes that commodities become more “credible,” thus more “bankable,” when they closely resemble previously profitable commodities and that the music industry is no exception to this rule.3 Music is only one ingredient in the commodities produced by the music industry, which itself is an integral component of the larger machine of colonial capitalism.

Lipsitz notes that access to becoming “one of the interchangeable parts in the linked chain of production and distribution of the music-television-internet industry,” is dependent on having such qualities as “appropriate faces, bodies, and hair.”4 The fact that these commodities are

“interchangeable” is essential to this industry in that it makes profitable commodities easily replaceable and problematic commodities disposable. In addition to conforming physically to a commodity archetype, gaining access to commodity status as well as sustaining that status requires performing the characteristics of an archetype (masquerading).

The myth that the music industry is a meritocracy remains pervasive even as mainstream media pieces have easily demonstrated it to be a lie.5 In spite of powerful motivations on the parts of both participants and consumers to believe this propaganda, many people within the industry understand it is a lie. Harry Owens’ orchestra certainly did. As one

3 Ibid., 13. 4 Ibid., 14. 5 Neil Irwin, “Alan Krueger on How the Music Industry Explains Inequality,” The Washington Post, June 12, 2013, accessed February 16, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/06/12/alan- krueger-on-how-the-music-industry-explains-inequality/ 158 musician in Owens’ group concisely explained the industry, “This racket of getting to the top is

95 percent ‘drag’ and 5 percent good musicianship.” L. D. Tavares noted that all of the musicians in Owens’ orchestra agreed that politics, not musical talent, governed success or failure in the industry.6

Harry Owens performed the role of “white messiah/mediator,” which is one of the many enduring archetypal roles within the music industry. These archetypes persist for the same reason the annexationists’ and tourism industry’s fantasy image of Hawai‘i persists: they all appeal to enduring notions of white supremacy. Just as haole elites in Hawai‘i used fantasy to attract white tourists, throughout the twentieth century the commodities of the music industry were almost entirely curated by white people for the consumption of a primarily white audience. The appeal of the “white messiah/mediator” trope within fiction, especially cinema, is well documented, but this role also has a long history of profitability in the music industry outside of the example of Harry Owens. Paul Whiteman was viewed as a refined white intellect who rescued jazz from the “primitive” people who created it.7 George Lipsitz writes that by the early 1970s, Ry Cooder started on “the course that he followed throughout his career as a romantic white interpreter of ‘lost’ music created by people of color.”8 Hanif Abdurraqib describes a 2018 concert by white rapper Machine Gun Kelly in language that makes it clear that the rapper is following the same recipe for success that Harry Owens followed on his television show. Abdurraqib writes that this white rapper “had black people on stage with him,

6 Tavares, 4. 7 Gurre Ploner Noble, 46. 8 Lipsitz, 125-126. 159 backing him up, accessorising his raps about their neighbourhood and the interior violence of it.

He sounds at times, like a tour guide, performing for this largely white crowd.”9

An examination of Harry Owens’ life demonstrates the power of the white supremacist, colonial capitalist system to create complicity. As a human being, Owens seems to have earned wide-spread respect for his kindness and integrity. When I first began reading these laudatory accounts of Owens, I speculated that he had become such a big star that those who knew him feared critiquing him and flattered him to gain favors from him, but as I progressed through the evidence, I realized that the evidence failed to fit my theory. For example, it seems unlikely that a revered mid-career scholar like Dr. George S. Kanahele could have feared any reprisal from an aging and nearly forgotten Harry Owens in 1979 when he featured, praised, and defended Owens in Hawaiian Music and Musicians and thanked him in the short acknowledgement section.10 A 1978 interview with guitarist Dwight Hanohano sheds light on how far Owens’ star had fallen by the late 1970s. Hanohano said that he and the other young musicians with whom he formed the band Hokule‘a, did so in part because they saw the band

“as a remedy to ‘Sweet Leilani’ syndrome.” He explained that other young musicians were taking part in this movement, noting that “Sweet Leilani” was still performed for tourists, but “if you go and see or Sunday Manoa and even whisper ‘Sweet Leilani,’ a

9 Hanif Abdurraqib, “From Vanilla Ice to Macklemore: Understanding the White Rapper's Burden,” The Guardian, October 8, 2018, accessed February 16, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/music/2018/oct/08/vanilla-ice-eminem-macklemore-understanding-white- rappers-burden. This description is also reminiscent of the descriptions of the lavish entertainments staged at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel for elite whites and select Hawaiians only. 10 George S. Kanahele, ed., Hawaiian Music and Musicians: An Illustrated History (Honolulu, HI: University Press of Hawaii, 1979), xiii and 281-282. 160 bouncer would throw you out.”11 Kanahele also could not have feared retaliation in 1994, eight years after Owens’ death, when he published Restoring Hawaiianess to Waikīkī. In this publication, Kanahele recommends that “Hawaiian music representing different periods as well as styles” be featured throughout Waikīkī and provides examples of composers from different eras. Each of the composers he recommends was Native Hawaiian with the exception of

Owens.12 The inclusion of Owens’ work in Kanahele’s 1994 argument demonstrates that

Owens’ fame had waned so that his work required restoring to be heard.

Bandleaders were mid-level managers in a giant corporate structure, but often had the power to greatly affect the quality of life of the musicians in their employ, thus tended to generate either gratitude or resentment. Kanahele spent years researching Hawaiian music and getting to know musicians who would have been in this latter phase of their careers when they generally have much less to lose by being honest about their history. Had Owens been an unkind and dishonest boss, Kanahele would have heard about it. Perhaps he did, but he was simply fond of Owens’ music and wanted to recognize the extent of his fame. Based on a great deal of evidence, I strongly suspect Kanahele’s positive assessment of Owens reflects that he heard positive reviews of Owens as a boss and had positive experiences with Owens himself.

In 1967, The Honolulu Star-Bulletin launched a series profiling the songwriters that their staff considered most important to twentieth-century Hawaiian music. Although they originally intended to write about thirty composers, they ultimately covered twenty-five, sixteen of

11 Burl Burlingame and Robert K. Kasher, Da Kine Sound: Conversations With the People Who Create Hawaiian Music, Honolulu, HI: Press Pacifica, 1978, 126. 12 George S. Kanahele, Restoring Hawaiianess to Waikīkī, (Honolulu, HI: Queen Emma Foundation, 1994), 40- 41. This book includes a photograph of only one of these artists, which is a full-page image of Harry Owens. 161 whom were born in Hawai‘i whereas nine of them were born on the continent and came to

Hawai‘i during their careers.13 Of the nine from this latter category, only Harry Owens received an entry in Hawaiian Music and Musicians. As expansive as Kanahele’s extremely impressive encyclopedia is, he could not include everything nor everyone significant. In fact, he specifies in the preface, “this is not a complete work-far from it-but it is as comprehensive a start as has been done in the field of Hawaiian Music.”14 Owens’ global fame exceeded that of all of the other subjects of entries in Kanahele’s encyclopedia, but global fame does not appear to have been one of Kanahele’s criteria. Kanahele compiled entries for many less famous artists including some whose fame was likely confined entirely to the islands, but excluded some

Native Hawaiian international stars such as Dick McIntire, Lani McIntire, and Al Kealoha Perry.

Along with the McIntire brothers and Perry, The Honolulu Star-Bulletin’s 1967 series details other significant Native Hawaiian composers who did not receive entries including Andy

Cummings, Madeline Lam, Sol K. Bright, Edna Bekeart, and Randy Oness. Of these eight composers, only Randy Oness receives an entry in the 2012 updated version of the encyclopedia.15 This edition’s appendix acknowledges the limitations of the updated version as it lists the McIntire brothers among the artists that John Berger hopes will be included in the encyclopedia’s third printing at some future date.16 Kanahele not only chose to include Owens over these other musicians, he chose to give two of Owen’s songs individual entries while

13 Rather than include a citation for each article here, I will note only the first and the last in the series-Paul W. Lovinger, “How he got his ‘hands’ into songwriting,” The Honolulu Star-Bulletin, June 9, 1967, page 21; Paul W. Lovinger, “Finale: Is Hawaiian music pau?,” The Honolulu Star-Bulletin, October 19, 1967, page 24. 14 Kanahele, ed., Hawaiian Music and Musicians: An Illustrated History, (1979), x. 15 Kanahele, ed., (revised and updated by John Berger), Hawaiian Music and Musicians: An Encyclopedic History, (2012), 615. 16 Ibid., 884. 162 praising Owens’ work and defending Owens’ music against Charles E. King’s criticism.17 Along with Kanahele’s recommendations about Owens’ music in Restoring Hawaiianess to Waikīkī, this demonstrates at the very least that Kanahele viewed Owens’ artistic contributions as valuable. Furthermore, he knew Owens personally and many of his colleagues personally, so it seems likely to reflect his view of Owens as a human being also.

Powerful, dishonest, and cruel individuals were not just a continental phenomenon. For example, Adria L. Imada notes how women musicians and dancers were especially vulnerable to abuse from powerful men in the entertainment industry. Imada writes that as a bandleader,

Ray Kinney had a bad reputation for skimming or withholding salaries from his dancers escalating to the point that in 1948, the dancers’ union American Guild of Variety Artists (AGVA) filed formal claims against Kinney.18 In another example, Hawaii Calls creator Webley Edwards drew scrutiny when it was discovered that he had created a pseudonym “John Kalapana,” under which he filed for copyrights for several old Hawaiian language songs, including one composed by Princess Miriam Likelike.19

Not only has Owens avoided accusations such as these, but the available evidence indicates that he was honest and a good boss to work for. Ernest and Freddie Tavares began working with Owens when he arrived in the islands in 1934 and worked with him almost continuously into the 1940s. The brothers came from a wealthy family and had extremely

17 Kanahele, ed., Hawaiian Music and Musicians: An Illustrated History, (1979), 112, 281-282, 380-381, and 388. 18 Adria L. Imada, Aloha America: Hula Circuits through the U.S. Empire (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), 193. 19 Jerry Hopkins, “Ripoffs! Larceny! Composers Trashed! But There’s Hope,” Ha‘ilono Mele, Volume 5, Number 12, December 1979: 5. 163 successful careers of their own, yet in 1965 they joined Owens, whose star had faded significantly by this point, for Owens’ final album produced for a minor .20 Tony

Todaro concludes his entry on Owens in his 1974 encyclopedia by noting that one of the most remarkable things about Owens is his kindness and how much the people who know him love him.21 Late in her career, Clara Haili (aka Hilo Hattie) reminisced about being a Hawaiian performer working on the continent,

Ti leaves are a very important part of Hawaiian life. It made us so happy when the girls could wear the real ones for their hula skirts. Harry Owens insisted on fresh ti leaves when it was possible. In fact, it was one of his biggest headaches, particularly while we were traveling.22

Randy Oness seems to have clearly understood Owens’ distortions of Hawai‘i to have been part of a masquerade required to advance in the music industry. Oness aimed for accuracy in his own work. He learned Hawaiian from his grandfather and wrote many Hawaiian language songs, but asked Mary Kawena Puku‘i to check his work to make certain he used the language correctly.23 Oness also described the six years that he worked for Harry Owens, from 1934 to

1940, as “the greatest” years of his career.24

20 Wianecki; Harry B. Soria, Jr., dj, “Harry Owens-Last Record-1965,” Territorial Airwaves, episode aired June 2, 2017, accessed February 12, 2020, http://www.territorialairwaves.com/index.php?page=30&id=393. 21 Todaro, Tony Todaro Presents: The Golden Years of Hawaiian Entertainment, 1874-1974, 283. Todaro was a haole from the continent, but he appears to have been highly regarded within Hawaiian music circles. Mary Kawena Puku‘i wrote the introduction to the book and praised Todaro as a kind and dedicated person that she had known for years. Nona Beamer assisted him with the book and wrote an entry praising him. Sol K. Bright delivered a eulogy at Todaro’s funeral.-Keith Haugen, “Music Hall of Fame,” The Honolulu Star- Bulletin, August 26, 1976, page 19. A bit of trivia that I found interesting about Todaro: “He was active in civil rights causes and took strong public stands in advocating stricter gun-control laws.”-Harold Morse, “Isle Music Figure Tony Todaro Dies,” The Honolulu Star-Bulletin, July 29, 1976, page 4. 22 Singletary, 79. 23 George S. Kanahele, “Ahiahi,” Ha‘ilono Mele, Volume 3, Number 4, April 1977: 7. 24 John Berger, “Randy Oness,” in Kanahele, ed., (revised and updated by John Berger), Hawaiian Music and Musicians: An Encyclopedic History, (2012), 616. 164

The most convincing evidence of Owens as a good bandleader in an industry full of unethical predators comes from interviews that Carlyle Nelson, Clara Haili’s husband during the final thirty years of her life, granted to Clara’s biographer Milly Singletary in the late 1970s.

Nelson, a violinist from North Dakota who married Clara in 1949, actually provides the closest example to a negative statement about Owens that I have come across. He explains that Clara got him a job with Owens’ group in 1950, but he could not get along with Owens.25 When he reflected on the situation years later, he realized, “Perhaps we were both too dependent on

Clara.” Nelson notes that he and Owens got along much better after he found work with another band.26 He also speaks about how rough and dishonest the music business is and how many people had stolen from and shortchanged Clara. Nelson continues, “Royalties on recordings are another questionable item in the music business. The only regular checks coming in have been for those recordings made with Harry Owens. He is very good.”27

One particular piece that wrote about Owens seems to reveal much about Kanahele’s personal feelings toward both the bandleader and the bandleader’s autobiography. In the June 1975 issue of Ha‘ilono Mele, the publication of The Hawaiian Music

Foundation founded by George Kanahele, who served as its president at this time, Kanahele writes of Owens’ autobiography, “This is a must for anyone seriously interested in the broad spectrum of Hawaiian music.” He also explains it can be purchased by sending $7.40 to Harry

Owens’ publishing company’s PO Box.28 The fact that Kanahele encouraged money to be sent

25 Singletary, 59-63. 26 Ibid., 62. 27 Ibid., 139. 28 George S. Kanahele, “Pahu Mele,” Ha‘ilono Mele, Volume 1, Number 6, June 1975: 3. 165 to Owens directly indicates that he had a positive opinion of him personally. His carefully worded recommendation of the book is also revealing. He seems to be advocating reading the book much in the way Lipsitz advocates reading cultural commodities. There is little doubt that

Kanahele recognized the book as a work of fiction. For example, he knew Ray Kinney and Hilo

Hattie were stars before meeting Owens and Kanahele certainly did not believe Aikane the

Kahuna ever existed. Yet, it seems reasonable to interpret what Kanahele wrote as noting that this book informs the reader that the colonial capitalist music industry that requires masquerades is part of what makes up “the broad spectrum of Hawaiian music.”

Owens’ autobiography is not only wildly inaccurate and loaded with popular tropes of

American fiction that shape the fantasies marketed by the tourism industry, which make if conform quite closely to the characteristics of Waikiki Wedding and the films that followed in its wake about the islands. I believe Owens wrote it this way quite deliberately and Kanahele, along with others who knew Owens personally, understood why. In 1974, four years after the release of the autobiography, Tony Todaro wrote, “Hollywood is missing the proverbial boat by not filming the life story of Harry Owens.”29 I believe Owens wrote a novel rather than a memoir, but marketed it as an autobiography hoping that Hollywood would produce it as a biopic. I believe that Kanahele along with Owens’ former colleagues, who understood the entertainment industry well, did not contest the book’s accuracy for the same reasons that they did not contest Waikiki Wedding and other such films as factual depictions of Hawai‘i. They recognized these commodities as fiction produced to prosper within the industry rather than as

29 Todaro, Tony Todaro Presents: The Golden Years of Hawaiian Entertainment, 1874-1974, 283. 166 lies much in the way this 1937 Honolulu Advertiser article describes Hollywood’s productions of

Hawai‘i,

The public at large on the mainland has its own ideas about what Hawaii is like so Hollywood conforms to those ideas. An authentic picture of Hawaii would go flat. Even our tourist agencies do a bit of enhancing to conform to the public’s idea of the islands which is why some of the ads we see in magazines aren’t exactly what you and I see in Hawaii. However, that’s what the public want so let ‘em have it.30

It seems likely that rather than fearing retribution, his former colleagues did not report the fictional nature of his autobiography because they liked Owens personally and wished not to compromise the masquerade that his autobiography helped perform.

