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Hawaii–Luau

A Hawaiian luau is more than just a party. A luau is a gathering, a happening, an experience. A luau is a celebration, a joyous exultation and, at its essence, a FEAST. Hawaiian food is the star of the luau–you can hula ’til the sun comes up, you can play your ukelele until Don Ho himself yells, “Enough!,” but a luau is not a luau without food. According to Hawaii-luaus.com, your luau will most likely include dishes like:

— Kalua pig
— Poi: a Polynesian staple food made of mashed taro
— Sweet potatoes
— Luau or laulau, which gives the luau its name. It’s a food made of taro plant leaves and chicken baked in coconut milk.
— Lomi Salmon
— Tropical fruit: pineapple, mango and papaya
— Haupia: Hawaiian coconut pudding. (Jesse will teach you how to cook haupia. Though, as he later learned, you don’t really need to use a blender.)
— Mai Tais to drink

Hawaii-luaus.com offers recipes for the above.

But a luau is even more than just a great meal. Ancient Hawaiian custom forbade men and women from eating together, and certain foods were even off limit to anyone but royalty. That changed in 1819 during the period of ‘Ai Noa, introduced above. King Kamehameha II welcomed men and women to the same feast and, voila…a luau!

A traditional luau takes place on lauhala mats rolled out on the floor. Guests sit on the floor and, according to tradition, eat the food placed before them with their hands. A main feature of the meal is poi, which diners scoop with one, two or three fingers depending on its thickness.

In class we’re going to have a luau, sitting on our pretend lauhala mats, eating pretend poi with our very real fingers.

How to sing with Jay each week in your home or classroom Support All Around This World on Patreon Enjoy interactive All Around This World lessons in your home or classroom

Hawaii–Music

 

Before Westerners arrived in the Hawaiian islands, Hawaiian folk music, like much other “pre-contact” music from Polynesia, featured many kinds of chant-songs, known
as mele, and much spiritual dance, known as hula. In Hawaii, music and dance have always played an essential role in family and communal celebrations. Even after Western settlement, music was so much at the essence of Hawaiian life that the royal family was also one the nation’s most musical families. For example, Hawaiian Prince Leleiohuku,
brother of Hawaiian monarch, Queen Lili’uokalani, is rumored to have written the song on our CD we call “In the Ocean Spray” in the mid 1860s, when he was 10-14 years old, about a secret meeting with a girl. (Leleiohuku died when he was 23.)Â Lili’uokalani was a prolific composer in her own right; she even wrote Hawaii’s most famous song of all time–Aloha ‘Oe. Hawaiian’s first met the guitar when Mexican cowboys brought it to the islands in the 1800s. Hawaiians took the instrument and changed the way the strings are tuned, enabling musicians to change the chords by sliding one finger up and down its neck. Sliding notes up and down the guitar fretboard seemed to be a natural complement to the swaying and sliding Polynesian folk songs.

The main Hawaiian guitar styles are slack-key guitar and
slide/lap steel guitar:

–SLACK-KEY GUITAR: an acoustic, fingerstyle style that arose as a low-key, island-based genre and only since the 1970s has it become well known worldwide. The name “slack key” comes from the practice of the guitarist’s loosening, or making “slack” the strings of a guitar until together they play a single chord. [National Geographic tells us about slack key guitar music | Watch slack key guitar masters Ledward Kaapana and George Kahumoku play this distinctly mellow kind of music.]

–“SLIDE”/LAP STEEL GUITAR: a style of guitar playing that original in the late 1800s when Hawaiian guitarist Joseph Kekuku realized he could make a unique and, frankly, quite beautiful sound when changing the tuning of his steel guitar, resting it on his lap and sliding a metal bolt or bar up and down the fretboard to reach the desired note. Kekuku’s steel guitar style eventually spread worldwide. [Read the Hawaiian Steel Guitar Association’s history of the steel guitar | Here’s an example of acoustic Hawaiian slide guitar.]

Another Hawaii “invention” that has become popular well beyond the borders of the Hawiian islands is the UKELELE. Portuguese immigrants first brought small guitars with them to Hawaii in the late 1800s. Hawaiians took these small European guitars–known as cavaquinhos–and renamed them “ukeleles,” legendarily from the words “uku (flea)” and “lele (jumping).” [Watch ukelele-master Ohta-San play “Waipo.”]

