Surfing about Music. Timothy J. Cooley
inheritors of Hawaii’s favorite pastime.
NEW SURFING: THE REINVENTION OF HEʻE NALU
Tensions between the Hawaiian monarchy’s and foreign industry’s control of Hawaiian resources came to a head in 1893, and with the support of the U.S. Marines, Queen Liliʻuokalani was deposed, Hawaiʻi was made a republic, and then it was illegally annexed as a U.S. territory in 1898.33 Haoles were taking over Hawaiʻi; why not surfing?
With U.S. business and military interests effectively in control of Hawaiʻi, in the first half of the twentieth century many material and cultural aspects of the islands were transformed to accommodate the growing capitalist demands of the United States. Heʻe nalu, or what was increasingly referred to by the English-language term surfing, was not excluded. Walker’s convincing argument that surfing remained essentially and defiantly Hawaiian—that the surf zone was the one area where Hawaiian men were able to resist colonial control (though as he notes, the prominence of women surfing in the twentieth century declined)34—is a crucial counterpoint to the story of reinvention that I tell here. Surfing was and is not one thing. While on the one hand the surf zone remained an arena where Hawaiian men strove to preserve agency beyond the reach of colonial domination, on the other hand the practice of surfing was simultaneously being reinvented to suit the purposes of non-Hawaiian practitioners both in Hawaiʻi and abroad. This reinvented, reinterpreted, revalued surfing is what I call New Surfing.
Alexander Hume Ford and Jack London were key figures in the reinvention of what became New Surfing. Ford was a wealthy world traveler who in 1907 moved to Waikīkī and adopted it as his home. He took to surfing with a passion and founded the Outrigger Canoe Club in 1908 in Waikīkī with the express intention of encouraging wave riding on boards as well as in canoes. The membership was almost exclusively white, and women were not admitted until 1926. The exclusion of Hawaiians was not written into the club’s charter, but the idea of their inclusion did not mesh with Ford’s greater agenda: the promotion of tourism and development in Hawaiʻi.35 The Outrigger Canoe Club was for Honolulu’s elite men, who at that time were predominantly white.
One of Ford’s early converts to surfing was Jack London, who sailed to Hawaiʻi in 1907 with his wife, Charmian, shortly after Ford settled there. Where Ford was a wheeler-dealer man of action, London was a man of words. Through his writerly pen we see the transformation of surfing into a hypermasculine “royal sport for the natural kings of the earth.”36 A Hawaiian surfer whom London witnesses becomes: “[A] Mercury—a black Mercury. His heels are winged, and in them is the swiftness of the sea. . . . [H]e is a man, a natural king, a member of the kingly species that has mastered matter and the brutes and lorded it over creation.”37 Here, in the first years of surfing’s reinvention, London introduces the notion of man’s mastery over nature—strikingly different from earlier Hawaiian approaches that suggested working with natural forces for sustenance and pleasure. In an unintentionally backhanded way, linking surfing to Hawaiian royalty also made the sport attractive to wealthy haole men. All were acutely aware that just a few years earlier Hawaiian royalty had been deposed, clearing the way for the new champions of the universe—wealthy Western men—to enjoy the spoils of a bygone era.
While surfing remained a vital link to Hawaiian heritage for many, this is not the story that non-Hawaiian surfing historians have been telling. Instead, today surfing origin myths, after acknowledging that Hawaiians (emphasizing Hawaiian royalty) surfed long ago, tend to place the beginning of the modern sport squarely in white men’s hands in the first years of the twentieth century. Patrick Moser points out how the myth of surfing’s demise in the hands of Hawaiians plays into white histories of surfing—that surfing was rescued from obscurity by white industrial enterprise.38 Walker makes a similar point but from a Hawaiian perspective: haole interests in Hawaiʻi needed to emasculate the strong Hawaiian male and emphasize instead the (tourism-industry sponsored) aloha of the Hawaiian hula girl.39 A new genre of Hawaiian music emerged that helped this process along.