Harry Owens also had knowledge of a history of Hawai‘i very different from the

Hollywood version that he forwarded in his autobiography. In 1937, while working in Los

Angeles, Owens was interviewed by The Los Angeles Times. Owens explains that upon starting work in Hawai‘i, he felt compelled to study the islands’ history and this led him to confront some difficult knowledge,

When the monarchy fell there was sadness. When the Republic of Hawaii became a Territory of the United States there was more sadness. It’s perfectly true that America was asked to accept Hawaii, but it’s just as true that the native people there saw their last hope of retaining their individuality falling before their eyes. When the haoles in Hilo were rolling great barrels of beer from the old and almost forgotten Peacock liquor house on Waianuenue avenue across the street to the livery stable to stage a celebration, the natives along the Puna coast saw the United States, not particularly as a friend, but as a new master.31

It seems unlikely that Owens learned this history hobnobbing with haole elites at the Royal

Hawaiian Hotel. Particularly in light of the favorable manner with which his colleagues seem to

30 Ray Coll, Jr., “Shoreside Shorts,” The Honolulu Advertiser, April 28, 1937, page 17. 31 Kenneth Crist, “Hawaiian Music Came From—Where?,” The Los Angeles Times, May 16, 1937, page 143. . 167 have viewed him, he was likely first exposed to this history by befriending the Native Hawaiian musicians in his orchestra and listening with empathy to their frustrations and stories of their parents’ and grandparents’ struggles. It is shocking that Owens publicly broke character in this

1937 interview, but perhaps this was early enough in his career that he had not yet learned how strictly the masquerade had to be performed. Regardless, Owens’ 1937 critique of colonialism makes sense of a couple pieces of his autobiography that seem out of character with the rest of the book.

The first of these pieces comes early in the book and is brief and buried within typical passages of other characters lauding Owens’ genius. Owens describes the aftermath of a spectacularly successful performance at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel in which Aikane praises

Owens for his transcendent brilliance and its positive effects on the islands. In the middle of his speech, Aikane says, “Not since the days of the monarchy have I been among so many happy hearts, so many happy people.”32 Although Aikane is fictional, this reflects the same Native

Hawaiian resentment of American colonialism that Owens reports in The Los Angeles Times.

The second piece comes at the very end of the final substantial chapter in the book.33 The chapter, titled “Sol K. Bright,” is about the singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist for whom it is named. Owens claims Bright to be a dear friend and shares some stories about the

Native Hawaiian entertainer. He concludes the chapter with familiar claims of his love of

Hawai‘i and his fluency in the Hawaiian language and then writes, “But what a shame! Today it is NOT taught in our island schools. The same situation prevails in Tahiti. The natives there are

32 Owens, Sweet Leilani: The Story Behind the Song, 65. 33 Two chapters of less than two pages each summarizing the book follow this. 168 taught French but NOT Tahitian.” Owens notes that he wants to draw attention to the fact that

“Sol Bright has toiled long and arduously” to restore the Hawaiian language to the school system and “one of these days, let us pray, his efforts may be rewarded.”34 These are small pieces, but they both jumped off the pages in a book dedicated to celebrating tropes of the tourism industry and American exceptionalism. It is also worth noting that Owens finished writing the autobiography in 1969 in the very early stages of the that would gain steam throughout the following decade. Thus, the vast majority of this book’s intended audience would have been unaware that Hawaiian was not taught in schools, much less that Kānaka Maoli were leading efforts to restore it. In consideration with the other evidence presented on Owens the human being, I believe these pieces help paint the picture that the masquerade he was required to perform in order to become a cultural commodity, did not reflect the person that those who worked with him came to know.

This is not to argue that Owensʻ personal honor and kindness justified his masquerade. The question is why a person would perform something so contrary to their personal values and what purpose does the performance serve for those who demand it. The process of asking this question demonstrates the power of the colonial-capitalist, white supremacist system to create complicity while deflecting accountability.

Harry Owens became one of the most visible components in a massive corporate and government effort to lure tourists and gain statehood through depicting Hawai‘i as an exotic, but safe and white-dominated place. In the effort to recreate Waikīkī as a playground for elite whites, Harry Owens presided over the “playground” as bandleader and host at the elite

34 Owens, Sweet Leilani: The Story Behind the Song, 308. The capital letters are in the original text. 169

Matson-owned venues ensuring that the elite white tourists dancing, schmoozing, and boozing the night away would return to their homes retaining the image of Hawai‘i that Matson viewed as most profitable. Owens and his orchestra in this context reinforced this image powerfully: these dance floors were filled with elite whites dancing to familiar Guy Lombardo style music with exotic ornamentations performed by an orchestra that was half white and half Kānaka

Maoli, but under the dominion of a white man from the US continent. Owens performed this persona so effectively that he became a centerpiece of the government-funded effort to broadcast to radio receivers around the world an image of Hawai‘i that could lead to statehood and tourism industry growth. The success of Hawaii Calls made it clear to Decca Records and

Paramount Pictures that this persona could prove profitable, which it did. As Variety Magazine quite eloquently summed up Owens’ commitment to this persona, “His refusal to be budged from anything Hawaiian or of Hawaiian flavoring is proof that he intends continuing to be popular and profitable…His music is meant to pay off, which is exactly what it does.”35

This corporate and government effort utilized Owens’ persona to great effect, and in doing so seared their racist fantasy depiction of the islands into the global perception of

Hawai‘i. Owens was complicit in this and criticizing that complicity is merited, but should be done only through considering the entire context. The most common defense made of historical figures scrutinized in the way that I have scrutinized Owens’ work is to claim that the work was of its time and only offensive to our modern sensibilities. Such defenses are often flawed as historical research will often demonstrate that the work was deemed offensive at the

35 “Harry Owens Is Booming Hawaii Music on Coast,” Honolulu Star-Bulletin, July 12, 1950, page 13. 170 time it was created and disseminated.36 In the case of Harry Owens, particularly in light of his critiques of colonialism, it seems likely he understood his persona was problematic. The context that is rarely considered is that performing this persona allowed Owens to get a job in the 1930s during the Great Depression when any job was hard to find. But this was not any job, it was to get paid to do something he loved. And it was not just a chance to be able to shelter and feed his family, it was admission into an industry that allowed a good-looking white man who behaved in required ways to advance through a long career doing something he loved with the possibility of earning enough money to support generations of his descendants. This only partially demonstrates the power of this system to create complicity.

There is another major component that I believe sheds a lot of light on why scholars like

Kanahele and musicians like Clara Haili and Randy Oness did not fault Owens for his persona.

Owens’ persona gave him access only to becoming an interchangeable and disposable component in a massive corporate and governmental endeavor. Owens’ colleagues understood that the conglomerate of corporations and government was going forward with their efforts in Waikīkī and on Hawaii Calls with or without Owens. They were also aware that these efforts almost certainly would have succeeded with or without Owens as evidenced by the spectacular ratings of the other continental haole bandleaders who were featured on the early episodes of Hawaii Calls. Owens’ colleagues understood that many of these men could have been the interchangeable, disposable, but highly visible component that Owens became.

36 Tom Schad, “'A Song Is Never Just a Song': The Complicated History behind the Controversy over Kate Smith's 'God Bless America',” USA Today, June 23, 2019, accessed February 20, 2020, https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/2019/06/17/is-kate-smith-being-treated-fairly-in-banning-her-god- bless-america/1132237001/ 171

Owens’ reputation for kindness and honesty likely formed as a result of these colleagues comparing his conduct to that of many of these other continental haole bandleaders.

This broader context is necessary to understand Harry Owens’ role in the history of

Hawai‘i. The territorial legislature credited Owens with making statehood possible and the LA

Times travel writer claimed that as a result of Owens’ music “boatloads and planeloads of tourists took off for the islands.”37 In one of the last large newspaper pieces written on Owens,

Pierre Bowman noted that Owens had written a new song called “Singing River” about the

McKenzie River in Oregon that he only shared with friends, but Bowman speculated that were

Owens still a bandleader “you sort of tremble to think what ‘Singing River’ could do to the tourist business on the McKenzie.”38 There is no difference between crediting disposable commodities for results beyond their power and blaming them for systemic injustices. The two articles cited above were written when the media still overwhelmingly celebrated tourism. Had

Owens not been forgotten by the time scholars and the media began to note the problems that the tourism industry brought, he would likely have received personal blame.

Neither Owens nor his music had any power to influence any politician to grant Hawai‘i statehood nor to induce any tourist to travel to the islands, but as a highly visible interchangeable component within the massive colonial-capitalist complex consisting of government along with various private corporations all seeking the imperial goals of statehood and tourism, Owens proved extremely useful. In this role, he facilitated the spread of the white supremacist colonial-capitalist vision of the Hawai‘i that existed long before he was born far

37 Jerry Hulse, “Harry’s Version of Paradise Lost,” The Los Angeles Times, Sunday, April 12, 1970, page 153. 38 Pierre Bowman, “‘Dream Merchant’ visits the land he set to music,” The Honolulu Advertiser, July 8, 1982, page 21. 172 more effectively than it had ever been disseminated before and helped ensure that this vision remained in use after he was forgotten. Through the financial backing of the territorial government largely due to the influence of the HSPA, the Matson Company, Paramount

Pictures, and Decca Records, his composition “Sweet Leilani” helped establish Waikiki Wedding as a profitable template for depicting Hawai‘i that continues to be utilized to the present day.

The music industry has long been an integral component of colonial capitalism. The industry worked in concert with tourism, agriculture, and motion pictures, and this expanded throughout the twentieth century to include other soft weapons of imperial power. Owens was merely an interchangeable component of this massive machine and a very successfully mobilized one, like a great many others who are nearly forgotten.

“Owens sells romance, Hawaiian style, with superlative effectiveness” 39

Owens, as a gifted salesperson, understood how to package fantasy into performance as a commodity. A 1950 Variety Magazine review of an Owens performance in San Francisco provides a precise explanation,

Owens sells romance, Hawaiian style, with superlative effectiveness, particularly in this town which has a long tradition of sentimentalizing over Hawaii…He knows his stuff in respect to what the local customers like. His refusal to be budged from anything Hawaiian or of Hawaiian flavoring is proof that he intends continuing to be popular and profitable…His music is meant to pay off, which is exactly what it does.40

The musical and lyrical components of this Owens method of fantasy production depict

Hawai‘i as a space welcoming white domination. Owens’ original compositions only depart from the sound of popular continental cornball artists, such as Lombardo and Welk, in the

39 “Harry Owens Is Booming Hawaii Music on Coast,” Honolulu Star-Bulletin, July 12, 1950, page 13. 40 Ibid. 173 ornamentation, such as Hawaiian style vamps, Hawaiian style instrumentation such as ukulele and steel guitars, and lyrical content about Hawai‘i including occasional Hawaiian language words.41

Lyrically, Owens seems to have had a rather strict formula. Most of his compositions explicitly address the experience of visiting Hawai‘i as a tourist. Of his hit songs, five of them describe Hawai‘i as a place where “dreams come true,” while another two songs describe the islands as a place where “make believe comes true.”42 Other songs focus on reinforcing tropes of the tourism industry identified earlier in this dissertation. For example, the “Happy

Hawaiian” is detailed in the song “Happy Hawaiian Beachboy,” while the sexually available native woman appears to be depicted in his composition “Princess Poo-poo-ly Has Plenty Pa-pa- ya (and She Loves to Give it Away).”43 The latter song is risqué enough that Hilo Hattie’s first televised performance of the composition resulted in it being banned by the television station.44 Owens includes both gendered stereotypes in “Poi My Boy (Will Make a Man of

You),”

41 Harry B. Soria, Jr., dj, “Harry Owens Hapa Haole Songbook,” Territorial Airwaves, episode aired September 28, 2012, accessed February 12, 2020, http://www.territorialairwaves.com/index.php?page=30&id=125; Harry B. Soria, Jr., dj, “Harry Owens-Last Record-1965,” Territorial Airwaves, episode aired June 2, 2017, accessed February 12, 2020, http://www.territorialairwaves.com/index.php?page=30&id=393; Harry Owens, The Best of Harry Owens and His Royal Hawaiians, (Tropical Concepts, 1988), CD; Various Artists, Hawaiian Memories: Rare Transcription Discs 1936-1947, (Harlequin, 1999), CD; Various Artists, Hawaiian Memories Vintage Recordings 1928-1941, (Take Two Records, 2001), CD; Guy Lombardo, All Time Favorites, (Geffen Records, 1992), Apple Music; Glenn Miller, The Essential Glenn Miller, (Sony Music, 2005), Apple Music; Lawrence Welk, The Essential Lawrence Welk: Collectors Edition, (Prestige Elite, 2007), Apple Music. While I am a musician and have been since childhood, I have never formally studied music in any capacity. I play by ear and cannot even read sheet music, thus I am not capable of doing any sort of high level musical analysis of this work other than relaying how it sounds in my opinion. Also, I specified Owens’ original compositions because his television show featured Hawaiian language songs performed with traditional Hawaiian instruments. I am not aware of Miller, Lombardo, or Welk ever including such material in their repertoires. 42 Owens, Great Songs of Hawaii; Soria, Jr., dj, “Harry Owens Hapa Haole Songbook.” 43 Owens, Great Songs of Hawaii, 15 and 30. 44 Singletary, 136. 174

Kamehameha went to war with nary a care never knew the meaning of wear and tear Waged a war, with all his might fought all day, loved all night There were maidens galore a thousand or more, Who’d line up and wait at his garden gate He ate poi every morning, poi every evening, poi my boy will make a man of you.45

The majority of the sheet music and album artwork associated with Owens’ work seem to be industry standard for hapa haole music of the period, in that it depicts tropical scenery often framing happy white heterosexual couples.46 A couple examples of cover art for Owens’ records stand out among the artwork of the hapa haole genre, particularly in the way they seem to recreate specific racialized art from the US continent. The artwork for both “Poi My

Boy (Will Make a Man of You)” and “Princess Poo-poo-ly Has Plenty Pa-pa-ya (and She Loves to

Give it Away)” depict Hawaiian women in sexualized and primitive fashion in striking similarity to the way in which promotional material for the whites-only New York Cotton Club portrays

African American women.47 Thus, these two hit songs provided widely dispersed examples of the Jim Crow binary, in which qualities white America imagined to define African Americans were used to depict Kānaka Maoli.

45 “Poi, My Boy (Will Make A Man Of You),” UHM Library Digital Image Collections, accessed February 13, 2020, https://digital.library.manoa.hawaii.edu/items/show/37902. 46 Brown; Elizabeth Tatar, Strains of Change: The Impact of Tourism on Hawaiian Music. (Honolulu, HI: Bishop Museum Press, 1987). Both books include many examples including many of Owens’ work. 47 Brown, 55; Tatar, 22; James Haskins, The Cotton Club (New York, NY: Random House, 1977), 21. Images of both album covers are included at the end of the chapter along with examples of Cotton Club promotional art. 175

Conclusion

In Harry Owens the persona, the tourism and music industries created a spokesperson for tourism and statehood that consumers viewed as credible. This credibility is attested to by his long successful career under the nickname “Mister Hawaii,” that his music became so associated with Hawai‘i that Hawaiian musicians labeled this phenomenon “Sweet Leilani

Syndrome,” and the fact that scholars still cite his outlandish autobiography as historical fact.

