Preceding the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy by agents supported by the United States government in 1893, the archipelago had witnessed a flowering of literature, dance, and music, all of which were born on a foundation of prayer and an understanding that cultural life unified and expressed of the sovereignty of Hawaiians. By the early 20th century Hawaiian culture, having co-existed for centuries with traders and plantation owners, was highly flexible and adaptive to outside influences, while foreign capitalists had suppressed hula dance performances. In that context, Joseph Kekuku (b. 1874 La’ie, O’ahu, Hawaii; d 1932 Morristown, New Jersey) adapted the European guitar, which Hawaiians played using steel rather than gut strings, as an instrument played flat on the lap and using a steel bar to pitch the strings using the left hand, giving birth to the “steel guitar.” That instrumental style traveled the world with Kekuku and a diaspora of musicians who toured widely throughout Asia, Australia, the Americas, and Europe during the late 19th and early 20th centuries and became the basis of much of modern guitar playing, still felt most notably in American country music in the mainland U.S. Hawaiian music (or Hawaiian-referential music) became outrageously popular in the U.S. during the 1910s-‘20s. The idea of Hawaii was a touchstone of the American pop charts for decades and so deeply influenced the past hundred years of music played on plucked string instruments that it would be reasonable to say that much of what is played on guitar today has some Hawaiian antecedent. In parallel to the rise of the steel guitar was a tradition of falsetto singing, particularly among men, which, drawing from a variety of both native and non-native sources, emphasized the break between the registers, as in yodeling.

Celebrity virtuoso native Hawaiian performers made popular records through the 1920s and ‘30s for major American labels. By 1940 Leo Kupina’i’ had established a recording studio in Honolulu, which was used by 25-year-old William Bell Fredlund (b. Michigan Oct 26, 1915; d. 1985) to establish his very productive Bell Records label (the second Hawaiian-owned label, following the HTP label of 1934-40). Raised in Minnesota by an Irish immigrant mother, Fredlund became one of the most important figures in the business community in 1940s Honolulu, employing union musicians. Bell released hundreds of hit records in collaboration with his wife Alice Davis Fredlund and her brother Willie Davis, both of whom were musicains, at a rate of more than a dozen a month for much of the 1940s, including the first discs by the crooner Alfred Apaka, the popular George Archer and his Pagans, singer-songwriter Andy Cummings (b. Aug. 2, 1913 Honolulu; d. June 23, 1995), master guitarist Gabby Pahinui, and many others including records in Filipino and Japanese.

Bell Records built a record manufacturing plant in 1948 in the working class Kalihi neighborhood of Honolulu but folded around 1950, supplanted largely by the 49th State Hawaii Record label founded by record dealer George K. Ching around 1947. (49th State’s early newspaper ads magnanimously offered congratulations to performers on the Bell roster who had recently released discs.) Ching worked closely with John K. Almeida (b. Pauoa Valley, O’ahu Nov. 28, 1897; d. Oct 9, 1985, Honolulu), a brilliant blind guitarist, songwriter, and all-around musician, to scout for talent and work in A&R. Almeida had begun performing at age 15 and played in 1917 at Queen Liliuoukalini’s funeral. He was an eminent fixture on the Honolulu musical scene, composing and performing prolifically. In the 30s, he began recording and performing on the radio. In September 1948, his wife and collaborator of nearly 30 years, Elizabeth K. Nahaku, died. It was around the same time he went to work for Ching’s 49th State label; he directed every recording session for the label and performed on many of them.

Ching and Almeida drew much of the recording talent for the 49th State roster from the hotels and nightclubs that had become the lifeblood of Honolulu’s music scene in the ‘40s, including, notably, Genoa Keawe (b. Oct. 31, 1919, O’ahu; d. Feb. 26, 2008) who began performing as a teenager in the late ‘30s and performed for 70 years, earning numerous awards and acclaim as a singer, songwriter, and recording artist. Unlike the performers on Bell, the 49th State roster were non-union. There remains, however, some stigma surrounding the music of the era, connected to the colonialist “tiki bar” culture that grew through the 1930s-‘60s. Very few Hawaiian performers of the ‘40s and ‘50s could earn a living solely on their music. Those who performed regularly relied heavily on the hotels and clubs where the tourist trade was a significant part of their income. (The Cafe Pagoda in Honolulu used the tagline “It’s Fun to ‘Slum’” in their ads in the late ’40s, aimed at tourists wishing to mix with the locals.) As a result, although the local labels recorded a lot of songs that were local hits for Hawaiian (and Japanese) speakers, they also worked hard at finding new hits all the time to feed the record production machine, and that meant some stuff that was for the tourists. The influence of mainland popular music was pervasive, but many of the most influential American performers were those who came by steamship to play in person. As a result, among the popular Black women of the era, it is not Ella Fitzgerald or Sarah Vaughn, or Billie Holiday who made the biggest mark on Hawaiian music but Nellie Lutcher (b. 1912; d. 2007), partially by dint of her late 1947 appearances in Honolulu, around the time of her hit song “Fine Brown Frame,” which spoke to Hawaiian audiences.