Hawaiian musicians have always demonstrated the ability to maintain their own musical traditions while still absorbing genres from abroad. For example, since the late 1980s Hawaiians–ethnic Hawaiians in particular–have adopted reggae so completely that they’ve developed their own sub-genre called “JAWAIIAN.” Hawaiian fans of Jawaiian music are known to wear the clothing featuring the colors of the Ethiopian flag (red, yellow and green), and Bob Marley memorabilia is popular. [Let the Jawaiian Jam All Stars “take you back to the 1990s.”]

In class we’re going to listen to:

— Gabby Pahinui, “Leahi” Beloved Hawaiian slack-key guitar master Gabby Pahinui began his work life as a road crew laborer but eventually caught the ear of the local record industry. He was the first slack-key guitarist to record a hit, “Hilawe”–possibly the first slack-key guitarist to record at all–and in the ’40s and ’50s pioneered slack-key guitar playing to a point it which it came to channel the very soul of the islands. In the 1970s Pahinui and slack-key guitar played an important role in the Hawaiian Renaissance, boldly supporting the performance of Hawaiian music as a way inspire Hawaiians to empower themselves culturally and politically.

More information:
Learn more about Gabby Pahinui, the slack-key guitar and the Slack Key Festival | Watch Gabby Pahinui play “Hilawe”

— Sudden Rush, “Pure Aloha” Sudden Rush is one of the most popular acts to emerge in the genre of NA MELE PALEOLEO, a form of Hawaiian spoken-word poetry that has transformed into a subgenre of hip hop. Formed in Hilo in the mid-’90s, Sudden Rush was among the first Hawaiian acts to embrace global hip hop as a musical mechanism for delivering their truly Hawaiian tales. Their lyrics largely focus on provocative Hawaiian social and cultural issues, challenging U.S. colonialism and delving into the complexity of the real life in “paradise.”

More information:
Read a good review of Sudden Rush’s 1997 na mele paleoleo album, “Ku’e,” which includes and introduction to the band | Listen to Sudden Rush “join” Gabby Pahinui in a rousing rendition of “Hilawe”

Hawaii-Language

 

There are two official languages in Hawaii–English and Hawaiian, though even the Hawaiian government admits an incredibly small number of people–about 0.1% of the population–is fluent in Hawaiian.

The Hawaiian language is surprisingly difficult to learn considering the fact that it features the shortest alphabet in the world–five vowels and eight consonants. The language seems to have arrived in Hawaii with settlers from the Marquesas but it was only oral until 19th century English-speaking missionaries endeavored to develop a written version as a way to teach Hawaiians to read and write. The missionaries couldn’t distinguish many sounds
that appeared in the language so they consolidated them into a smaller number of letters: the vowels a, e, i, o and u are there, but the only consonants are h, k, l, m, n, p and w. When Americans overthrew the Hawaiian monarchy they prohibited the speaking or teaching of Hawaiian; the bans effectively lasted until the 1970s, when the language experienced a revival. Though Hawaiian became an official language of
Hawaii in 1978 and was reintroduced into schools in 1987, including the development of immersions during which students speak and write in Hawaiian all day, by then the damage was done. Today, while many Hawaiians have become familiar with the language, there are only a few thousand people who speak it to the exclusion of all others.

In Hawaiian, hello and goodbye are both the same word: “Aloha.” Aloha also means “love,” “affection,” and much more; the “Spirit of Aloha” is the part of the essence of Hawaii. (What is the deeper meaning of Aloha?)

Hawaii–When You Go There

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Hawaii wants you! The Hawaii Tourism Authority wants you to visit. GoHawaii wants you to visit. LonelyPlanet.com may not care whether or not you visit Hawaii, but LonelyPlanet.com’s Hawaii page does hint that the state is as close as one can get to an earthly paparadise. Lonely Planet also tells us that 50% of Hawaiian marriages are inter ethnic and that Hawaii’s state fish is the humuhumunukunukuapua’a (reef triggerfish). Now doesn’t that make you want to visit all the more?