HAPA HAOLE MUSIC, TOURISM, AND THE EXPORT OF SURFING
I love a pretty little Honolulu hula hula girl
She’s the candy kid to wriggle, hula girl
She will surely make you giggle, hula girl
With her naughty little wiggle
—Chorus of “My Honolulu Hula Girl,” by Sonny Cunha, 1909 (audio example 3)
Annexed by the United States, Hawaiʻi quickly became the tourist destination of choice for those with the means to get there. Tourism is always a two-way street. The primary objective may be to bring paying customers to the tourist destination, but to do this the industry must first export inviting ideas about that destination. One genre of music that did this better than any other was hapa haole (half-foreign or half-white) songs. This genre combined English texts with some Hawaiian words or phrases, and Hawaiian musical aesthetic with then-popular mainland styles such as ragtime, jazz, blues, and so forth.40 Hapa haole music, like surfing itself, became one of the greatest exports for Hawaiʻi globally, and during the first half of the twentieth century it was one of the most successful products of the mainland music industry as it changed its focus from selling sheet music and instruments to selling records. Up to the Great Depression of the 1930s, hapa haole was the best-selling genre for leading recording companies.41 Music did much to shape the world’s image of Hawaiʻi and Hawaiians.
Exports of cultural practices like surfing and musicking require the export of practitioners as well. Many leading Hawaiian musicians from the early twentieth century had their careers on the mainland, especially in California’s port cities such as Los Angeles. A few Hawaiian surfers also personally introduced surfing to key coastal areas around the world.
Here I focus on the early exchange of personnel and ideas between coastal California and Hawaiʻi. Though Hawaiʻi remained the ideal surfing destination, and while Californian surfers emulated many Hawaiian cultural practices in addition to surfing, including hapa haole music and hula, the cultural center of surfing eventually shifted from Hawaiʻi to California. Over time, surfing was remade, reimagined, reinvented to reflect mainland U.S. and global cosmopolitan social and cultural norms of male dominance, competition, and commercialization. Music, too, reflected and sometimes participated in these changes.
This story is not without irony: Hawaiians themselves introduced surfing to the mainland United States and to Australia at the very time when some accounts were declaring Hawaiian surfing to be extinct. The first recorded surfing in California was accomplished by three Hawaiian princes, brothers Jonah Ku-hio- Kalanianaʻole, David Piʻikoi Kupio Kawa-nanakoa, and Edward Kawa-nanakoa. Natives of the island of Kauaʻi, they were attending St. Matthew’s Military School in San Mateo when, in 1885, they made their own boards with California redwood and surfed off the shore of Santa Cruz.42 These royal surfers were succeeded by George Freeth, a hapa haole born in Hawaiʻi to a Hawaiian mother and Irish-immigrant father. In 1907 he moved to the Los Angeles area, where he was hired to promote tourism to the Hotel Redondo, in Redondo Beach, California, by demonstrating surfing, teaching surfing and swimming, and serving as a lifeguard.43
The greatest global surfing ambassador was the multimedaling Olympic swimmer Duke Paoa Kahanamoku, who introduced surfing to the U.S. East Coast in 1912 and to Australia and New Zealand in 1914 and 1915, respectively. He also spent time surfing in Southern California in 1915. Yet his international influence began earlier, at Waikīkī, where many tourists from around the world saw him surf, and even learned how to surf from him. Kahanamoku was also part of the loosely affiliated Waikīkī Beachboys—Hawaiian men who taught surfing, served as lifeguards, and provided all sorts of other services to tourists at Waikīkī, including playing music and singing (hapa haole songs as well as other genres).44 Thus at the very moment Ford and London were suggesting that Hawaiians had effectively abandoned surfing, Hawaiians were actually teaching them and the world how to surf.
FIGURE 7. E. J. Oshier (left) and George