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Kīkā Kila: How the Hawaiian Steel Guitar Changed the Sound of Modern Music

2017; Duke University Press; Volume: 64; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00141801-4174296

1527-5477

Patrick Burke,

Asian American and Pacific Histories

John W. Troutman’s new book is a history of global cultural transformation and appropriation centered on a specific musical instrument: the Hawaiian steel guitar, or kīkā kila. By employing kīkā kila as a case study, the book sheds light on the history and politics of Hawai‘i, from sovereign kingdom to fiftieth state, and the dramatic way in which an obscure, local musical tradition became fundamental to the development of popular music around the world.After an introductory examination of the Spanish guitar’s musical and political role in nineteenth-century Hawai‘i, the story of kīkā kila begins with Joseph Kekuku (1874–1932), who modified his guitar by raising the strings higher above the frets to accommodate the novel technique of sliding a steel bar over the instrument’s neck. After Kekuku began teaching and performing in San Francisco in 1904, the steel guitar’s popularity spread with incredible speed across the mainland United States. “By 1916,” Troutman reveals, “Hawaiian guitar music was outselling every other genre of recorded music in the United States” (77). The misleadingly named Honolulu Conservatory of Music (founded in Cleveland, Ohio, by the opportunistic brothers Harry G. Stanley and George Bronson, neither Hawaiians nor guitarists) ran a national network of Hawaiian guitar school franchises that served 200,000 students between the late 1920s and the 1940s. In 1930s Los Angeles, guitarists such as Sol Ho‘opi‘i entertained the Hollywood elite in Hawaiian-themed nightclubs while appearing in films like Waikiki Wedding (1937) and Hawaiian Nights (1939). Readers interested in the history of music in the United States will be most intrigued by Troutman’s careful analysis of the influence of Hawaiian guitar style on both the bottleneck slide technique of blues guitarists and the pedal steel guitars typical of country music. The electric guitar, perhaps the most iconic instrument in American popular music, developed from the Hawaiian guitar—when the electric guitar’s inventors applied for a patent in 1934, Ho‘opi‘i traveled to Washington, DC, to give a demonstration. At the same time, Hawaiian musicians continued to promote their music internationally from London to Kolkata to Tokyo and, perhaps most astonishingly, in Nazi Germany, where the Moe family both performed for an admiring Adolf Hitler and helped to smuggle refugees out of the country.Troutman thoughtfully assesses the “dissonance” in the steel guitar’s global reception during the mid-twentieth century. At the same time that Hawaiian music signified cosmopolitan modernity, it also represented the supposed backwardness of Hawai‘i’s “uncivilized, inferior peoples” (84). “Hit pseudo-Hawaiian songs” (151) recalled the primitivist stereotypes of blackface minstrelsy and encouraged white audiences to “play Hawaiian” in insulting ways. During the “Hawaiian Renaissance” of the 1970s, these associations between the steel guitar and tourist fantasy led a younger generation of Hawaiian musicians to turn away from the instrument, which was now “seen as a tool to ridicule and delegitimize Kānaka political concerns rather than articulate them” (214). Troutman, noting that “the indigeneity of the instrument—its associations with Hawaiian history, if not with Hawaiian musicians—remains firmly outside public consciousness, at least beyond the Islands,” hopes to revive its status by revealing its complex history (228).The book draws on thorough and imaginative archival research as well as original interviews, and Troutman’s writing is clear and engaging, if occasionally somewhat encyclopedic as he displays his considerable knowledge of the kīkā kila tradition. A gorgeous selection of photos, many in color, showcases vintage guitars and their players. Kīkā Kila is highly recommended to readers concerned with the history of Hawai‘i, American popular music, or the global circulation of culture during the twentieth century.