Owens worked to perform this persona and spread the marketing messages of his financial backers and his efforts grew tourism, advanced the cause of statehood, and strengthened the

American imperial grip on the islands. Though his complicity in these efforts deserves scrutiny, it also should be analyzed in context. He was a human being with a family to support during the

Great Depression who was offered a potentially lucrative career engaged in his life’s passion, but this career required the performance of this specific persona. Another essential piece of this context is that Owens worked in the music industry, which is notorious for dishonest predatory conduct. The evidence indicates Owens treated those over whom he had power with kindness and honesty and in turn, he earned their respect. He may have served as an effective tool of American empire, but he was only a tool and not an architect of the movements he served.

Harry Owens the salesperson understood how to package pro-statehood and tourism marketing into his music. Owens wrote lyrics that depicted touristic fantasies and set them to continental style music with Hawaiian ornamentation. The record and publishing companies packaged this music with artwork that reflected these fantasies and distributed them widely. 176

The music industry’s multisensory messaging shaped perceptions of the islands around the world helping to grow the tourism industry and advance the statehood movement. 177

Chapter 5: The Aftermath

“Johnny Noble joined the staff of Mutual Telephone Company on June 15, 1911. A few years later he started his rise to musical fame; however, at no time did he allow this to interfere with his work in the telephone company. He has always done his job faithfully and well. He is one of our most esteemed employees.” —Mutual Telephone Company statement regarding the April 23, 1938 celebration of Johnny Noble Day.1

“Another contribution he [Harry Owens] made was in helping to launch and consolidate the careers of such outstanding Hawaiian musicians as Ray Kinney and Hilo Hattie. But, indirectly, he helped many more through the total impact he made on the musical preferences of America vis-à-vis Hawaiian music.” —George S. Kanahele2

“You cannot improve the melodious and gripping songs of our islands by the new-style treatment. Don’t try it! Harry Owens, at public expense, has done more harm by doing it.” —Charles E. King3

Statehood and tourism advocates’ use of the music industry quickly sparked a multitude of profound changes when Hawaii Calls became a global sensation almost immediately after its initial broadcast in 1935. In the course of the 1920s and ʻ30s, Kānaka Maoli grew an already powerful movement to preserve and perpetuate their culture. Some Native Hawaiian musicians were bitterly opposed to colonialism and to tourismʻs impact on Hawaiian language and culture and spoke out against the impacts of Hawaii Calls and music of the Harry Owens type. Many other Kānaka Maoli became deeply involved in tourism and the music industry as a means of

1 “Mutual Telephone Company,” The Honolulu Star-Bulletin, April 23, 1938, page 7. 2 George S. Kanahele, ed., Hawaiian Music and Musicians: An Illustrated History (Honolulu: University Press of Hawaii, 1979), 282. 3 George S. Kanahele, ed., (revised and updated by John Berger), Hawaiian Music and Musicians: An Encyclopedic History (Honolulu, HI: Mutual Publishing, 2012), 269. 178 advancing their own careers as musicians, songwriters, and performers. Some saw in the music industry the possibility to preserve, perpetuate, and innovate Hawaiian music, and through this process, to strengthen other aspects of cultural preservation. Native Hawaiian artists and musicians often functioned in a counter-colonial capacity, even within performances that bolstered colonial efforts. Infusing the islands with anti-Asian racism was a key element of

Americanizing Hawai‘i that was embraced and evangelized by both the tourism and music industries. Asian and Asian-American musicians found themselves excluded from most elite performance venues, yet some of these artists found ways to navigate this racism to pursue their passions professionally. Statehood and tourism advocates brought about the dramatic changes detailed in this chapter through their 1930s mobilization of the music industry.

Resistance and Preservation of Culture

The Hawaiian craze that began to sweep the world in the late 1930s and created a significant amount of employment for performers also created opportunities for communities to preserve and grow their cultural heritage through performance. These opportunities are particularly valuable to an indigenous people suffering colonial occupation and an Asian

American community forced to navigate vicious American racism. Elizabeth Alexander argues that communities of color have been forced to “carry around knowledge and stories in our bodies” because resources are rarely allocated to preserve the places that contained that knowledge.4

4 Casey Cep, “The Fight to Preserve African-American History,” The New Yorker, January 24, 2020, accessed March 24, 2020, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/02/03/the-fight-to-preserve-african- american-history 179

Amy Ku‘uleialoha Stillman explains the particular relevance of this concept to Native

Hawaiian arts, “Through hula dances and songs, memories of people and events endure long after they have passed. Performances are moments in which remembrances are sounded and gestured.”5 Through this process, performers communicated and preserved cultural memory.

In doing so, these performers functioned in a counter-colonial capacity even when these performances were used to bolster colonial efforts such as tourism and the statehood movement.6 In the example of hapa haole songs popular with tourists, Native Hawaiian artists have continued to infuse the music they perform with elements that originated in the pre-

Western contact indigenous methods.7 Helen H. Roberts, Yale University anthropologist, spent

1923 and 1924 in Hawai‘i studying the islands’ music, which led her to conclude in 1925 regarding said music, “the modern product can only be understood in the light of the ancient, and to a degree bears its impress.”8 She writes that she believes this musical heritage accounts for the fact that “In a century of acquaintance with harmonized European music the Hawaiians have learned to sing in parts, but unless they have been well schooled in choral singing, or are singing from notes, one frequently hears harmonies which are unorthodox according to

5 Amy Ku‘uleialoha Stillman, “Re-Membering the History of the Hawaiian Hula,” in Jeannette Marie Mageo, ed., Cultural Memory: Reconfiguring History and Identity in the Postcolonial Pacific (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2001), 188. 6 While white elites remained the target consumer of the industry in the 1930s, tourism’s growth definitely had a great many “counter-colonial” aspects. Adria L. Imada defines “counter-colonial” tactics as “unpredictable and occasionally insurgent disruptions—while not necessarily oppositional to colonialism— nonetheless disorganize empire.”-Adria L. Imada, Aloha America: Hula Circuits through the U.S. Empire (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), 17. 7 “Hawaiian Music Interview with ,” Ha‘ilono Mele,Volume V, Number 5, May, 1979: 5; Amy Ku‘uleialoha Stillman, “Published Hawaiian Songbooks,” Notes, Second Series, Vol. 44, No. 2 (December 1987): 223; Elizabeth Tatar, “Falsetto,” in George S. Kanahele, ed., (revised and updated by John Berger), Hawaiian Music and Musicians: An Encyclopedic History (Honolulu, HI: Mutual Publishing, 2012), 134-145. 8 Helen H. Roberts, “Hawaiian Music,” Hawaiian Annual for 1926 (Honolulu, HI: Thos. G. Thrum compiler and publisher, 1926) : 69. 180 classical rules.”9 Regarding instrumentation, Roberts notes, “The ukulele is now the common companion of every group of Hawaiian youths, who generally achieve with it only the necessary chords with which to accompany their songs, and these, like the vocal harmonies, are not always orthodox but often delightfully unexpected.”10 Harry Owens remembered being confounded by a musical concept he had never encountered, “When I began unearthing the music of Hawaii, I discovered, to my complete dismay, that Hawaiians had the lovely, lazy habit of dropping a half-bar at will, of holding a note for an extra two and a half or three bars, as the spirit moved them.”11 He explained that he began to try to write these features into his arrangements with disastrous results as he could not predict when Hawaiian musicians would improvise these musical elaborations.12 It seems likely Owens was describing a characteristic that originated before haole contact. When the oldest Hawaiian chants were notated, scholars discovered that time signatures often changed from bar to bar meaning that to the Western ear, it would sound as if parts of bars were randomly dropped and other bars randomly extended.13 Through the incorporation of these musical characteristics in their performances for tourists, Native Hawaiian performers functioned in a counter-colonial capacity by preserving cultural heritage while disrupting the ability of the tourism and music industries to project

Hawai‘i as white space.

9 Ibid., 76. 10 Ibid., 78. 11 Harry Owens, “Hawaii-My Land of Beginning,” Paradise of the Pacific, March 1959, page 58. 12 Ibid. 13 Emerson C. Smith, “The History of Musical Development in Hawaii,” The Sixty-Fourth Annual Report of the Hawaiian Historical Society for the Year 1955 (Honolulu, HI: Hawaiian Historical Society, 1956): 5. 181

Although advocates of tourism and statehood used the music industry to craft a distorted image of Hawai‘i even before Hawaii Calls, the radio show brought these efforts into the forefront of popular culture in 1935. Shortly after, “Sweet Leilani” created a global sensation. While this brought opportunities for artists to better their careers and lives while also preserving their culture and language, it also threatened and suppressed many aspects of cultural heritage. The privileging of Hawaii Calls over Hawaii Serenades signaled the fact that this colonial endeavor was to champion the newer largely continental style “music of the Harry

Owens type” over the musical styles born in the years of the Kingdom of Hawai‘i.14 This alarmed and outraged many who cherished this older style of music, which almost exclusively featured Hawaiian language lyrics as opposed to the largely English language new style.

The most prominent and vocal of the Native Hawaiian critics of “music of the Harry

Owens type” was Charles Edward King. King was born in Honolulu in 1874 and graduated from

Kamehameha Schools in 1891. He was raised among Hawaiian Royalty and Queen Lili‘uokalani was his childhood music teacher. George Kanahele writes,

If Sonny Cunha looked to Tin Pan Alley for inspiration, King looked to the Hawaiian composers of the last quarter of the 19th century, particularly the Royal Composers…By insisting on certain standards, King challenged the hapa haole music…These standards, which were more or less taken for granted and unarticulated until King came along, were: (1) lyrics of Hawaiian songs should be in the Hawaiian language, (2) the subject of a song should be about Hawai‘i, and (3) the melodic quality should be nahenahe (sweet) and the tempo not “jazzed up.”15

King stressed that he had no objection to jazz and George Kanahele notes that some of King’s music demonstrates the influence of jazz, but King’s objection was that through the

14 “Hawaii Calls, Serenades To Be Heard On the MBS,” Honolulu Star-Bulletin, January 30, 1937, page 14. 15 George S. Kanahele, ed., (revised and updated by John Berger), Hawaiian Music and Musicians: An Encyclopedic History, 474-475. 182 overwhelming influence of continental trends, Hawaiian music was losing its distinctiveness and becoming a stylistic facsimile of continental music.16 King saw the distinctiveness of Hawaiian music as important to Hawaiian identity and argued, “Let us have enough pride in our own music to keep it pure.”17

Hawaii Calls and the “Sweet Leilani” craze significantly bolstered King’s career as a composer even if he was not happy about the stylistic manner in which this was accomplished.

From the beginning of Hawaii Calls, Harry Owens’ orchestra regularly performed King’s compositions to rave reviews from listeners.18 From 1936 to 1940, King hosted his own radio show on KGU on which he featured the styles of Hawaiian music he preferred and regularly criticized Hawaii Calls and Harry Owens for the ways in which they had affected the music that he cherished.19 In 1941, 20th Century Fox hired Harry Owens to be musical director for their film Song of the Islands, in which he included Charles E. King’s composition “Na Lei O Hawaii.”

20th Century Fox released Song of the Islands in 1942. The film became a hit and greatly increased the popularity of King’s composition. That popularity has endured for decades. In

1979, Broadcast Music Incorporated, one of the two largest music licensing organizations in the world, named “Na Lei O Hawaii” their most popular Hawaiian song.20 Due to the fact that royalties and sales of his work had increased substantially, King moved to New York City in 1942

16 Ibid., 475-476. 17 Ibid., 476. 18 Ibid., 269. 19 Ibid., 269 and 669. 20 Jerry Hopkins, “BMI’s Most Popular Hawaiian Song is by Charles E. King,” Ha‘ilono Mele, Volume 5, Number 5, May 1979: 5. 183 to be close to his music distribution business.21 In 1949, Television Film Inc. hired King to produce a television series on Hawaiian music. He made forty-nine episodes before his death in

1950.22

Charles E. King’s objections to Hawaii Calls and the work of Harry Owens seem to have been rooted entirely in musical and cultural issues. King was a tourism advocate and quite proud of the role that his compositions played in luring visitors to the islands.23 In light of the ways which Kānaka Maoli found to use tourism during this period to preserve and grow their culture, King’s advocacy of tourism is understandable. King also argued that the older style music that he championed would draw more tourists than the Harry Owens style music featured on Hawaii Calls.24

In March 1939, King addressed the Hawaiian Civic Club by commending Bina Mossman and Louise Akeo for performing music in an authentic Hawaiian style while also mounting a strong critique of others. He claimed, “Hawaiian music is being murdered—and by Hawaiians.

The worst offenders are KGU, KGMB, the Hawaiian Tourist Bureau, Harry Owens, Bowman,

Holst Macfarlane & Richardson, Ltd., and Al Perry. They, mostly malihinis, have the audacity to tell us to ‘pep it up because the mainlanders like the music that way.’”25 King cited research that indicated that Hawaiian records in the style he advocated actually outsold most records

21 Don McDiarmid, “Charles E. King, dean of Hawaiian Music,” Paradise of the Pacific, May 1950: 5; George S. Kanahele, ed., (revised and updated by John Berger), Hawaiian Music and Musicians: An Encyclopedic History, 474. 22 McDiarmid, 5; Kanahele, ed., (revised and updated by John Berger), Hawaiian Music and Musicians: An Encyclopedic History, 474 and 814. 23 Charles Edward King, “Na Lei O Hawaii,” Paradise of the Pacific, October 1936: 7. 24 “King Says Hawaiians Ruining Island Music,” Honolulu Star-Bulletin, March 16, 1939, page 1. 25 Ibid. Bowman, Holst Macfarlane & Richardson, Ltd. was an advertising firm hired by the Hawaii Tourist Bureau.-“Advertising, Publicity Agencies In Combine,” The Honolulu Advertiser, December 7, 1938, page 4. 184 made in the new style on the US continent. He then explained that because tax dollars funded the tourist bureau and Hawaii Calls, that taxpayers should protest and demand an answer for why they privileged newer style English language songs over the older style Hawaiian language songs.26 King did not speculate as to the answer, but that answer is the power that comes from controlling the story about the islands that is given the widest distribution. “Music of the Harry

Owens type,” English language songs in a largely continental style with Hawaiian ornamentation, provided the story that the white elites who controlled the Hawaii Tourist

Bureau wished to disseminate to the world. King may have been correct that the intended audience preferred the older style, but that style did not create a story of Hawai‘i conducive to this vision of white American domination.27

Ironically, King’s quest to privilege the older style of Hawaiian music found allies among a portion of the haole elite most interested in securing white American domination. Most prominent haole elites endorsed the style of depicting of Hawai‘i that became associated with

Harry Owens, but a few embraced a different vision. In Adria L. Imada’s words, by the end of the 1920s, “kama‘aina haole—particularly those who had invested capital in the tourist infrastructure—anointed themselves the guardians of authentic Hawaiian practices. They

26 Ibid. 27 Frances Negrón-Muntaner addresses this same issue in the twenty-first century regarding the film industry. She argues that Hollywood is aware of the studies that conclude that making films with more people of color while including a wider array of more authentic stories about people of color would make the film industry greater profits, but the industry chooses not to do so because “the power of story is enormous. It’s the way we make sense of the world…those who are in power reproduce that power through the stories they produce, which we consume and through which, we make sense of our lives.”-“U.S.-Born Latinos Struggle to Gain Visibility in Hollywood: The Takeaway,” WNYC Studios, September 3, 2019, accessed March 27, 2020, https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/takeaway/segments/us-born-latinos-struggle-gain-visibility- hollywood 185 would protect Hawaiian culture from Hawaiians themselves.”28 Houston Wood writes of an imperialist nostalgia specific to the Hawaiian Islands that he labels as the kama‘aina anti- conquest and he explains that this became prominent during the territorial period. He defines this phenomenon as haole elites declaring themselves guardians of authentic Native Hawaiian cultural practices. These elite haoles took offense at Native Hawaiian innovations such as hapa hoale music in part because their nostalgia for older versions obscured haole culpability for change in the islands. The kama‘aina anti-conquest, as detailed by Wood, basically attempted to make Hawaiians and Hawaiian culture into museum artifacts as it relegated them to the past while hapa hoale music posed a threat to these colonialists because it established Kānaka Maoli and Hawaiian culture as very much alive.29 The kama‘aina anti-conquest and Harry Owens style depictions of Hawaiian life perform the same basic task through slightly different means in that they both misrepresent Kānaka Maoli in a way specifically designed to please white elites while at the same time obscuring the vitality of Native Hawaiian culture.

