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The writer Charles Warren Stoddard was especially taken with the music he heard everywhere in Honolulu. “Hawaiians are passionately fond of music,” he wrote, whether it was “the clang of gourds…beaten by savage palms,” a passing “troop of troubadours strumming a staccato measure,” or “Professor Berger and his clever native lads”—Henry Berger (1844-1929) and the Royal Hawaiian Band. Berger and his musicians sailed to San Francisco in 1883 to perform at the Triennial Conclave of the Knights Templar, an event that would also include the first Mainland performance of Liliuokalani’s beloved “Aloha Oe.” After a week of grueling, nonstop performances that included light classics, marches, ballroom dance tunes, and an a capella vocal rendition of “Hawaii Ponoi,” the Royal Hawaiian Band were declared “prime favorites with the populace” by the San Francisco Chronicle. During his forty-year tenure, Berger continually expanded the RHB from its martial roots to include full orchestral strings, vocalists, and a glee club that sang Hawaiian songs while accompanying themselves on guitars, banjos, and ‘ukuleles. In the three decades following the Triennial Conclave, the RHB blazed a trail for all Hawaiian musicians—from San Francisco, throughout the West Coast, and ultimately across the continent.

The earliest known commercial mainland performance of Hawaiian music with the ‘ukulele was at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. The Kilauea Cyclorama featured a re-creation of the interior of Kilauea Crater, complete with a quartet of vocalists that included William Aeko. Dubbed the Volcano Singers, they accompanied themselves with Spanish guitars, five-string taropatch, and ‘ukulele. Along with the musicians, the entire exhibition was shipped west to San Francisco for display at the California Mid-Winter Fair in 1894.

Anthony Zablan, Pan-American Exposition, Buffalo, New York, 1901. (Hawaii State Archives)

Hawaiian musicians often supplemented their appearances at world’s fairs with performances on the vaudeville stage. After leaving the 1901 Pan-American Exposition, Mekia Kealakai’s troupe made its way west from Buffalo, performing on the Keith Vaudeville circuit, a tour that ended with engagements in San Francisco and Los Angeles. In the first decade of the twentieth century, Hawaiian performers could also be heard in such cities as New York, Atlanta, Chicago, and Atlantic City. A Hawaiian quintet even entertained President Taft and his guest, Prince Tsai Tsao of China, during a state dinner at the White House in 1910.
 
Interest in the ‘ukulele grew with the production of Bird of Paradise in 1911. A stage drama set in Hawaii, Bird was the work of Bay Area playwright Richard Walton Tully and Los Angeles impresario Oliver Morosco; its most notable feature was a continuous undercurrent of Hawaiian music provided by a quintet of native musicians that included Aeko. The play opened on Broadway in 1912 and became a sensation, touring North America, Europe, and Australia. “It wasn’t until Tully’s opera, ‘The Bird of Paradise’ was produced,” Edison Phonograph Monthly reported, “that musicians gave any serious thought to the [‘ukulele] and its music.” But it was an event in San Francisco in 1915—one that capitalized on the popularity of Bird of Paradise and the success of Hawaiian music pioneers like Aeko, Kealakai, and Kaai—that would incite a worldwide craze for the ‘ukulele and Hawaiian music.

The Hawaii Exposition Commission began the task of organizing an Hawaiian exhibition for the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in 1911, four years before the proposed start of the event. The commissioners decided on a French Renaissance building designed by C.W. Dickey, a Hawaii-born architect from Oakland. The main hall accommodated an aquarium filled with tropical fish that covered three walls; exploding from the fourth wall was a sculptural group by Gordon Usborne entitled “Surf Riders.” In the center of the hall “an Hawaiian quintette—amid palms and tree ferns—sang morning and afternoon those weird, unworldly melodies that seem to rise and fall on the long swells of the Pacific and take their tempo from them.”

Henry Kailimai’s Hawaiian Quintet,
Hawaii Building, Panama-Pacific

Jonah Kumalae. (Hawaii State Archives)

The quintet (and the fish) were a hit, one of the most popular exhibitions at the P.P.I.E. “People were about ready for a new sensation in popular music,” exposition historian Frank Morton Todd wrote, “and the sweet voices of the Hawaiians you heard at the Hawaiian Building…were enough to start another musical vogue.” San Francisco-based Sherman, Clay & Co. took notice, calling themselves “the largest ‘ukulele dealers in the world” and advertising Hawaii-made ‘ukuleles and free lessons beginning in May 1915. Visitors to the P.P.I.E. also could purchase ‘ukuleles, taropatches, and other koa wood curios from the award-winning concession of Jonah Kumalae. On Thanksgiving Day, the San Francisco Chronicle threw a party for the “inmates of the Children’s Hospital and the Relief Home,” with music by Hawaiian musicians from the Keech Studios, owned by Hawaii-born brothers Alvin and Kelvin Keech. When industrialist Henry Ford visited, he was so enthralled by the Hawaiian music he hired the house quintet to come to Detroit when the P.P.I.E. ended in December 1915 to play for Ford Motor Company events throughout the Midwest. The imp was out of the bottle…

Advertisement for Ford Hawaiian Quintet,
Newark Daily Advocate, April 11, 1917. (Collection of John King)

Charmian and Jack London, Honolulu, 1907. (Hawaii State Archives)

That month, Jack and Charmian London returned to Hawaii aboard the steamer Great Northern—a voyage that featured Hawaiian entertainment supplied by the Keech Studios. On his first trip to Hawaii in 1907, Jack London likened the ‘ukulele to “a young guitar”; thereafter, he mentioned the instrument frequently in his Hawaiian stories and even presaged the impending mainland mania for the ‘ukulele in his novel The Valley of the Moon. In Honolulu, on the last day of his visit, London was feted at a farewell luau with a mele (song) telling of his pilgrimage around the Big Island. “We had assembled our friends for the christening of the Jack London Hula,” Charmian later wrote, “chanted stanza by stanza, each repeated by Ernest Kaai and his perfect Hawaiian singers with their instruments. Each long stanza, carrying an incident of the progress around Hawaii, closed with two lines:

Hainaia mai ana ka puana,
No Keaka Lakana neia inoa.

“This song is then echoed,
’Tis in honor of Jack London.”

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© 2007 by John King and Jim Tranqauda.
All images collected, digitized and © 2007 by John King.

 

About the authors:

John King

John King began playing the ukulele in 1960 while living on the island of Oahu. He has contributed articles to the Hawaiian Journal of History, Spirit of Aloha, and the Galpin Society Journal and is currently co-authoring a scholarly history of the ukulele for the University of Hawaii Press.

Jim Tranquada

A former newspaper reporter with a degree in history from Stanford University, Jim Tranquada is director of communications for Occidental College in Los Angeles. He is a great-great grandson of ukulele pioneer Augusto Dias.