Hawaii may be crawling with tourists, and you may even have been one of them at a time, but not all the main Hawaiian islands are tourist meccas. In fact, two are privately owned and one has become a wasteland. Of the others, some will wow you with their multicultural wonders, others are just so extraordinarily beautiful you can’t help but want to stay. Let’s learn a bit about the eight main Hawaiian islands. We’ll go roughly from west to east:

— Ni’ihau (“The Forbidden Isle”):
In 1864 King Kamehameha V raised a bit of cash–$10,000 in gold–by selling one of the Hawaiian islands, Ni’ihau, to a family of wealthy Scots known as the Sinclairs. Eliza McHucheson-Sinclair moved her family of farmers from New Zealand, where they had sold their land for a profit, and brought them to Honolulu. When they bought Ni’ihau they also effectively bought the 350 Native Hawaiian islanders at the time, turning them into tenants. The Sinclairs were devout fundamentalist Christians and decreed that all islanders should attend church, may not drink alcohol and should not smoke cigarettes. They distributed Bibles, translated into the Hawaiian language and forbade manual work on Sundays. After Eliza died one of her grandsons, Aubrey Robinson, became owner of Ni’ihau, and he passed along the islands to his own grandsons, Keith and Bruce Robinson. Keith Robinson is an active conservationist who has engaged in bitter battles with the Hawaiian government and with environmentalists over how best to preserve
endangered species, both animal and vegetative, on the island. Are the Robinsons admirable environmentalists who have dedicated their lives, not to mention their family fortune, to keep Ni’ihau pristine? Or, are the Robinsons old-school paternalistic plantation masters–potentially violent, if threatened–who want to keep Ni’ihau’s residents primitive and therefore “pure?” Robinson Crusader is a documentary about Keith Robinson and decide for yourself.

Today the less than two hundred residents of Ni’ihau are Native Hawaiian and primarily speak a particular dialect of Hawaiian language. Most residents are subsistence farmers or fishers or otherwise live low-tech lives. According to Wikipedia’s entry on Ni’ihau, rent is free on the island, meat is free…solar power is the exclusive source of electricity. There’s no telephone service on Ni’ihau, nor cars–residents get around on horseback or on bicycle. There are no hotels, not even a general store; barges deliver groceries from Kauai’. Tourism is effectively banned on Ni’ihau, though some helicopter tours are now allowed. Some of Ni’ihau’s beaches are legendarily strewn with garbage that has floated there from other islands, which probably would not be the case if every inch of the island was groomed for tourism.

[Visit the Ni’ihau Cultural Heritage Foundation | Jane’s Oceania’s take on Niihau | Learn more about Keith Robinson: “Hawaiian Plantsman Confounds Greenies.” | Alan Loyd introduces you to Niihau’s history and landscape in two YouTube videos: “Niihau–Hawaii’s Forbidden Island A Rare Tour”: Part 1 & Part 2 | (a link for grown-ups) “The Niihau Incident“–a Japanese pilot crash lands on Niihau after the attack on Pearl Harbor and meets a violent end]

— Kaua’i (“The Garden Isle”):
Kaua’i is a wonder. Canyons and cliffs and sprawling, almost-startling nature…. You don’t go to Kaua’i to sit on a beach–you go to Kaua’i to hike, to kayak, to have adventures. You may also go to Kaua’i to hobnob with movie stars. More than seventy Hollywood movies and TV shows have been filmed in Kaua’i, including the musical South Pacific, scenes from Raiders of the Lost Ark and that shot in the opening credits of M*A*S*H with the helicopter flying over mountain top…if you’re of a certain age, you know the one. If you’re of an even more certain age, you’ll be most familiar with Kaua’i from movies by Elvis–the young Elvis. [Let Beth Fisher introduce you, by way of video, to Kaua’i; “Heaven on Earth (Except for the Mosquitos).”]

— O’ahu (“The Gathering Place”):
O’ahu is Hawai’i’s most modern, most ethnically diverse, most urban, most active island. Honolulu, Hawai’i’s biggest city, is the centerpiece of O’ahu, but there are natural wonders galore–surfing, snorkeling and swimming and even roasting in the sun. [Meet O’ahu.]

— Moloka’i (“The Friendly Isle”):
Why go to Moloka’i? If you read Lonely Planet’s list of the top 10 Moloka’i travel experiences the more likely question would be, “why not?” What kind of adventures on tiny Molokai made the top 10? Visit the nearly uninhabited dense tropical forest of the Halawa Valley. Bring your family to swim in he shallow water of the lagoon near Kumimi Beach. Hike along the world’s highest sea cliffs in Kalaupapa National Historical Park (though watch out for people with Hansen’s disease). Mountain bike in the Moloka’i Forest Reserve, snorkel and scuba dive on along the Moloka’i reef. Or, when all else fails, “go fly a kite.” Ultimately, though, “Moloka’i is one of the planet’s finest spots to do something very rare and special in today’s day and age: nothing at all.” [Hear the voices of Moloka’i’s people–the island’s greatest national research–in this video: “Molokai words of wisdom.”]