Early newspaper coverage of Hawaii Calls hints at this divide among haole elites as to how to depict Hawai‘i. The Honolulu Star-Bulletin provided tremendous coverage of the program, while the The Honolulu Advertiser avoided mentioning it for over a year. Imada argues that hula troupes further disrupt colonialism by producing “counter-memories” because

28 Imada, 158. This also has similarities to the ways in which American colonial capitalism imposed Jim Crow binaries on Hawai‘i and cast Kānaka Maoli in the place of black people. Frantz Fanon writes that as new styles of jazz came about, many white people became offended because they believed “in a frozen image of a certain type of relationship and a certain form of negritude…For them jazz could only be the broken, desperate yearning of an old ‘Negro,’ five whiskeys under his belt, bemoaning his own misfortune and the racism of whites.”-Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York, NY: Grove Press, 2004 originally published Paris, France: Présence Africaine, 1963), 176. 29 Houston Wood, Displacing Natives: The Rhetorical Production of Hawaiʻi (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1999). 186

“hula is more of a living repertoire than a repository securing official state history.”30 Hapa haole music served as a “living repertoire” that similarly disrupted colonialism as demonstrated by The Honolulu Advertiser’s initial avoidance of covering Hawaii Calls and subsequent denouncement of its musical stylings.

On Sunday, February 12, 1939, Lorrin P. Thurston, editor of The Honolulu Advertiser and son of one of the principal architects of the illegal overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom, sparked an intense, months-long discussion in the pages of his paper with his editorial, “Jazzing Up

Hawaiian Music with a HI-DI-HI and HO-DI-HO!” which is quite critical of altering the style of

Hawaiian music popular in his childhood. In this article, Thurston accuses many artists of destroying the sounds of his youth, but particularly criticizes Harry Owens.31 In the weeks that followed, The Honolulu Advertiser published many letters and articles that supported

Thurston’s position and most of these supportive authors identified themselves as haoles.32

One of the few dissenting letters was signed “Dance Lover.” This author defends the artists that she sees as under assault by Thurston and these artists are almost all Kānaka Maoli: Lani

McIntyre, Al Kealoha Perry, Sam Alama, Johnny Noble, and Lena Machado. “Dance Lover” also addresses issues of class related to this debate in arguing that Thurston’s opinions are typical of a “college man” and that “college graduates may prefer” older style music, but that the

“common mass of workers prefer jazzed music.”33 “Dance Lover” speaks to how Native

Hawaiian artists asserted Hawaiian vitality even within the colonial capitalist music industry,

30 Imada, 32. 31 Lorrin P. Thurston, "Jazzing Up Hawaiian Music with a HI-DI-HI and HO-DI-HO!" Honolulu Advertiser, February 12, 1939, page 19. 32 “Letters From the People,” The Honolulu Advertiser, February 18, 1939, page 14. 33 Dance Lover “Defends Jazz in Hawaiian Music,” Honolulu Advertiser, February 24, 1939, page 20. 187

“Lena Machado practically immortalized To You Sweetheart Aloha with the Royal Hawaiian

Band singing at Kapiolani Park.”34 This author of the letter argues that this Native Hawaiian singer backed by an orchestra created a century earlier by a Native Hawaiian sovereign while performing a Harry Owens composition created a new and significant sound that would

“endure fame for time immemorial.”35

Charles E. King and Lorrin P. Thurston were allies in this cause, but their motivations appear disparate because the substance of their critiques contain significant differences. King consistently stressed the importance of Hawaiian language within Hawaiian music whereas

Thurston did not mention language at all in his writings on the subject. King’s concerns focused largely on the future of Hawaiian language, culture, and distinctiveness. Thurston along with those other haole letter writers who supported him only focused on their personal fond memories from their youth in order to argue for the superiority of older styles of Hawaiian music. Henry Glassie argues, “If tradition is a people's creation out of their own past, its character is not stasis but continuity; its opposite is not change but oppression, the intrusion of a power that thwarts the course of development.”36 Glassie’s insight serves as a rather thorough encapsulation of the conflicts covered in this dissertation. Colonial capitalism, through both the Harry Owens style distortions and the kama‘aina anti-conquest, thwarted the course of development of the musical culture that King cherished. Thurston most definitely advocated stasis whereas King desired the continued development of a distinct Hawaiian culture.

34 Ibid. 35 Ibid. 36 Henry Glassie, "Tradition," The Journal of American Folklore 108, no. 430 (1995): 396. 188

Emerging Opportunities for Cultural Preservation and Employment for Kānaka Maoli

In a 1927 article, Lorrin A. Thurston reflected on the impact of the first Hawaiian music craze, “The name ‘Hawaii’ is the synonym of ‘music’ the world over.”37 In this article, he laments the fact that in spite of the association of Hawai‘i and music, Hawaiian musicians leave

Hawai‘i to be heard rather than having people come to Hawai‘i to hear them. Thurston expresses his desire to make the islands into a destination for music lovers,

One of the problems to be solved, if Hawaii is to become a musical center, is how to retain our best singers, instead of their being scattered all over the world. The solution to this problem is simple. A certain number will always be going—and it is well for all concerned that they should. But Hawaiian singers do not go abroad because they prefer to live there. The great majority of them, infinitely prefer to live in Hawaii. The reason why they go abroad is that they can make a good living there, by means of their music, whereas they cannot make a living at all in Hawaii by this means. The remedy is to provide ways and means by which their musical talents will afford them a livelihood at home.38

As he notes, before the 1930s, many of Hawai‘i’s most talented and ambitious artists were compelled to depart the islands to pursue dreams of make a living through their art. Those artists who wished to remain in the islands could not earn a living through music alone and had to subsidize their living through other jobs, often full time work unrelated to the arts. As the opening epigraph indicates, even a star bandleader like Johnny Noble needed a day job to supplement his income. Each of the musicians employed in Noble’s orchestra also had to work full time jobs outside of the band to support themselves.39 The tourism industry generated

37 Lorrin A. Thurston, “Hawaii as a Center of Music—A Vision,” Mid-Pacific Magazine, Volume 33, Issue 4, April 1927: 311. 38 Ibid., 314. 39 Gurre Ploner Noble, Hula Blues: The Story of Johnny Noble, Hawaii, Its Music and Musicians (Honolulu, HI: E. D. Noble, 1948), 66. 189 many employment opportunities allowing some of these gifted artists to use their talents to provide for their families without having to journey thousands of miles from home.40

By the late 1920s, Kānaka Maoli had built a powerful movement to preserve and perpetuate their culture. Some found ways to utilize various colonial institutions to aid these efforts. In tourism, many Hawaiians identified great potential for advancing their endeavor.

The signage of a Bishop Museum exhibit on the 1930s in Hawai‘i begins, “Even while

Americanism was replacing Native ways, tourism was providing unanticipated support for the continuation of Hawaiian culture. Working within the western style economy, Hawaiians themselves entertained and enlightened visitors.”41 George S. Kanahele argued that while tourism both invents false Hawaiian culture and distorts real Hawaiian culture, the industry depends on Hawaiian culture as an integral component of its sales pitch. Kanahele contended that while the processes of globalism homogenize the planet and eradicate cultural heritage throughout the planet, the tourism industry in Hawai‘i has a financial incentive to provide

Kānaka Maoli with opportunities to protect and perpetuate their culture.42

During the same period, late-1920s and early 1930s, as the tourism industry blossomed,

Samuel Wilder King notes the blossoming of another movement in a 1935 letter to Charles W.

Kenn,

The revival of ancient Hawaiian sports is a splendid idea. It is part of the general revival of interest in our ancient culture that has taken place the past ten years and to which I have tried to contribute my part. So much that was fine was lost during the period of

40 “Ray Kinney” in Pau Hana Years. Honolulu, HI: KHET, 1971. UH Mānoa Streaming Video; Gurre Ploner Noble, Hula Blues: The Story of Johnny Noble, Hawaii, Its Music and Musicians (Honolulu, HI: E. D. Noble, 1948), 66 and 97. 41 Tourism and Entertainment: 1930s, Hawaiian Hall, Bishop Museum, Honolulu, Hawai‘i. 42 George S. Kanahele, “Tourism as a Positive Force in Strengthening Hawaiian Culture,” Ha‘ilono Mele, Volume 1, Number 8, August 1975: 3-4. 190

rapid industrial development. Now we should delve back into the past to rescue such part of our Hawaiian heritage as can be adapted to modern conditions. The result will be a richer life for our people, and the creation of a distinctive community drawing both from old Hawaii and modern America.43

This letter is quoted in an article that Charles W. Kenn authored on ancient Hawaiian sports in the October-December issue of Mid-Pacific Magazine, meaning it was published precisely when

Hawaii Calls began airing. This issue of Mid-Pacific Magazine also provides other articles documenting significant examples of the cultural revival referenced by King. An article detailing the development of the University of Hawai‘i notes that the school’s Theatre Guild recently performed “Ke Kuapuu Alii (The Royal Hunchback), the first full-length Hawaiian play ever presented.”44 Another article on the University of Hawai‘i, written by UH student Margaret

Bairos, celebrates the fact that, “We have a full-blooded Hawaiian, John H. Wise, to instruct in the native language and Mrs. Dorothy Kahananui to preserve the old traditional songs used in

Glee Club work on the campus.”45

The history of Lalani Hawaiian Village, which was opened in Waikīkī on May 19, 1932 by

Keoki P. Mossman, illuminates into the relationship between tourism and Native Hawaiian efforts at preservation of their intangible cultural heritage.46 In 1934, Mossman explained that his motivations for creating Lalani Village were rooted in a belief that traditional Hawaiian knowledge could benefit modern life. He cited the esteem of twentieth-century Western

43 As quoted in Charles W. Kenn, “Ancient Hawaiian Sports and Pastimes,” Mid-Pacific Magazine, October- December 1935: 316. 44 Albert Horlings, “Educating for World Citizenship: The University of Hawaii,” Mid-Pacific Magazine, October-December 1935: 327. 45 Margaret Bairos, “If We Could All Be Schooled in Hawaii,” Mid-Pacific Magazine, October-December 1935: 350. 46 Harold Coffin, “Hawaiian Village, 1936,” Paradise of the Pacific, September 1936: 15 and 32. 191 dieticians for traditional Native Hawaiian diet as one example. His mission, he argued, was urgent:

The old people with knowledge of the old Hawaiian customs are dying rapidly, and their knowledge is dying with them. Our task now is to preserve everything we can. There is no time now to say what is good and what is bad, what can be adapted to our use and what is not of value to us. We must devote our time to learning from the older Hawaiians while they are still living. Later we can stop and study the value of what we have learned.47

Before opening Lalani Village, Mossman owned an ‘ukulele factory out of which in 1928 he began to run a school to teach Hawaiian culture called Hale Hoonaauao Hawaii. He hoped to expand the school to accommodate the growing number of students, most of whom were

Kānaka Maoli, but could find no way to fund the operation until he decided to build his school

“in the heart of Honolulu’s tourist colony” and charge tourists admission.48 Mossman hired ninety-five year old chanter James Kapihenui Pālea Kuluwaimaka, who had been a renowned chanter during the reign of Kind David Kalākaua, to work as a teacher in his school. Recordings of Kuluwaimaka’s work at Lalani Village survive in the Bishop Museum as rare evidence of an earlier period of Hawaiian music.49 Mossman was one of many Kānaka Maoli dedicated to preserving cultural traditions who found viable pathways in tourism at a time when a place like

Kamehameha Schools, that would later embrace cultural preservation, was still “actively hostile to the indigenous culture.”50

47 Gwenfread Allen, “Hulas of Old Hawaii Being Revived Here,” Honolulu Star-Bulletin, February 23, 1934, page 12. 48 Coffin, 32. 49 Jerry Hopkins, Rebecca Kamili‘ia Erickson, and Amy Ku‘uleialoha Stillman, The Hula, (Honolulu, HI: Bess Press Inc., 2011) 97. 50 Ibid., 94. 192

“The tourist industry,” wrote George S. Kanahele, “is the grand patron, albeit a very impersonal one, of Hawaiian music. As such, by providing a livelihood to musicians, it also enables them to become better artists, to develop new techniques, to research the past and revive old or lost songs and styles, and so on. Thus, Hawaiian music is enriched, reinvigorated, strengthened and perpetuated.”51 Hawaii Calls serves as an excellent example to illustrate

Kanahele’s point. The territorial government funded Hawaii Calls specifically to grow the tourism industry and to gain statehood. The show initially played continental style dance songs, but increasingly worked in Hawaiian songs. In assembling the initial song catalog,

Webley Edwards received assistance and compositions, including old family songs, from Native

Hawaiian artists such as Johnny Noble, Charles E. King, and Simeon and Andrew Bright.52 By the time that Harry Owens gave up the musical director position in 1937, this catalog had grown to about one hundred songs. Al Kealoha Perry succeeded Owens, and by 1965, had built the catalog up to over 3000 songs.53 Aaron Sala notes that even though Hawaii Calls was created by a continental haole to promote tourism, the show eventually became “a Hawaiian show for

Hawaiians, shared with the world.”54

Although tourism certainly exploited Hawaiian music, it provided opportunities for artists to preserve, perpetuate, and innovate Hawaiian music specifically, and through this

51 George S. Kanahele, “Tourism as a Positive Force in Strengthening Hawaiian Culture,” Ha‘ilono Mele, Volume 1, Number 8, August 1975: 4. 52 “KGMB to Broadcast Island Programs Over CBS Hookup,” Honolulu Star-Bulletin, October 4, 1935, page 12; Kanahele, (revised and updated by John Berger), Hawaiian Music and Musicians: An Encyclopedic History, 267. 53 George S. Kanahele, “‘Hawaii Calls’ Becomes Shrine for Webley Edwards,” Ha‘ilono Mele, Volume , Number 11, November 1977: 2. Kanahele writes that by 1948, the Hawaii Calls band had committed 1500 songs to memory. 54 John Berger, “Radio Days,” Honolulu Star-Bulletin, November 13, 2008, page 47. 193 process, to strengthen other aspects of cultural preservation. The processes of colonialism suppressed the Hawaiian language for generations, but Native Hawaiian songwriters and performers found enduring methods of perpetuating the language through the tourist economy. There are abundant examples of this, but a few that relate to Harry Owens follow.