The 49th State label’s eponymous wish for inclusion in the U.S.A came to naught in January 1959 when Alaska became the 49th state of the union, and it was around that time that the label drew to a close, but not before the short-lived Island Recording Studio label had appeared. Island was largely a venue for the Heeheno Serenaders under the direction of Joseph Kahaulelio (b. Honolulu Dec. 14, 1929; d. Honolulu 1985) who had previously recorded for 49th State. Kahaulelio came up through the hotels in the ‘50s and became an important dancer and teacher carrying a more distinctly Hawaiian cultural thread into an era that became increasingly more oriented toward an unassimilated and politicized independent Hawaiian expression in the decades that followed. But it all happened very fast, and there was so little money going around to support most musicians or dancers to develop their work. It is, in a sense, the totality of the work of many people together that so much of what Hawaiian music has retained its core values. In an 2021 interview the radio personality, record collector, and researcher Harry B. Soria, Jr. (b. 1948; d. Dec. 7, 2021) addressed the meaning of the 1940s-50s era music this way:

“There are two ways to look at it. Some people say, ‘oh [the colonialists] outlawed the language and they destroyed the connection [to the past], and we lost our roots.’ But on the other side without hapa haole [half-foreign] music, we wouldn’t have had that string [of cultural continuity] to keep us going to this point so that we would have a generation rediscovering Hawaiian language and writing songs again.”

He was right, of course. This collection by an outsider and novice might open a window and makes clear that there is a person-to-person sharing from the Hawaiian Kingdom through the Territorial era into Statehod of lasting value.

For this installment of our Ataraxia guided meditation series, Louisville-based Psychic Skin (aka Joyce Barbour) offers gentle ambient music and a trio of guided meditations centered around trans voices from her community.

Kelly Weaver, currently interim ED at Out Loud Louisville, opens the cassette with a grounding exercise that encourages listeners to be present and accepting of their bodies.

Louisville-born but now Missouri-based Rylee Short offers a refreshing morning meditation to open the b-side, then a breath-centered meditation focused on positive affirmations.

Barbour intersperses these works with complementary sound baths, so listeners can use the entire sequence or break the tape down into several mini-meditations and rest period.

The Canto has persisted for centuries in the voices of hundreds of men and women who conjure vivid visions of apocalypse, the divine, and angelitos (very young children who have died). But the verses are also rooted in daily life in the valley – labor and drought, family, animals, and the life cycles of plants. There are countless entonaciones (melodies) passed on in 10-line rhyming decimas, an ancient song form originating in Spain and found from South America to the Mississippi Delta. The combination is entrancing and transporting, cosmic and earthly at once.

The artwork introduces the work of Frederico Lohse, a baker from the village of Los Vilos who brought the end-times visions from the cantos to life – the apocalypse painted on old flour sacks.

Mississippi Records is privileged to work with the Museo Campesino En Movimiento and their archive of hundreds of hours of intimate field recordings of the Canto – music rarely, if ever, heard outside of the region.

First proposed by Russian rocket scientist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and taken to mystical literary heights by Arthur C. Clark in his 1979 book Fountains of Paradise, the concept of a space lift takes a spiritual turn here, with LAGOSS chronicling its construction, right here and there on a near future version of their Island of Tenerife, in the Canary Archipelago.

The album moves freely through ideas and moods akin to the world imagined by Arthur C. Clarke. It conveys a new story by sonically imagining future civilizations in a faux ethnographical exercise whilst exploring current ideas of technology, religion and alternative history by creating its own particular insular sound world.

The album counts with the participation of dear friends such as a synth solo by Spencer Clark (Monopoly Child Star Searchers et all.) and a punchy, full blown remix by Muqata’a. Altogether creating a unique collection of eerie musical moments made of sub tropical moods and cyber exotica jams from a band that keeps growing and evolving into their very own personal sound. Enter Tenerife in the late 21st Century, meet the Aquachachos and Guayechi, and ascend!