— Lana’i (“The Pineapple Isle”):
Lana’i was a relatively quiet and autonomous island for centuries until the first King Hamehameha violently asserted control in the late 1700’s, devastating most of the population. Settlers turned the island briefly into a Mormon stronghold before transforming it into the headquarters of a sugar company. In 1922, as described above, James Dole, president of the Hawaiian Pineapple Company (later known as the Dole Food Company), bought the entire island to use as a pineapple plantation. Today the island belongs to billionaire David Howard Murdock who owns the parent company of Dole. As the pineapple and sugarcane plantations became less prominent the island has developed into a destination for tourists who flock there for its slow pace of life–there are no traffic lights or
shopping malls in LanaÊ»i City–and its romantic resorts. [“I Miss You My Lanai.”]

— Kaho’olawe (“The Target Isle”):
Kaho’olawe is off the main tourist path, but it is an important spiritual place for Hawaiians. For centuries the island has featured prominently in Hawaiian history, culture and religion. The 20th century, however, was rough on Kaho’olawe. There has been substantial deforestation and overgrazing by sheep, cattle and goats, leading to erosion of the island’s soil, several feet of which have blown off in the Pacific wind. The U.S. military’s use of the island as a place for frequent target practice hasn’t helped. Today the island’s soil appears to have an unnatural tinge of pink. [Can anything save Kaho’olawe’s environment? Watch “Kaho’olawe: A Sacred Island Restored.”]

— Maui (“The Valley Isle”):
Maui has jungles and volcanic craters and beaches and whale watching and luaus (more about them below) and fantastic multi-ethnic food and ritzy resorts and down-home bed and breakfasts and, well…everything. [This is what visitors see when they come to Maui. This is what you’re more likely to do when you live on Maui.]

— Hawai’i (“The Big Island”):
Hawai’i, “the Big Island,” is in fact twice as large as the all the other Hawaiian Islands combined. The Big Island has five volcanoes including its most active (Kilauea). The Big Island has towering mountains and vast lava fields and sandy white beaches and dense rainforests and stunning coral reefs. The Big Island is also home to much of Hawai’i’s culture–ancient temples and spiritual sites galore, as well as its second-largest city, Hilo. The Big Island has everything too! [“Six Great Spots on Hawaii’s Big Island.“]

p.s. Read an argument that Hawaii’s tourist economy isn’t necessarily great for Native Hawaiians.

Hawaii–History

 

So how did a mild-mannered group of volcanic islands isolated way far out in the Pacific end up becoming the 50th state of the decidedly non-volcanic, non-isolated U.S.?

About 1,500 years ago–not long at all in the annals of human habitation–Polynesians from the Marquesas Islands are thought to have first set foot on the islands we now know as Hawaii. Somehow they followed the stars and landed their canoes on a little speck of land almost two thousand miles from their home. About five hundred years later more Polynesian settlers came, this time from Tahiti. These immigrants brought with them their complicated system of deities as well as their social hierarchy and system of kapu (taboos) that helped regulate that society by separating positive actions from bad. Hawaiian culture developed on its own over the next several centuries, giving rise to the sacred dance known as hula and the sacred, to some, sport of surfing.

In 1778 the seemingly ubiquitous British navigator James Cook landed in Hawaii. He called the islands the Sandwich Islands in honor of England’s Earl of Sandwich. While in general Hawaiians treated him, and other Westerners, with a respect bestowed only on high chiefs or even gods, Cook lost his life in a flare-up of violence. Apparently Hawaiians, whose culture de-emphasized private property, had “borrowed” one of Cook’s boats. To inspire the returning of his boat Cook tried to kidnap King of Hawaii, Kalani’Åpu’u, to hold him for ransom–a tactic that had worked for Cook in the past. This time there was a physical altercation and, when Cook got involved, his thousands upon thousands of miles of harrowing Pacific exploration came to an abrupt, though perhaps not so unexpected, end.