Hilo Hattie regularly sang songs in Hawaiian along with addressing the audience in the language at live performances with the Royal Hawaiians, including on Owens’ very popular and long- running television series.55 Songwriter Sol K. Bright composed many songs entirely or almost entirely in Hawaiian that became quite popular with tourists visiting Hawai‘i along with gaining a following throughout the world and many of his songs have endured in some measure of popularity to the present day.56 Randy Oness experienced success as both a bandleader and a composer after his six years of working for Harry Owens along the way penning many popular

Hawaiian language songs.57 Oness learned Hawaiian from his grandfather and worked with

Mary Kawena Puku‘i to make certain his songs used the language correctly.58 Many of these songs were recorded and disseminated as cultural commodities surviving to the present, thus preserving language and culture. DeSoto Brown notes that these commodities achieved such success in the American marketplace that “If the average American can be said to have any

55 Milly Singletary, Hilo Hattie, a Legend in Our Time: A Biography (Honolulu, HI: Mutual Publishing, 2006); Harry B. Soria, Jr., dj, “Hilo Hattie,” Territorial Airwaves, episode aired September 20, 2013, accessed March 15, 2020, https://www.territorialairwaves.com/index.php?page=30&id=185; “Harry Owens Show-1958- Hawaiian Music-1 Hour Long,” YouTube (YouTube, February 19, 2016), accessed February 6, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XjyP72x1Nsw 56 Harry B. Soria, Jr., dj, “Sol K. Bright,” Territorial Airwaves, episode aired February 28, 2014, accessed March 15, 2020, https://www.territorialairwaves.com/index.php?page=30&id=208 57 Harry B. Soria, Jr., dj, “Randy Oness,” Territorial Airwaves, episode aired July 12, 2013, accessed March 15, 2020, https://www.territorialairwaves.com/index.php?page=30&id=175 58 George S. Kanahele, “Ahiahi,” Ha‘ilono Mele, Volume 3, Number 4, April 1977: 7. 194 knowledge of what the Hawaiian language sounds like, it would mostly be due to popular music.”59

The new opportunities that arose for Hawaiian artists in the late 1930s were quite diverse. In a 1971 interview, Bob Barker asked Ray Kinney about being part of the first broadcast of Hawaii Calls. Kinney responds that the launch of this radio program was important because Webley Edwards obtained funding that allowed “Hawaiian boys working for the city and county, and bus drivers” to earn a living as musicians.60 John Troutman writes, “It seems clear that, with few exceptions, musicians were honored to perform on the show.

Hawaii Calls provided them with regular work and an unprecedented platform.”61 That platform provided pathways to larger success as evidenced by Kinney himself. His performances with Owens’ orchestra during the first year of Hawaii Calls were so popular that

CBS signed him to a lucrative deal to perform on the continent.62 In addition to paying jobs performing on Hawaii Calls, the show helped increase tourism and the popularity of Hawaiian music, creating jobs for performers throughout the islands and throughout the world.63 Decca

Records formed in 1936 and immediately created a catalog of Hawaiian records with Ray

Kinney signing as one of their first artists.64 When Decca decided to record Louis Armstrong singing four Hawaiian songs in 1936 and 1937, they hired Native Hawaiian bandleader Andy

Iona, who had already been living on the US continent for many years, to provide the

59 DeSoto Brown, Hawaii Recalls (Honolulu, HI: Editions Limited, 1982), 49. 60 “Ray Kinney” in Pau Hana Years. Honolulu, HI: KHET, 1971. UH Mānoa Streaming Video. 61 John William Troutman, KīKā Kila: How the Hawaiian Steel Guitar Changed the Sound of Modern Music (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2016), 208. 62 “Hawaii Calls to Celebrate Anniversary,” Honolulu Star-Bulletin, October 10, 1936, page 39. 63 Paul Findeisen, “Roamin’ Over The Kilocycle Waves,” Honolulu Star-Bulletin, July 18, 1936, page 42. 64 Gurre Ploner Noble, Hula Blues: The Story of Johnny Noble, Hawaii, Its Music and Musicians (Honolulu, HI: E. D. Noble, 1948), 101. 195 accompaniment with his orchestra the Islanders, staffed mostly with Native Hawaiian musicians.65

The sensation created by “Sweet Leilani” and Waikiki Wedding significantly amplified these effects. Even before the song became a hit, its inclusion in the film generated opportunities for Native Hawaiian artists already working in Los Angeles’ entertainment industry. Paramount Pictures hired Sam Koki to arrange “Sweet Leilani” for Bing Crosby, and

Lani McIntire and His Hawaiians to perform the accompaniment.66 Waikiki Wedding featured

Sol Hoopii’s steel guitar playing throughout the movie launching both Hoopii and the Hawaiian steel guitar to new levels of international acclaim.67 The success of Waikiki Wedding prompted the film industry to produce a plethora of musical movies set in Hawai‘i and the majority of these films hired Native Hawaiian actors, musicians, and dancers.68 Sol Hoopii capitalized on this trend along with his new found fame and started a Hollywood talent agency built around finding film work for Native Hawaiian actors and performers. Apparently, Hoopii even found ways of expanding opportunities for Native Hawaiian actors that extended beyond island themed movies as he often found work for these actors as American Indians in Hollywood

Westerns.69

65 Hugues Panassié, Louis Armstrong (New York, NY: DaCapo Press, 1979), 110-111; T. Malcolm Rockwell, Hawaiian Guitar Records: 1891-1960, (Kula, Hawai‘i: Mahina Piha Press, 2007), 51-52; Harry B. Soria, Jr., dj, “Andy Iona & His Islanders,” Territorial Airwaves, episode aired February 13, 2015, accessed March 15, 2020, https://www.territorialairwaves.com/index.php?page=30&id=266 66 , “Aloha, Sam Koki: A Special Tribute from Cincinnati,” Ha‘ilono Mele, Volume 4, Number 6, June 1978: 7. 67 George S. Kanahele, ed., (revised and updated by John Berger), Hawaiian Music and Musicians: An Encyclopedic History, 554. 68 George S. Kanahele, “Mele and the Movies,” Ha‘ilono Mele, Volume 4, Number 6, June 1978: 5. 69 Harry B. Soria, Jr., dj, “Sol Hoopii,” Territorial Airwaves, episode aired April 11, 2014, accessed March 15, 2020, https://www.territorialairwaves.com/index.php?page=30&id=214; Apparently, Hoopii often found work for Native Hawaiian actors as American Indians in Hollywood Westerns. 196

This “Sweet Leilani” inspired Hawaiian craze of the late 1930s also created many employment opportunities outside of the film industry for Hawaiian performers. On June 23,

1937, the prestigious Lexington Hotel in New York City opened the Hawaiian Room in the building’s spacious basement. Club patrons dined and drank while musicians and dancers conducted Hawaiian themed floor shows with paintings of Diamond Head and Waikīkī Beach in the background and artificial flowers and palm trees arranged throughout the space. The Harry

Owens orchestra’s former singer, Ray Kinney, led the first house band at the club and became the club’s most famous attraction, but many legendary Native Hawaiian artists found employment at the venue including Pualani and Piilani Mossman, Andy Iona, Lani McIntire, Sam

Koki, and Meymo Holt.70 Almost instantly after opening, the Lexington Hotel’s Hawaiian Room became an enormously popular club. Adria L. Imada writes, “The clever marketing of a feminine, sensual, and uncomplicated Hawai‘i put the Hawaiian Room on the map in

Manhattan.”71 The club’s success prompted the openings of quite similar establishments in Los

Angeles, Chicago, Cleveland, Denver, San Francisco, Buffalo, New Orleans, Minneapolis, Detroit, and Ft. Lauderdale along with various international locations creating many employment opportunities for Hawaiian artists.72

Two Native Hawaiian brothers, Ernest and Freddie Tavares, built particularly remarkable careers after initially gaining notoriety through their work with Harry Owens. The brothers

70 George S. Kanahele, ed., (revised and updated by John Berger), Hawaiian Music and Musicians: An Encyclopedic History, 282. Pualani and Piilani Mossman were both daughters of Keoki P. Mossman, founder of Lalani Village. Both daughters performed at Lalani Village before moving to New York City to work at the Lexington Hotel. 71 Adria L. Imada, Aloha America: Hula Circuits through the U.S. Empire (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), 176. 72 Ibid.; George S. Kanahele, ed., (revised and updated by John Berger), Hawaiian Music and Musicians: An Encyclopedic History, 281. 197 were born in Paia, Maui: Ernest first in 1911 and then Freddie in 1913.73 Both of them developed an interest in electronics at early ages and became quite proficient at building their own radios when they were both still quite young, which was a skill that would serve them well later in their careers as they created innovations that profoundly altered the course of popular music throughout the world. Both brothers were part of Harry Owens’ original 1934 line-up.

Ernest was a gifted multi-instrumentalist in the Royal Hawaiians and Freddie served as the orchestra’s steel guitarist. Steel guitar came to define the sound of Hawaii Calls and Freddie was the first musician to play that instrument on the radio program.74 The brothers remained with Owens until he left for California in 1941. They both relocated to California in 1942 so that they could rejoin Owens’ orchestra. The brothers both settled in California permanently thereafter.75

Freddie’s career establishes him as an important in figure in a great many genres beyond Hawaiian music. In 1949, he joined a country and western band called the Ozark

Mountain Boys that worked as the house band at a Los Angeles western club called Cowtown.

Freddie not only wrote all of the band’s musical arrangements, but he designed and built their amplifiers. The band’s fiddle player, Wade Ray, remembers, “Fiddle is the awfulest darned instrument to amplify, but Freddie figured out a way to do it…We were only a four-piece band, but with Freddie’s harmonies on steel guitar, we sounded like a nine-piece orchestra. He played

73 Shannon Wianecki, “The Astounding, Astonishing Tavares Brothers,” Hana Hou!, Issue 15.4, August/September 2012, accessed January 18, 2020, https://hanahou.com/15.4/the-astounding-astonishing- tavares-brothers 74 Ibid.; John William Troutman, KīKā Kila: How the Hawaiian Steel Guitar Changed the Sound of Modern Music (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2016), 206. 75 Wianecki. 198 so pretty, so smooth and sweet.”76 In 1953, a mutual friend brought Leo Fender, owner of the legendary Fender Musical Company, which was the most famous amplifier producing company in the world at that time, to Cowtown to hear Freddie’s amplifiers. When introduced, Freddie candidly told Fender that his company’s amplifiers were terrible. After examining Freddie’s work, Fender realized it was much superior to his own and wisely hired Freddie to be an engineer at his company.77

Freddie’s first job at Fender was co-designing the now legendary Stratocaster guitar.

This innovative instrument redefined how the guitar could be used, making it far more commonly a lead instrument than simply part of the rhythm section. This is largely due to

Freddie’s efforts to make the instrument sound more like a saxophone, which he achieved through the electronic design of the instrument. The Stratocaster’s iconic sound and look propelled it to being the guitar most associated with Rock ‘n’ Roll. For example, it was the instrument of choice for both Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton.78

Codesigning one of the most prominent instruments of the past hundred years was not even Freddie’s most famous accomplishment. In 1942, he created arguably the most well- known musical performance of all time: the opening steel guitar glissando on the Looney Tunes theme song.79 Achieving the distinctive sound of that piece required Freddie’s advanced technical skills and knowledge. He performed the glissando, but it could not achieve the sound

76 Ibid. 77 Ibid. 78 Nathan Cobb, “Classical Strat struts its stuff,” The Monitor (McAllen, Texas), April 7, 1985, page 55. 79 Richard R. Smith, William Koon, and Tom Wheeler, Fender: The Sound Heard 'round the World (Milwaukee, WI: Hal Leonard, 2009), 117; Huw Price, “All About... Freddie Tavares: Musician, Inventor and a Huge Figure in Fender’s History. We Celebrate the Life and Times of Leo’s Greatest Sideman,” Guitar.com, May 16, 2018, accessed August 16, 2020, https://guitar.com/guides/essential-guide/all-about-freddie-tavares/ 199 he wanted. To do so, he reversed the tape recording of his performance to create a distinctive sound that would not be possible without the technology of a recording studio and the knowledge to utilize it to its full advantage.80

Ernest crafted a successful career of his own as both a musician and inventor. He received much acclaim both playing in various jazz ensembles and performing on Hollywood movie scores. Ernest was an excellent steel guitarist and often in demand, but he did not like the instrument, so he set out to improve it. In 1946, he built an elaborate new steel guitar mounted in a frame with pedals that allowed him to move between a broader range of chords more precisely. Ernest built an even more elaborate version of this steel guitar in 1952, but he became frustrated with some of its limitations. After Freddie got hired at Fender, Ernest turned the plans for his new steel guitar over to his brother who developed the plans into the Fender

1000 Pedal Guitar. This remains the standard design of the pedal steel guitar, which revolutionized American country and western music along with becoming the quite distinctive instrumental sound most associated with that genre.81 This innovative instrument has found its way into many diverse genres of popular music. For example, iconic British rock band Pink

Floyd featured the instrument in the opening riffs of their legendary 1973 album Dark Side of the Moon, and nearly three decades later, American R&B singer/songwriter Maxwell used the instrument with beautiful effect on his 2001 album Now.82 It seems quite likely that if these

80 Wianecki; Smith, Koon, and Wheeler, 117; Price. 81 Ibid.; Troutman, 311. 82 Casey James Saulpaugh, “A Hidden Gem: Pedal Steel on Today's Music Scene,” Independent Music Group, April 5, 2019, accessed April 4, 2020, https://www.independentmusicguide.com/Blog/279922/A-Hidden- Gem-Pedal-Steel-On-Today-s-Music-Scene; Dan Ouellette, “Maxwell's Career Booms as Young Soul Singer Releases Third Album,” SFGate (San Francisco Chronicle, February 1, 2012), https://www.sfgate.com/entertainment/article/Maxwell-s-career-booms-as-young-soul-singer-2886231.php 200 two Native Hawaiian brothers fit more neatly into the American Jim Crow binary vision of race, they would both be revered legends with the status of and the subject of many books, documentaries, and perhaps even feature films. As it stands, little is written about them anywhere and they did not even receive a mention in Ken Burns’ sixteen-hour documentary on the history of American country music.83

Kānaka Maoli who found professional success within tourism and the American entertainment industry navigated a complicated situation. As Kanahele notes, although tourism became the patron of Hawaiian music, it became a cold, profit-hungry patron that faked, suppressed, and distorted Hawaiian culture to conform to colonial narratives. Musicians who participated in this industry helped empower it, but as Haunani Kay-Trask notes, this participation should be seen within context,

Despite their exploitation, Hawaiians' participation in tourism raises the problem of complicity. Because wages are so low and advancement so rare, whatever complicity exists is secondary to the economic hopelessness that drives Hawaiians into the industry. Refusing to contribute to the commercialization of one's culture becomes a peripheral concern when unemployment looms.84

Native Hawaiian artists who participated in this colonial project not only avoided the dire situation of unemployment, but did so in a way that allowed them to pursue their passions professionally. In doing so, these artists preserved old culture and new culture. Trask described the bleak reality of the effects of tourism on Hawaiian people. Preservationists like

83 Stephen Deusner, “At 16 Hours, Ken Burns' 'Country Music' Ain't Nearly Long Enough,” Stereogum, September 13, 2019, accessed April 4, 2020, https://www.stereogum.com/2058155/ken-burns-country- music-review/franchises/sounding-board/ 84 Haunani-Kay Trask, From a Native Daughter: Colonialism and Sovereignty in Hawai'i (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press, 2005), 145 201

King and Kanahele argued that through preserving and creating tools for future generations to build something better, there are ways for artists to mitigate the damage of colonialism.

Asians and Asian Americans Navigate Racism

Racism excluded Asian and Asian American musicians from nearly all of the opportunities that the success of Waikiki Wedding and “Sweet Leilani” had opened in both the islands and on the US continent. Contrary to widely accepted notions of the time that people of Asian ancestry had neither musical talent nor interest, Hawai‘i was home to many dedicated and talented musicians of Asian ancestry. Gabe Baltazar Jr. became a famous saxophonist in the 1960s through his work with the Orchestra. Baltazar was born in Hilo in 1929 to a Japanese mother and a Filipino father and moved to Honolulu, where he was raised, in

1930.85 He grew up in a community in which most people were Filipino and Japanese and writes of this community, “those days there was always music. Even my mother wanted to play the saxophone because she loved music. So in ’37 or ’38, she decided she wanted to learn to play.” He explains that she became quite good and took third place in a prestigious local amateur talent contest.86 In his early childhood, his father supported the family playing as a musician by playing saxophone in plantation orchestras and teaching saxophone and clarinet lessons.87 His father, who Baltazar praises as an exceptional musical talent, never found work in the high-end downtown Honolulu and Waikīkī music scenes, which left him always on the lookout for a wide variety of employment opportunities until World War II created openings in

85 Gabe Baltazar Jr. and Theo Garneau. If It Swings, It’s Music: The Autobiography of Hawaiʻi’s Gabe Baltazar Jr. (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2012), 1. 86 Ibid., 18-19. 87 Ibid., 3. 202 the Royal Hawaiian Band. The band was government funded and positions in the band were equivalent to civil service jobs. Baltazar writes, “it was early 1942, he finally got himself a steady gig and stayed till he retired.”88 But five years before finding secure employment with the Royal Hawaiian Band, Baltazar’s father found work through one of the options that was available to musicians of Asian ancestry in Hawai‘i: he moved his family to Japan where there was a growing demand for musicians who could play American style music, particularly the improvisational jazz that Baltazar Sr. specialized in.89

Shirakata Tsutomu, known professionally as “Buckie” Shirakata, became a famous entertainer in Japan through taking advantage of the professional opportunities that country offered Asian American musicians. Shirakata was born in Honolulu in 1912, graduated from that city’s McKinley High School in 1931, and the University of Hawai‘i in 1935.90 In 1933, he formed the Aloha Hawaiian Trio along with two other nisei, Satoru Moriwaki and Charles

Nosaka. The group traveled to Japan in November of that year and performed at hotels while also making several records for ’ Japan division. Shirakata came back to the islands in September 1934 to earn his degree from the University of Hawai‘i, but decided to return to Japan in November 1935 because he wanted “to make a living as a Hawaiian musician.”91 The Japanese government banned Hawaiian music after the United States entered

World War II. The American occupation lifted the ban at the war’s conclusion in 1945 and

88 Ibid., 23. 89 Ibid., 14-15. 90 George S. Kanahele, ed., (revised and updated by John Berger), Hawaiian Music and Musicians: An Encyclopedic History, 746; Tony Todaro, Tony Todaro Presents: The Golden Years of Hawaiian Entertainment, 1874-1974 (Honolulu, HI: Tony Todaro Publishing Company, 1974), 318. 91 George S. Kanahele, ed., (revised and updated by John Berger), Hawaiian Music and Musicians: An Encyclopedic History, 747. 203

Shirakata’s band quickly returned to prominence.92 Shirakata had a long and successful career in Japan, remaining a popular performer into the 1970s, long after Hawaiian music’s popularity had waned in most places outside of Japan.93

Much as a World War II caused musician shortage opened a job in the Royal Hawaiian

Band for Gabe Baltazar Sr., a lack of musicians began again in the 1960s and this opened opportunities for Masao “Mel” Abe. Abe, described by Tony Todaro as a “steel guitar virtuoso,” was born on Kaua‘i in 1912.94 Like Shirakata, he graduated from McKinley High School in 1931, during a time when the school was commonly referred to as “Tokyo High.”95 In spite of being a virtuoso, Abe had to wait until 1950, when he was at the age of thirty-eight, to get his first professional job as a musician.96 This was not a high-profile gig as Abe’s name does not appear in a Honolulu newspaper until a brief mention in an article on a USO tour in which he participated in 1955.97 Abe’s first high-profile gig came in 1960, when ’s steel guitarist died suddenly at the age of thirty-six.98 Hawaiian music’s decline in popularity had already begun by this point and with it, fewer people in the islands played the style and the instruments it required.99 George Kanahele writes that by 1971, only six or seven steel guitarists remained in the islands.100

92 Ibid. 93 George S. Kanahele, “must we bid sad aloha to Hawaiian music?,” The Honolulu Advertiser, January 15, 1971, page 19. 94 Tony Todaro, Tony Todaro Presents: The Golden Years of Hawaiian Entertainment, 1874-1974, 18. 95 Ibid.; Kelli Y. Nakamura, “McKinley High School,” Densho Encyclopedia, accessed March 22, 2020, http://encyclopedia.densho.org/McKinley_High_School/ 96 Tony Todaro, Tony Todaro Presents: The Golden Years of Hawaiian Entertainment, 1874-1974, 18. 97 “Hawaiian Troupe Leaves Saturday on Europe Tour,” Honolulu Star-Bulletin, April 12, 1955, page 17. 98 Tony Todaro, Tony Todaro Presents: The Golden Years of Hawaiian Entertainment, 1874-1974, 18-19. 99 Paul W. Lovinger, “Is Hawaiian Music Pau?,” Honolulu Star-Bulletin, October 19, 1967, page 24; George S. Kanahele, “must we bid sad aloha to Hawaiian music?.” 100 George S. Kanahele, “must we bid sad aloha to Hawaiian music?.” 204

Taxi dance halls in Chinatown provided employment opportunities for many Asian and

Asian American musicians excluded from the prestigious continental and Waikīkī orchestra jobs.

Many of these taxi dance hall orchestras featured multi-ethnic lineups that reflected Hawai‘i’s diversity far more accurately than the orchestras like Harry Owens’ that performed for white elites. Nisei musician Shigeo Yasui played clarinet and sax in many of these groups from the late 1920s to the early 1940s, including a stint in the Swing Dragons alongside Gabe Baltazar

Sr.101

Like the government-funded Royal Hawaiian Band, the non-profit organization the

Honolulu Symphony Orchestra included Asian musicians as well. Though this was occasionally a paying gig, the symphony primarily consisted of volunteer musicians during the first half of the twentieth century, some of whom played professionally in various dance orchestras.102 The ensemble was remarkable for the era. Dale E. Hall writes that the Honolulu Symphony “was one of the few organizations in the Territory in which people of different ethnic and racial backgrounds mixed and cooperated on an equal basis in creating a product.”103 Though not a means to earn a living, the orchestra provided both Asian and female musicians excluded from the elite dance orchestras an opportunity to express themselves musically and showcase their talents.104 In 1948, Gurre Ploner Noble argued of Hawai‘i’s Asian population that “musically

101 Gae Rusk, Phillip A. Wilson, and Ed Kenney, eds. Swingtime in Honolulu. (Honolulu, HI: KHET-TV, 1991), 5. This publication along with its companion documentary (also titled Swingtime in Honolulu) provides information on many musicians of Chinese, Japanese, and Filipino ancestry who found work in these orchestras. These works also contain information on musicians of various ancestries who worked in these ensembles, including Kānaka Maoli, African Americans, and Portuguese. 102 Dale E. Hall, The Honolulu Symphony: A Century of Music (Honolulu, HI: Goodale Publishing, 2002), 26 and 45. 103 Ibid., 30. 104 Ibid., 31 and 45. 205 they have been almost completely unproductive.”105 The Symphony’s Chinese, Japanese, and

Filipino members, along with the other artists noted in this chapter, emphatically disprove her contention.

Conclusion

The tourism industry along with allies in the statehood movement sparked the second

Hawaiian music craze, which exploded in the late 1930s. While the tourism industry was largely built by and served the interests of white elites, Kānaka Maoli found ways to utilize the music industry to leverage employment opportunities in Hawai‘i as well as far beyond its shores. Kānaka Maoli took advantage of these opportunities to support their families and to preserve, innovate, and grow their culture. Ironically, some haole elites anointed themselves the guardians of authentic Hawaiian practices, including Hawaiian music—a position that reveals how the struggle over colonialism played out on musical terrain. By contrast, Native

Hawaiian artists and performers often functioned in a counter-colonial capacity, even within performances that bolstered colonial efforts. Even as many Kānaka Maoli found ways to use the tourism industry to their advantage, others protested aspects of the industry that they found harmful and continued to oppose colonial influence. Meanwhile, increasing anti-Asian racism in the USA meant that Asian American artists in Hawai‘i during this period were often forced into lower paying or less glamorous jobs, or both, but found other opportunities through various avenues including relocating to Asia.

105 Gurre Ploner Noble, Hula Blues: The Story of Johnny Noble, Hawaii, Its Music and Musicians (Honolulu, HI: E. D. Noble, 1948), 108. 206

Conclusion

“As history shows time and again, invented racial realities that reinforce white supremacy have enormous cultural capital and routinely ‘trump’ the historical record.” —David Ikard1

“I learned early on that in fighting against systematic oppression, dehumanization and colonization, who controls the narrative shapes the reality of how the world views society. It controls who’s loved, who’s hated, who’s degraded and who’s celebrated.” —Colin Kaepernick2

“For the ceremony of the bowl, I choose my friend, the friend of all my friends, I choose the haole.” —Unnamed Native Hawaiian character in the opening scene of Waikiki Wedding.3

As the epigraphs that open this conclusion indicate, there is great power in controlling narratives. The first two quotes attest to that reality while the third provides an example of messaging used to reinforce an imperial narrative. This fantasy about Kānaka Maoli has informed how many throughout the globe view this people and their land. This narrative controlling messaging owes much of its success to the 1930s music industry.

As this dissertation has argued, in 1930s Hawai‘i, the statehood movement allied with the tourism industry to use the music industry to market their causes on a global scale that presented the islands as a feminized and exoticized, yet white-dominated space. Chapter one demonstrated that white elites had used this fantasy, built on old racist ideas from the US continent, for decades before the 1930s while actively working in many ways to make Hawai‘i into a white space in both reality and the colonial imaginary. Chapter two argues that a key

1 David Ikard, Lovable Racists, Magical Negroes, and White Messiahs, (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 12. 2 Darin Gantt, “Colin Kaepernick Breaks Silence, Writes Book, Wants to Play in NFL,” ProFootballTalk, February 13, 2020, accessed May 7, 2020, https://profootballtalk.nbcsports.com/2020/02/13/colin- kaepernick-breaks-silence-writes-book-wants-to-play-in-nfl/ 3 Waikiki Wedding. Directed by Frank Tuttle. USA: Paramount Pictures, Inc., 1937. DVD. 207 component of this process was the work of tourism industry in collaboration with the US continental music industry to replace an island industry and culture innovated largely by Kānaka

Maoli with haole musicians and popular styles of music from the US continent. Chapter three explores the career of Harry Owens, the most prominent musician in the process explored in the second chapter. Owens’ autobiography, music, TV show, and the movies with which he was associated were built on tourism’s distortion of the islands. This chapter argues that the formulaic nature of these commodities fueled the spread of tourism and pro-statehood marketing as it granted spokespeople like Harry Owens a sense of authenticity and authority that Americans find credible because it conforms to and confirms their false notions of what

Hawai‘i and Hawaiian culture and music are. Chapter four analyzes Harry Owens’ public persona to argue that the ability to manufacture spokespeople that consumers view as credible is central to the success of the music industry’s ability to function as a marketing machine and that the music industry offers compelling inducements for complicity in white supremacist projects. The final chapter details the profound changes that statehood and tourism advocates’ use of the music industry brought about for individual musicians in the islands and provides an overview of the complicated nature of navigating the aftermath of Waikiki Wedding.

This dissertation focuses on the 1930s, but the American entertainment industry has continued to market globally popular commodities with great success and at the expense of local artists and local traditions throughout the planet. The processes that led to Harry Owens’ style of Hawaiian music dominating the global market for music classified as Hawaiian continued to shape the arts long after statehood for Hawai‘i came about, long after tourism became the dominant industry in Hawai‘i, and long after Harry Owens and his music lost favor 208 in the popular culture marketplace. In 1971, George S. Kanahele wrote on the effect that corporately marketed rock ‘n’ roll was having on Hawaiian music, “Ask any kid in Hawaii and he will say Hawaiian music is a drag—it’s out: it’s dead. Which means that rock ‘n’ roll has virtually captured the musical allegiance of nearly a whole generation of Hawaiians who most likely couldn’t care less about the fate of Hawaiian music.” Kanahele recognized this phenomenon as an effect of capitalism, “Economics is one of the biggest reasons why there are fewer Hawaiian musicians…there is little percentage in playing Charles E. King as opposed to

Mick Jagger.”4 Note that Kanahele uses the word “allegiance” to describe this single-minded devotion to rock ‘n’ roll. Americus Reed’s explanation of how marketing creates loyalty and world views explains how rock ‘n’ roll could capture the “allegiance of nearly a whole generation of Hawaiians” while also ensuring most of that generation “couldn’t care less about the fate of Hawaiian music.”5 This marketing-generated allegiance saw to it that, in spite of homefield advantage, Charles E. King’s distinctive style lost marketplace struggles to Harry

Owens in the 1930s and Mick Jagger in the 1970s.

Although Owens’ music lost popular favor by the 1960s, core elements of the Hawaiian craze of the late 1930s have continued to shape popular perceptions of the Hawaiian Islands.

The massive commercial success of Waikiki Wedding along with the song “Sweet Leilani,” established the tourism industry’s misrepresentations of Hawai‘i as the entertainment industry’s archetype. In fact, one of the many reasons that Owens left Hawai‘i in 1941 to live in

4 George S. Kanahele, “must we bid sad aloha to Hawaiian music?,” The Honolulu Advertiser, January 15, 1971, page 19. 5 Shankar Vedantam et al., “I Buy, Therefore I Am: How Brands Become Part Of Who We Are,” NPR.org, July 1, 2019, accessed July 19, 2020, https://www.npr.org/2019/06/28/736942500/i-buy-therefore-i-am-how- brands-become-part-of-who-we-are 209

California was that two motion picture companies hired him to advise them on producing movies featuring Hawai‘i.6

Commodities are marketed to shape perceptions of “reality.”7 The best funded and most heavily marketed commodities generally dominate the marketplace and shape the world views of those who consume them.8 This explains what happened in the struggle between the

Kingdom-era musical culture that Charles E. King championed and the colonial capitalist industry that drove Harry Owens to superstardom. In the case of entertainment industry commodities, fantasy depictions of people, places, and periods became consumers’ perceptions of reality.9 Through this process, the American colonial gaze came to dominate the international cultural memory of Hawai‘i.