In 1810 a Hawaiian chief named Kamehameha united the oft-warring Hawaiians into one big kingdom. (Here’s a picture of the king.) When he died in 1819 the strict rules of kapu were relaxed as people mourned–for example, women were allowed to eat forbidden food like pork and bananas and were also allowed to eat food with men. When Kamehameha’s
son Liholiho was anointed the next leader he tried to reimpose the kapu, as was the custom after mourning. His mother and the other wives of Kamehameha opposed the
reinstatement of kapu. Liholiho eventually relented and word spread among the islands that the old religion had fallen. This brief period of religious and social upheaval came to be known as ‘Ai Noa, Hawaiian for “free eating.” Coincidentally, and perhaps fortuitously for them, Protestant missionaries arrived just month later and offered Christianity as a way the fill the islanders’ spiritual void. (Read a description of ‘Ai Noa provided by PacificWorlds.com.)

During the mid-1800s a succession of international powers tried to exert influence on Hawaii:

— There were RUSSIANS who in 1817 established a fort on the island of Kaua’i and signed a treaty with chief Kaumuali’i making the island a Russian protectorate.
— There were the FRENCH, who in 1839 opposed an islands-wide ban on Catholicism imposed by Protestant missionaries, threatening King Kamehameha III with war until he signed the Edict of Toleration, and then came back in 1849 to destroy Honolulu to express their disapproval with the Hawaiian kingdom’s perceived lack of enthusiasm for the edict.
— There were BRITISH, including Lord George Paulet who landed in Honolulu harbor in 1843 with a Royal Naval warship and “claimed” Hawaii for the British Crown, forcing the king Kamehameha III to surrender. After the French protested to the British and Americans, Paulet’s commanding officer arrived a few months later and restored the monarchy.
— There were AMERICANS, whose new-fangled approach to colonization included the signing of an economy treaty with Hawaii in 1875 (led by then by nobles from the House of KalÄkaua, who replaced the Kamehamehas) that allowed for the duty-free importation of Hawaiian sugar cane into the United States in exchange for U.S. control of Pearl Harbor, on which it eventually planted a naval base. The treaty confirmed Hawaii’s sovereignty. This promise lasted less than 20 years.

During the years a multiplicity of immigrants from other nations flocked to Hawaii to work on its sugar cane plantations and play other vital roles in its economy. People came from China, Japan, the Philippines, Portugal, Korea and even Puerto Rico. Today Hawaii remains a proudly multicultural society.

THE BAYONET CONSTITUTION and THE OVERTHROW OF THE QUEEN

In 1887 a group of King KalÄkuna’s advisors and an armed militia, claiming they wanted to reign in the King’s outrageous spending, forced him to sign “The Bayonet Constitution” which stripped the monarchy of authority, imposed income and land-ownership requirements for voting and took the vote away from Asian immigrants. When the king died in 1891 his sister, Lili’uokolani, took the throne. She immediately moved to rescind the Bayonet Constitution. A group of lawyers and pineapple and sugar-growing businessmen, members of the Hawaiian League, formed the “Citizen’s Committee of Safety” (also known as the Annexation Club), in order to rescind the queen. Committee of Safety members portrayed themselves as crusaders for democracy aiming to overthrow a corrupt monarchist regime. They also happened to have just a bit of personal interest in the matter, being that most of them were pineapple and sugar-growing businessmen.

When Queen Lili‘uokalani proposed a new constitution, meant to to replace the Bayonet Constitution, that would restrict the voting rights of European and American settlers in Hawai’i, the Committee of Safety decided to act. On January 17, 1893, the Committee of Safety mobilized its 1,500 person strong militia, called the Honolulu Rifles. With the Rifles at the ready, U.S. Marines landed in Honolulu harbor. The Marines’ public orders were to remain neutral, but their presence made the royalists wary of opposing the militia. The Queen saw how dire the situation had become and, sparing her people from substantial bloodshed, relinquished the monarchy. She called upon the U.S. government to help her regain her throne.

It didn’t.

Actually, it came close. The president at the time, Benjamin Harrison, supported annexation, but the next president, Grover Cleveland, ordered a study of the revolution that concluded that it wouldn’t have succeed if the American minister to Hawii hadn’t worked with the Committee of Safety to make it happen. or if American troops hadn’t landed. President Cleveland eventually wrote, “The provisional government owes its existence to an armed invasion by the United States. By an act of war…a substantial wrong has been done.”