Films and Television

Hollywood recognized an opportunity to capitalize on the immense popularity of Hawaii

Calls by producing a series of popular musical films set in the islands.10 Waikiki Wedding (1937) was the first and most successful of these movies. This film depicts Hawai‘i in precisely the manner that Owens’ autobiography does: Hawai‘i’s population is almost entirely white with a

6 “War Talk Here Interests Hawaii Orchestra Leader,” The Los Angeles Times, April 15, 1941, page 32. 7 Vedantam et al. 8 Viet Thanh Nguyen, Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), 13-15. 9 Many scholars have written on this issue. For examples related to Hawai‘i, see: Beth L. Bailey and David R. Farber, The First Strange Place: The Alchemy of Race and Sex in World War II Hawaii (New York: Free Press, 1992), 32-39 and 150; Isaiah Helekunihi Walker, Waves of Resistance: Surfing and History in Twentieth- century Hawaiʻi (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2011), 91-92 and 148. For examples beyond Hawai‘i, see: Viet Thanh Nguyen, Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), 13-15; David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2001), 394-395. 10 George S. Kanahele, ed., (revised and updated by John Berger), Hawaiian Music and Musicians: An Encyclopedic History, 554-555. 210 few happy, complacent Native Hawaiians who go to any length to help white people. According to Dean Saranillio, “By 1937, anti-Japanese American racism was at an all-time high,” so it should come as no surprise that the only Asian character in this influential 1937 film is a servant.11 The protagonist played by Bing Crosby is a haole from the continent who has quickly become completely fluent in the Hawaiian language and is adored by the Native Hawaiian population, exactly as Owens represents himself in his autobiography.12

Many more money-making musical movies followed Waikiki Wedding. Hawaii Calls

(1938), Honolulu (1939), It’s a Date (1940), and Song of the Islands (1942) just like Waikiki

Wedding, depict Hawai‘i as a white space with musical natives waiting in the background to assist the white heroes when needed. It’s a Date and Song of the Islands have no Asian characters, whereas the other three films all have one or two Asians who appear as servants. In the case of the film Hawaii Calls, the single Asian character in the film is a servant who is also revealed to be a villain at the film’s conclusion. The movie Hawaii Calls states in its opening credits that it was inspired by the radio show of the same name. Harry Owens appears as an actor in It’s a Date and served as musical director for Song of the Islands.13

Throughout this period, Kānaka Maoli continued to resist these depictions of the islands particularly when the Hollywood portrayals crossed certain lines. George S. Kanahele reports that when the film Honolulu debuted in Honolulu in 1939, “irate Hawaiians protested the ‘hula’

11 Dean Itsuji Saranillio, Unsustainable Empire: Alternative Histories of Hawai'i Statehood, (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), 91. 12 Waikiki Wedding. Directed by Frank Tuttle. USA: Paramount Pictures, Inc., 1937. DVD. 13 Waikiki Wedding. Directed by Frank Tuttle. USA: Paramount Pictures, Inc., 1937. DVD.; Hawaii Calls. Directed by Edward F. Cline. USA: RKO Radio Pictures, 1938. DVD.; Honolulu. Directed by Edward Buzzell. USA: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), 1939. DVD.; It's a Date. Directed by William A. Seiter. USA: Universal Pictures, 1940. DVD.; Song of the Islands. Directed by Walter Lang. USA: 20th Century Fox, 1942. DVD. There are many more films like these from this era, but these are the only five that I have been able to view. 211 performed by Eleanor Powell…and asked that the ‘jazz version’ of the dance, in which she combined tap dancing with hula-style movements, be cut from the picture.”14 He notes that these Hawaiians based their complaints both on the “sensational” nature of Powell’s costume and on the fact that the film declared the dances “Hawaiian.” Kanahele concludes his report on the reaction to the film, “Nothing was said against the music.”15

These films powerfully shaped the tourists’ expectations for what their money would buy on a Hawaiian vacation. For example, most Australians were first exposed to Hawai‘i through the radio program Hawaii Calls in the mid-1930s and the genre of Hawaiian music quickly became extremely popular throughout Australia.16 Hula followed as an Australian national fascination, but John Berger writes, “Australian expectations were primarily shaped by the hula-style dances seen in Hollywood films such as Waikiki Wedding (1937) and Hawaii Calls

(1938), that were often performed by Caucasian or hapa haole women. This was ‘hula’ detached from its cultural context, and presented as an exclusively female activity that was overtly sensual if not openly sexual.”17

The sales pitch used by annexationists and later by tourism and statehood advocates which became an international cultural memory has continued to live and profit well beyond

Owens’ heyday. For example, Blue Hawaii (1961), one of the most famous movies set in the islands, features only one Asian character who is a family servant to rich white people. The vast

14 George S. Kanahele, ed., (revised and updated by John Berger), Hawaiian Music and Musicians: An Encyclopedic History, 555. 15 Ibid. 16 John Berger, “Australia, Hawaiian Music in,” in George S. Kanahele, ed., (revised and updated by John Berger), Hawaiian Music and Musicians: An Encyclopedic History, 40 and 43. 17 Ibid., 51. 212 majority of the characters are white and even the few Native Hawaiian characters are mostly portrayed by white actors.18 In addressing a more recent prominent example, Guy Aoki, head and co-founder of The Media Action Network for Asian-Americans, said of the 2015 film Aloha,

Caucasians only make up 30 percent of the population [of Hawaii], but from watching this film, you’d think they made up 99 percent…This comes in a long line of films — The Descendants, 50 First Dates, Blue Crush, Pearl Harbor — that uses Hawaii for its exotic backdrop but goes out of its way to exclude the very people who live there.19

This is an accurate description of Aloha, but this film comes from a longer line of films than Aoki indicates. Aloha’s cinematic genealogy predates Pearl Harbor (2001) by many decades.

This same archetype has dominated television depictions of Hawai‘i as well. For example, Darrell Y. Hamamoto writes of the enduringly popular TV series Magnum, P.I. (1980 to

1988) that “for the most part Magnum, P.I. marked off this tropical paradise as the exclusive preserve of Euro-Americans.”20 This archetype sparks a controversy that continues to the present day with critics noting that the show Hawaii Five-0 (2010 to 2020) over-represents whites while under-representing Asians.21 The annexationist/statehood/tourism industry’s racist vision of Hawai‘i has exploited mass media quite effectively and in doing so, created massive profits while shaping perceptions throughout the planet. This is evidenced by and reinforced through decades of movies and television that depict Hawai‘i as a white space while erasing or distorting the islands’ non-white population.

18 Blue Hawaii. Directed by Norman Taurog. USA: Paramount Pictures, Inc., 1961. DVD. 19 As quoted in Ryan Gajewski, “Cameron Crowe's 'Aloha' Criticized for Depicting ‘Whitewashed’ Hawaii,” , May 24, 2015, accessed April 5, 2020, https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/cameron-crowes-aloha-criticized-depicting-797794 20 Darrell Y. Hamamoto, Monitored Peril: Asian Americans and the Politics of TV Representation (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1994), 19. 21 Eric Deggans, "'Hawaii Five-0' Casting Announcement Doesn't Fix CBS's Larger Diversity Problem," NPR, July 19, 2017, accessed April 5, 2020, http://www.npr.org/2017/07/19/536711220/-hawaii-five-0-casting- announcement-doesn-t-fix--larger-diversity-problem 213

This dissertation has argued that the entertainment industry archetype for depicting

Hawai‘i, born in the nineteenth century, was first popularized by white annexationists. It was later embraced by tourism and statehood advocates who used the music industry to disseminate this distortion of island life on an unprecedented scale through Hawaii Calls in the

1930s. This old misrepresentation solidified as the entertainment industry archetype through the success of Waikiki Wedding and it continues to be utilized to this day.

Projecting and Obscuring

A few prominent remnants of the earliest aspects of the built environment of modern

Waikīkī remain. Along with the Waikiki Wedding style depiction of the islands, these remnants are also legacies of the early push to grow the tourism industry. These two legacies remain intertwined to this day. From the creation of the Ala Wai Canal to displace Asian and Native

Hawaiian residents to the construction of elite resort hotels, the desire of haole elites to create a whites-only district fueled the origins of modern Waikīkī’s built environment. The entertainment industry projected a fictive whites-only Hawai‘i through mass media.

The tourism industry worked with the entertainment industry to create a white Hawai‘i serviced by Native Hawaiians in the American and global imagination in part through its production of fantasy through a transformed physical environment. That built environment, through entertainment industry commodities, continues to present Hawai‘i as a white space even to those who have never set foot in the islands. Shows ranging from Blue Hawaii to

Magnum P.I. to the 2010s reboot of Hawaii Five-0, these commodities depict the largely white residents of Hawai‘i going about their lives in Waikīkī. Anyone getting their knowledge of

Hawai‘i from this reboot of Hawaii Five-0, would believe that Ala Wai Boulevard is the route to 214 the North Shore and that every local’s favorite watering hole was the beachfront bar at the

Royal Hawaiian Hotel. This built environment continues to project the fantasy that it was originally designed to convey. This fantasy hides important histories. The beachfront bar at the

Royal Hawaiian Hotel is not a favorite watering hole of many Hawai‘i residents, but it sits on land that was formally decreed as sacred by Hawaiian Ali‘i.22 The Ala Wai Boulevard does not span to the North Shore, but it was built as part of a process that forced families off of land that had nourished them for generations and was intended to serve as a final resting place for their loved ones as well as cherished ancestors.23

The work of statehood and tourism advocates to create a white Hawai‘i obscured both the reality and history of life in the islands. Harry Owens became the most visible disposable tool of these advocates during the period in the late 1930s when their efforts achieved unprecedented success sparking international waves in popular culture. Through the disposable tool of Owens, tourism’s marketing reached ever wider audiences on these waves in popular culture. These waves are fueled by profit, thus this profitable messaging continues to spread through disposable tools that have replaced Owens within entertainment industry commodities. Though the tools have changed, the fantasies they project have not and the damage they create continues to be felt by Kānaka Maoli and other groups of people targeted by these white supremacist fantasies. In opposition to this, the ideas forwarded by people like

Charles E. King, George S. Kanahele, and Haunani Kay-Trask also continue to gain traction in the present day and work to dismantle these distortions while restoring obscured realities to light.

22 "Royal Hawaiian Hotel Is Eight Years Old On Feb. 1," Honolulu Star-Bulletin, January 25, 1935, 8. 23 “Bones of Hawaiian Chief Reverently Exhumed For Improvement in Waikiki,” The Honolulu Advertiser, April 16, 1924, page 1. 215

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Dissertations, Theses, and Other Student Works:

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Paradise Hawaiian Style. Directed by Michael D. Moore. USA: Paramount Pictures, 1966. DVD.

Picture Bride. Directed by Kayo Hatta. USA: Miramax, 1995. DVD.

Pukiki: the Portuguese-Americans of Hawai'i. Directed by Luis Proença. Hope Media Productions, 2003. DVD.

“R. Alex Anderson," in Spectrum Hawaii, Hawai‘i Public Television, 1989. UH Mānoa Streaming Video.

“Ray Kinney” in Pau Hana Years. Honolulu, HI: KHET, 1971. UH Mānoa Streaming Video. 242

The Slanted Screen. Directed by Jeff Adachi. USA: Asian American Media Mafia/Center for Asian American Media (CAAM), 2006. UH Mānoa Streaming Video.

Song of the Islands. Directed by Walter Lang. USA: 20th Century Fox, 1942. DVD.

State of Aloha. Directed by Anne Misawa. Academy for Creative Media/University of Hawai'i, 2010. DVD.

Swingtime in Honolulu. Directed by Phillip A. Wilson. USA: KHET-TV, 1988. UH Mānoa Streaming Video.

Waikiki Wedding. Directed by Frank Tuttle. USA: Paramount Pictures, Inc., 1937. DVD.

Television Series:

Hawaii Five-0. USA: CBS Productions, 1968-1970. Netflix Streaming Video.

Hawaii Five-0. USA: CBS Productions, 2010-2020. Netflix Streaming Video.

Magnum P.I. USA: Universal Television, 1980-1988. Netflix Streaming Video.

Sheet Music:

Owens, Harry. Harry Owens' Great Songs of Hawaii. Pacific Palisades, CA: Royal Music Publisher, 1964.

Owens, Harry. Hawaii Calls: Musical Theme on the Trans-Pacific Broadcasts. Honolulu, HI: Royal Music Publishing Company-Royal Hawaiian Hotel, 1936.

Sound Recordings:

“Architecture and Power,” In Our Time, October 31, 2002, accessed August 1, 2020, https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00548k0

Lombardo, Guy, recording artist. All Time Favorites. Geffen Records, 1992. Apple Music.

Miller, Glenn, recording artist. The Essential Glenn Miller. Sony Music, 2005. Apple Music.

Owens, Harry, recording artist. The Best of Harry Owens and His Royal Hawaiians. Tropical Concepts, 1988. CD.

Owens, Harry, recording artist. “Hawaii” (Remastered). Bacci Bros Records, 2013. Apple Music. 243

Owens, Harry, recording artist. “Hawaiian Music Collection - Owens, Harry: Composer Biography.” Accessed September 1, 2020. https://digital.library.manoa.hawaii.edu/music/artists/owens

Owens, Harry, recording artist. “Poi, My Boy (Will Make A Man of You).” UHM Library Digital Image Collections. Accessed February 13, 2020. https://digital.library.manoa.hawaii.edu/items/show/37902

Owens, Harry, recording artist. “Says My Heart (From Cocoanut Grove).” JB Production, 2014. Apple Music.

Soria, Harry B., Jr., dj. “Al Kealoha Perry.” Territorial Airwaves. August 23, 2013. Accessed December 25, 2019. https://www.territorialairwaves.com/index.php?page=30&id=181

Soria, Harry B., Jr., dj. “Al Kealoha Perry-Revisited.” Territorial Airwaves. November 25, 2016. Accessed December 25, 2019. https://www.territorialairwaves.com/index.php?page=30&id=366

Soria, Harry B., Jr., dj. “Alfred Aholo Apaka.” Territorial Airwaves. November 15, 2013. Accessed March 25, 2020. https://www.territorialairwaves.com/index.php?page=30&id=193

Soria, Harry B., Jr., dj. “Alfred Aholo Apaka-Limitless.” Territorial Airwaves. March 27, 2015. Accessed March 25, 2020. https://www.territorialairwaves.com/index.php?page=30&id=272

Soria, Harry B., Jr., dj. “.” Territorial Airwaves. October 24, 2014. Accessed December 2, 2019. https://www.territorialairwaves.com/index.php?page=30&id=250

Soria, Harry B., Jr., dj. “Along the Ala Wai.” Territorial Airwaves. June 22, 2012. Accessed November 5, 2019. https://www.territorialairwaves.com/index.php?page=30&id=111

Soria, Harry B., Jr., dj. “Alvin Kaleolani Isaacs.” Territorial Airwaves. September 6, 2013. Accessed August 15, 2020. https://www.territorialairwaves.com/index.php?page=30&id=183

Soria, Harry B., Jr., dj. “Alvin Kaleolani Isaacs & Sons.” Territorial Airwaves. June 26, 2015. Accessed August 15, 2020. https://www.territorialairwaves.com/index.php?page=30&id=285

Soria, Harry B., Jr., dj. “Amy Stillman - 9-03-2010 Live in studio.” Territorial Airwaves. July 24, 2020. Accessed July 27, 2020. https://www.territorialairwaves.com/index.php?page=30&id=566

244

Soria, Harry B., Jr., dj. “Andy Cummings & Sol K. Bright.” Territorial Airwaves. October 31, 2014. Accessed March 15, 2020. https://www.territorialairwaves.com/index.php?page=30&id=251

Soria, Harry B., Jr., dj. “Andy Iona & His Islanders.” Territorial Airwaves. February 13, 2015. Accessed March 15, 2020. https://www.territorialairwaves.com/index.php?page=30&id=266

Soria, Harry B., Jr., dj. “Andy Iona: 1934-36.” Territorial Airwaves. December 14, 2018. Accessed March 15, 2020. https://www.territorialairwaves.com/index.php?page=30&id=475

Soria, Harry B., Jr., dj. “Bill Akamuhou.” Territorial Airwaves. March 28, 2014. Accessed January 4, 2020. https://www.territorialairwaves.com/index.php?page=30&id=212

Soria, Harry B., Jr., dj. “Bill Ali‘iloa Lincoln.” Territorial Airwaves. October 9, 2015. Accessed February 6, 2020. https://www.territorialairwaves.com/index.php?page=30&id=303

Soria, Harry B., Jr., dj. “Bina Mossman Glee Club.” Territorial Airwaves. April 14, 2017. Accessed January 29, 2020. https://www.territorialairwaves.com/index.php?page=30&id=386

Soria, Harry B., Jr., dj. “Bing Crosby-Hawaii.” Territorial Airwaves. October 25, 2019. Accessed October 31, 2019. https://www.territorialairwaves.com/index.php?page=30&id=521

Soria, Harry B., Jr., dj. “Charles E. King.” Territorial Airwaves. June 21, 2013. Accessed February 1, 2020. http://www.territorialairwaves.com/index.php?page=30&id=172.

Soria, Harry B., Jr., dj. “Danny Kalauawa Stewart.” Territorial Airwaves. May 3, 2013. Accessed December 29, 2019. https://www.territorialairwaves.com/index.php?page=30&id=158

Soria, Harry B., Jr., dj. “Decca Hi-Fi.” Territorial Airwaves. February 20, 2015. Accessed November 6, 2019. https://www.territorialairwaves.com/index.php?page=30&id=267

Soria, Harry B., Jr., dj. “Dick McIntire.” Territorial Airwaves. December 6, 2013. Accessed November 15, 2019. https://www.territorialairwaves.com/index.php?page=30&id=196.

Soria, Harry B., Jr., dj. “Dick McIntire-Hana Hou.” Territorial Airwaves. January 25, 2019. Accessed November 15, 2019. https://www.territorialairwaves.com/index.php?page=30&id=481

Soria, Harry B., Jr., dj. “Django Hula.” Territorial Airwaves. February 22, 2013. Accessed December 20, 2019. https://www.territorialairwaves.com/index.php?page=30&id=148

245

Soria, Harry B., Jr., dj. “Don McDiarmid Hapa Haole Songbook.” Territorial Airwaves. October 12, 2012. Accessed December 4, 2019. https://www.territorialairwaves.com/index.php?page=30&id=127

Soria, Harry B., Jr., dj. “Don McDiarmid- Original Hula Records.” Territorial Airwaves. April 28, 2017. Accessed December 4, 2019. https://www.territorialairwaves.com/index.php?page=30&id=388

Soria, Harry B., Jr., dj. “The Fabulous Fifties - 1950s.” Territorial Airwaves. September 19, 2014. Accessed November 2, 2019. https://www.territorialairwaves.com/index.php?page=30&id=245

Soria, Harry B., Jr., dj. “40th annual New Years Party.” Territorial Airwaves. December 28, 2018. Accessed December 30, 2019. https://www.territorialairwaves.com/index.php?page=30&id=477

Soria, Harry B., Jr., dj. “-The 49th State Years.” Territorial Airwaves. February 6, 2016. Accessed November 22, 2019. https://www.territorialairwaves.com/index.php?page=30&id=265

Soria, Harry B., Jr., dj. “George Tautu Archer & his Pagans.” Territorial Airwaves. March 6, 2015. Accessed May 11, 2020. https://www.territorialairwaves.com/index.php?page=30&id=269

Soria, Harry B., Jr., dj. “Georgia Hawaiians.” Territorial Airwaves. January 11, 2019. Accessed September 20, 2019. https://www.territorialairwaves.com/index.php?page=30&id=479

Soria, Harry B., Jr., dj. “Haole Hapa Haole.” Territorial Airwaves. January 1, 2021. Accessed January 29, 2021. https://territorialairwaves.com/index.php?page=30&id=592

Soria, Harry B., Jr., dj. “Harry Owens Hapa Haole Songbook.” Territorial Airwaves. September 28, 2012. Accessed February 1, 2019. http://www.territorialairwaves.com/index.php?page=30&id=125.

Soria, Harry B., Jr., dj. “Harry Owens-Last Record-1965.” Territorial Airwaves. June 2, 2017. Accessed March 18, 2019. http://www.territorialairwaves.com/index.php?page=30&id=393.

Soria, Harry B., Jr., dj. “Hawaii Calls - 1975.” Territorial Airwaves. February 17, 2017. Accessed February 1, 2020. https://www.territorialairwaves.com/index.php?page=30&id=378

Soria, Harry B., Jr., dj. “Hawaii Calls - Revisited.” Territorial Airwaves. July 20, 2012. Accessed February 1, 2020. http://www.territorialairwaves.com/index.php?page=30&id=115.

246

Soria, Harry B., Jr., dj. “Hawaii Calls Stars After Dark.” Territorial Airwaves. December 5, 2014. Accessed February 1, 2020. https://www.territorialairwaves.com/index.php?page=30&id=256

Soria, Harry B., Jr., dj. “Hawaii Calls presents Young Hawaiians.” Territorial Airwaves. December 11, 2015. Accessed June 22, 2020. https://www.territorialairwaves.com/index.php?page=30&id=312

Soria, Harry B., Jr., dj. “Hawaiian Big Band Swing.” Territorial Airwaves. March 1, 2013. Accessed February 1, 2020. https://www.territorialairwaves.com/index.php?page=30&id=149

Soria, Harry B., Jr., dj. “Hawaiian Music and Musicians-2nd Edition.” Territorial Airwaves. October 5 2012. Accessed April 10, 2020. https://territorialairwaves.com/index.php?page=30&id=126

Soria, Harry B., Jr., dj. “Hawaiian Music History - Katchi Katchi.” Territorial Airwaves. March 8, 2013. Accessed December 21, 2019. https://www.territorialairwaves.com/index.php?page=30&id=150

Soria, Harry B., Jr., dj. “Hawaiian Railroads - 1977.” Territorial Airwaves. October 14, 2016. Accessed August 21, 2020. https://www.territorialairwaves.com/index.php?page=30&id=360

Soria, Harry B., Jr., dj. “Hawaiian Recordings History - Brunswick.” Territorial Airwaves. November 23, 2012. Accessed August 4, 2020. https://www.territorialairwaves.com/index.php?page=30&id=134

Soria, Harry B., Jr., dj. “Hawaiian Recordings History - Columbia.” Territorial Airwaves. November 9, 2012. Accessed August 2, 2020. https://www.territorialairwaves.com/index.php?page=30&id=132

Soria, Harry B., Jr., dj. “Hawaiian Recordings History - Decca.” Territorial Airwaves. November 30, 2012. Accessed August 7, 2020. https://www.territorialairwaves.com/index.php?page=30&id=135

Soria, Harry B., Jr., dj. “Hawaiian Recordings History – H. T. P.” Territorial Airwaves. December 7, 2012. Accessed August 8, 2020. https://www.territorialairwaves.com/index.php?page=30&id=136

Soria, Harry B., Jr., dj. “Hawaiian Recordings History - Victor.” Territorial Airwaves. November 16, 2012. Accessed August 3, 2020. https://www.territorialairwaves.com/index.php?page=30&id=133

247

Soria, Harry B., Jr., dj. “Hilo Hattie.” Territorial Airwaves. September 20, 2013. Accessed March 15, 2020. https://www.territorialairwaves.com/index.php?page=30&id=185

Soria, Harry B., Jr., dj. “History of the Hawaiian Steel Guitar - 1999.” Territorial Airwaves. April 1, 2016. Accessed August 12, 2020. https://www.territorialairwaves.com/index.php?page=30&id=328

Soria, Harry B., Jr., dj. “Hollywood Hawaiians.” Territorial Airwaves. January 24, 2020. Accessed January 29, 2020. https://www.territorialairwaves.com/index.php?page=30&id=540

Soria, Harry B., Jr., dj. “Honolulu Students - 1904.” Territorial Airwaves. February 22, 2019. Accessed January 2, 2020. https://www.territorialairwaves.com/index.php?page=30&id=485

Soria, Harry B., Jr., dj. “John Kameaaloha Almeida.” Territorial Airwaves. October 2, 2015. Accessed March 1, 2020. https://www.territorialairwaves.com/index.php?page=30&id=302

Soria, Harry B., Jr., dj. “Johnny Kaonohi Pineapple.” Territorial Airwaves. September 13, 2013. Accessed September 1, 2020. https://www.territorialairwaves.com/index.php?page=30&id=184

Soria, Harry B., Jr., dj. “Johnny Noble's Brunswick Legacy.” Territorial Airwaves. December 12, 2014. Accessed March 18, 2020. https://www.territorialairwaves.com/index.php?page=30&id=257

Soria, Harry B., Jr., dj. “Johnny Noble Hapa Haole Songbook.” Territorial Airwaves. September 21, 2012. Accessed March 18, 2020. http://www.territorialairwaves.com/index.php?page=30&id=124.

Soria, Harry B., Jr., dj. “Kalama's Quartette.” Territorial Airwaves. April 18, 2014. Accessed March 8, 2020. https://www.territorialairwaves.com/index.php?page=30&id=215

Soria, Harry B., Jr., dj. “Kalama's Quartet-Hana Hou!” Territorial Airwaves. March 1, 2019. Accessed March 8, 2020. https://www.territorialairwaves.com/index.php?page=30&id=486

Soria, Harry B., Jr., dj. “Keaumoku Louis.” Territorial Airwaves. May 12, 2017. Accessed December 29, 2019. https://www.territorialairwaves.com/index.php?page=30&id=390

Soria, Harry B., Jr., dj. “Lani McIntire.” Territorial Airwaves. December 13, 2013. Accessed November 15, 2019. https://www.territorialairwaves.com/index.php?page=30&id=197.

248

Soria, Harry B., Jr., dj. “Lani McIntire-Hana Hou.” Territorial Airwaves. February 1, 2019. Accessed November 15, 2019. https://www.territorialairwaves.com/index.php?page=30&id=482

Soria, Harry B., Jr., dj. “Lena Machado.” Territorial Airwaves. December 18, 2015. Accessed December 21, 2019. https://www.territorialairwaves.com/index.php?page=30&id=313

Soria, Harry B., Jr., dj. “Lena Machado-Hana Hou.” Territorial Airwaves. February 15, 2019. Accessed December 21, 2019. https://www.territorialairwaves.com/index.php?page=30&id=484

Soria, Harry B., Jr., dj. “Manhattan Hawaiians.” Territorial Airwaves. January 31, 2020. Accessed February 2, 2020. https://www.territorialairwaves.com/index.php?page=30&id=541

Soria, Harry B., Jr., dj. “Non-Hawaiian Music by Hawaiians.” Territorial Airwaves. July 10, 2015. Accessed December 21, 2019. https://www.territorialairwaves.com/index.php?page=30&id=287

Soria, Harry B., Jr., dj. “Pauline Kekahuna.” Territorial Airwaves. July 19, 2013. Accessed December 20, 2019. https://www.territorialairwaves.com/index.php?page=30&id=176

Soria, Harry B., Jr., dj. “The Post War Forties - 1940s.” Territorial Airwaves. September 12, 2014. Accessed October 31, 2019. https://www.territorialairwaves.com/index.php?page=30&id=244

Soria, Harry B., Jr., dj. “R. Alex Anderson Hapa Haole Songbook.” Territorial Airwaves. October 19, 2012. Accessed November 12, 2019. https://www.territorialairwaves.com/index.php?page=30&id=128

Soria, Harry B., Jr., dj. “Randy Oness.” Territorial Airwaves. July 12, 2013. Accessed March 15, 2020. https://www.territorialairwaves.com/index.php?page=30&id=175

Soria, Harry B., Jr., dj. “Ray Kinney.” Territorial Airwaves. April 26, 2013. Accessed February 5, 2020. https://www.territorialairwaves.com/index.php?page=30&id=157

Soria, Harry B., Jr., dj. “Ray Kinney-Hana Hou.” Territorial Airwaves. February 8, 2019. Accessed February 5, 2020. https://www.territorialairwaves.com/index.php?page=30&id=483

Soria, Harry B., Jr., dj. “Roaring Twenties - 1920s.” Territorial Airwaves. August 29, 2014. Accessed January 15, 2020. https://www.territorialairwaves.com/index.php?page=30&id=242

249

Soria, Harry B., Jr., dj. “Royal Hawaiian Girls Glee Club.” Territorial Airwaves. May 5, 2017. Accessed December 4, 2019. https://www.territorialairwaves.com/index.php?page=30&id=389

Soria, Harry B., Jr., dj. “Royal Hawaiian Serenaders.” Territorial Airwaves. January 3, 2014. Accessed August 17, 2020. https://www.territorialairwaves.com/index.php?page=30&id=200

Soria, Harry B., Jr., dj. “Slack Sax.” Territorial Airwaves. September 26, 2014. Accessed September 6, 2020. https://www.territorialairwaves.com/index.php?page=30&id=74

Soria, Harry B., Jr., dj. “The Soaring Sixties - 1960s.” Territorial Airwaves. September 26, 2014. Accessed January 16, 2020. https://www.territorialairwaves.com/index.php?page=30&id=246

Soria, Harry B., Jr., dj. “Sol Hoopii.” Territorial Airwaves. April 11, 2013. Accessed December 26, 2019. https://www.territorialairwaves.com/index.php?page=30&id=214

Soria, Harry B., Jr., dj. “Sol Hoopii-1925.” Territorial Airwaves. January 18, 2019. Accessed December 26, 2019. https://www.territorialairwaves.com/index.php?page=30&id=480

Soria, Harry B., Jr., dj. “Sol Hoopii-2006.” Territorial Airwaves. May 6, 2016. Accessed August 22, 2020. https://www.territorialairwaves.com/index.php?page=30&id=333

Soria, Harry B., Jr., dj. “Sol K. Bright.” Territorial Airwaves. February 28, 2014. Accessed March 15, 2020. https://www.territorialairwaves.com/index.php?page=30&id=208

Soria, Harry B., Jr., dj. “Sol K. Bright-Hana Hou.” Territorial Airwaves. March 8, 2019. Accessed March 15, 2020. https://www.territorialairwaves.com/index.php?page=30&id=487

Soria, Harry B., Jr., dj. “’Squeeze’ Kamana & his Hawaiian All-Stars.” Territorial Airwaves. January 30,2015. Accessed May 19, 2020. https://www.territorialairwaves.com/index.php?page=30&id=264

Soria, Harry B., Jr., dj. “Tavares Brothers.” Territorial Airwaves. December 18, 2020. Accessed January 29, 2021. https://territorialairwaves.com/index.php?page=30&id=590

Soria, Harry B., Jr., dj. “35th annual Territorial Christmas Party.” Territorial Airwaves. December 20, 2013. Accessed December 20, 2019. https://www.territorialairwaves.com/index.php?page=30&id=198

Soria, Harry B., Jr., dj. “36th annual Territorial Christmas Party.” Territorial Airwaves. December 19, 2014. Accessed December 20, 2019. https://www.territorialairwaves.com/index.php?page=30&id=258 250

Soria, Harry B., Jr., dj. “The Thrilling Thirties - 1930s.” Territorial Airwaves. September 5, 2014. Accessed January 6, 2020, https://www.territorialairwaves.com/index.php?page=30&id=243

“U.S.-Born Latinos Struggle to Gain Visibility in Hollywood: The Takeaway.” WNYC Studios. September 3, 2019. Accessed March 27, 2020. https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/takeaway/segments/us-born-latinos-struggle- gain-visibility-hollywood

Various Artists. Hawaiian Memories: Rare Transcription Discs 1936-1947. Harlequin, 1999. CD.

Various Artists. Hawaiian Memories: Vintage Recordings 1928-1941. Take Two Records, 2001. CD.

Various Artists. Vintage Hawaiian Magic. Vintage Masters, 2012. Apple Music.

Various Artists. Vintage Hawaiian Music. Big Eye Music, 2009. Apple Music.

Welk, Lawrence., recording artist. The Essential Lawrence Welk: Collectors Edition. Prestige Elite, 2007. Apple Music.