Cleveland recommended the monarchy be restored but Congress only agreed to censure the U.S. minister to Hawaii. In 1894, aspiring pineapple magnate Sanford Dole declared himself president of the Republic of Hawaii. His government found the queen guilty of treason and placed her under house arrest. The next U.S. president, Republican William McKinley, supported a joint resolution in Congress that made Hawai’i a U.S. territory in 1900. Though annexation was popular at the time–the Spanish-American War had just ended and the U.S. was in territory-gathering mode, there was a fear the Japanese would annex instead, etc.–almost a century later, in 1993, President Bill Clinton signed a Congressional resolution officially apologizing to Hawai’i for the U.S. role in the overthrow.

JAMES DOLE AND THE “PINEAPPLE ISLAND”
In 1899 James Drummond Dole, governor Sanford Dole’s cousin, arrived in Hawai’i eager to use his Harvard business and agriculture degrees to transform Hawai’i into a farming powerhouse. The pineapple was not a native fruit in Hawaii; in fact, James Cook had introduced it as recently as 1790 and was first cultivated there in 1813. At the turn of the 20th century the pineapple was hardly known in the continental United States. Dole’s company applied modern science to find the best variety of pineapple to process and can–the Smooth Cayenne–perfected methods of canning to enable mass production and transport and aggressively marketed the pineapple to middle America. In 1922 Dole and his company bought the entire Hawaiian island of Lanai and transformed it into a gigantic pineapple plantation. Over the next several decades the Dole corporation and its rival pineapple producer Del Monte exported millions upon millions of tons of pineapples. They also joined the “Big Five” sugarcane producing companies in dominating Hawaii’s economy and political culture.

More about Hawaiian pineapples:
The Dole company’s own history of their forefather James | Read this engaging history of the pineapple: “Fruit Cocktail Colonialism: The Globalization of Pineapples” (how often do you hear the phrase “engaging history of the pineapple?” But it really is great.) | How Dole plants its pineapples

PEARL HARBOR and HAWAIIAN STATEHOOD
The formal push for Hawai’i to become one of the United States began in 1903 when Hawaii’s territorial legislature passed a resolution commissioning a delegate to request
Congress consider statehood. Various statehood initiatives worked their way through Congress without stunning success, even after the matter came to a vote in Hawaii 1940, when Hawaiian citizens voted in favor of statehood by a margin of 2 to 1. On December 7, 1941, the Japanese blasted the U.S. Naval base on Oahu’s Pearl Harbor with a massive surprise attack. (Or was it really a surprise? If you like conspiracy theories, you’ll love this one.)

After World War II the United Nations put Hawaii on its list of non self-governing territories. A non self-governing territory may change its status through a “plebiscite,” which is a vote held on its status by the inhabitants of the territory. According to the U.N. three options must be the table:

1) to become part of the trustee nation, i.e. for Hawaii
to become one of the United States
2) to remain a territory
3) independence

In 1959 the U.S. Congress agreed to welcome Hawaii as a state. The final step was for Hawaiians to hold a plebiscite to confirm or deny the change in status…or, according to the rules set by the U.N., to choose independence. Hawaii’s 1959 plebiscite presented only two choices: to become a state or to remain a territory. There was no way to choose independence. From their two choices, Hawaiian voters overwhelmingly chose to become the 50th American state.

Today Hawaii’s politics and economy have integrated almost entirely into the politics and economy of the U.S. While some Hawaiians advocate for increased autonomy from the United States, others for complete independence, others still for complete independence accompanied by the U.S. paying reparations for its overthrow of the Queen’s sovereign government, Hawaii–the most multicultural and modern of all the groups of Polynesian islands–seems like it will be part of the increasingly multicultural, modern U.S. for a long time to come.

More about Hawaii:
Learn about Hawaiian volcanoes through the eyes of the U.S. Geological Survey’s Hawaiian Volcano Observatory | Watch the Kilauea volcano erupt in March 2011 | Learn more about Hawai’i’s last queen, Lili’uokalani |Â What about the idea of restoring an independent Hawaiian monarchy? | Read PearlHarbor.org’s history of the December 7, 1941 attack | An eyewitness account of the attack on Pearl Harbor | Is Hawaii really a legal U.S. state? Not everyone thinks so: 1/2/3

Hawaiian Slack Key Guitar

SLACK-KEY GUITAR is an acoustic, fingerstyle style that arose as a low-key, island-based genre and only since the 1970s has it become well known worldwide. The name “slack key” comes from the practice of the guitarist’s loosening, or making “slack” the strings of a guitar until together they play a single chord. [National Geographic tells us about slack key guitar music | Watch slack key guitar masters LEDWARD KAAPANA and GEORGE KAHUMOKU play this distinctly mellow kind of music.