Surfing about Music. Timothy J. Cooley
Chronicle Books, 1996), 41. Reproduced with permission of Graham Peake.
During the first half of the twentieth century—the heyday of hapa haole music—surfing was still considered inherently Hawaiian, and this was confirmed by the musicking associated with early-twentieth- century surfing in Hawaiʻi and also in California, the first stop for globalizing surfing.
Noted early Californian surfer E. J. Oshier was active playing music on the beaches of Southern California from the 1930s until his death in 2007. The photograph in figure 7 was taken in 1937 by Don James at San Onofre, a beach between Los Angeles and San Diego that has been a popular surfing spot since the 1930s. The man playing ukulele with Oshier, George “Peanuts” Larson, was another early California surfer. Figure 8, also taken by Don James at San Onofre but two years later, includes friends of Oshier’s playing ukuleles and guitars while Eleanor Roach does a hula dance.
FIGURE 8. San Onofre music and hula session, 1939. Eleanor Roach (dancing), Barney Wilkes, Katie Dunbar, and Bruce Duncan. Photograph by Dr. Don James. From Surfing San Onofre to Point Dume, 1936–1942: Photographs by Don James (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1996), 50. Reproduced with permission of Graham Peake.
In an interview, Oshier told me that before World War II, the music at San Onofre was 98 to 99 percent Hawaiian. According to Oshier, everything Hawaiian was paradise to the San Onofre crew, and they actively cultivated Hawaiian-language songs, and also learned how to dance a little hula.45 Thus, even while haoles were appropriating Hawaiian cultural practices including music, dance, and surfing, the San Onofre group still conceived of those practices as Hawaiian. (I return to San Onofre and consider the present-day musicking and surfing scene there in chapter 6.)
The sense I get from my interactions with surfers who engage the hapa haole repertoire is that it is an icon of Hawaiʻi and surfing.46 Few of the songs are about surfing. That is not the point. They are perceived as Hawaiian, and thus are appropriate for a surfing lifestyle. But hapa haole songs are also about post-contact, post-monarchy Hawaiʻi, and they carry messages about the reinvention of surfing in the twentieth century. Hapa haole songs do not feature the powerful surfing queens and kings of Hawaiʻi but instead present a romanticized image of Hawaiʻi and especially Hawaiian women, who are forever small, soft, brown skinned, skilled at tourist-style hula, and always welcoming. This corresponds to a simultaneous regendering of surfing as the nearly exclusive domain of men, including white men, who take on surfing as a sign of appropriating Hawaiʻi, its women, and its lands. Hawaiian men are largely absent from the lyrics of English-language hapa haole songs, except for the few references of their surfing and canoe-paddling prowess.
HAWAIIAN SONGS, 1900–1950
Hawaiian songs from the first half of the twentieth century illustrate the new gendered roles for Hawaiian women and men, and occasionally their engagement in surfing. Here I survey Hawaiian songs from this period as found in four key sources. The first three sources are song collections published by eminent composers in Hawaiʻi who included in their songbooks some of their own compositions, as well as traditional pieces and songs composed by others. The first is the seminal Famous Hawaiian Songs, published by A. R. “Sonny” Cunha in 1914 and containing 45 songs. Cunha is often described as “the Father of Hapa Haole Songs.” The second collection is Charles E. King’s 1948 edition of King’s Book of Hawaiian Melodies, which includes 101 songs, many of them also in the first edition of the collection, which was published in 1916. A contemporary of Cunha’s, King emphasized more traditional Hawaiian music. The third songbook was published by Johnny Noble, a younger composer and publisher in the hapa haole genre who sometimes collaborated with Cunha. Johnny Noble’s Book of Famous Hawaiian Melodies was published in 1935 and contains 32 songs. The fourth source considered here is the Web site Hapa Haole Songs, which contained about 560 songs when I analyzed its content in the fall of 2012.47 All told, I searched over 700 songs and versions of songs for references to surfing. Many of these songs fall within the broad hapa haole genre, but the collections by Cunha, King, and Noble also contain traditional hula and other songs popular in Hawaiʻi. Here I give particular weight to the print collections since they are dated and each one represents especially influential collections of its era: the 1910s (Cunha and King), the 1930s (Noble), and the late 1940s (King). In these songs I searched for references to surf riding in both Hawaiian and English. In particular I looked for the term surf or the Hawaiian terms heʻe (to surf) and nalu (wave or surf break). I generally did not mark songs that mention the ocean or waves without a surf rider, such as the many references to the surf washing up on the beach.
In Cunha’s seminal 1914 collection, there is only one song that mentions surfing, “Ku’u ipo i ka he’e pu’e one,” by Princess Miriam Kapili Kekāuluohi Likelike (1851–87). Composed in the late nineteenth century, this song remained popular in the twentieth. The opening line is the same as the title, and is translated in Cunha’s collection as “Proudly riding on the crest of the ocean,” though a more literal translation is “My sweetheart who surfs over the sand bar.” In this song by one of the sisters of the two last ruling Hawaiian monarchs, we have a glimpse of pre-reinvented surfing that is integral to Hawaiian society.
There are no other direct references to surfing that I find in Cunha’s book, though there are several references to canoe paddling. One is Cunha’s own composition “My Tropical Hula Girl,” and it stands in contrast to Likelike’s Hawaiian-language song from a generation earlier. Cunha’s song is set in a moonlit night at Waikīkī:
Where the breakers they are rolling in high . . .
All the hula girlies in reach,
Will be prancing up and down the beach,
Up and down the beach, they’ve nothing to do,
But to paddle in their little canoe,
In their little canoeoo,
In their little canoe.
At least in this early hapa haole song, copyright 1909, the Waikīkī “hula girlies” are depicted as being capable of paddling out in their canoe on a moonlit night with high breakers: they were capable water women. However, the rest of the song is about a visitor to Waikīkī courting a hula girl, spooning, looking into her eyes; and when the hula ends, “[y]ou’ll be feeling kind of welakahao and raving for more.” Welakahao is not a Hawaiian word, but if we break it up as wela ka hao, we have three Hawaiian words with a possible translation of “hot or lustful in the horn or iron.” Cunha knew his audience well, including knowing when to switch to Hawaiian for his mainland audience. At any rate, the song is not about women’s canoe surfing skills, and we are left wondering what hula girlies paddling their little canoe is really about. If this early hapa haole song from the father of the genre carries anything from earlier Hawaiian poetic traditions, it may be double entendre and innuendo.
Noble’s 1935 collection, Johnny Noble’s Book of Famous Hawaiian Melodies, reads as a musical siren call to Hawaiʻi. The first song is “Hawaii across the Sea,” in which the wanderer is called to return to “. . . Fair Hawaii, To these Sunny Isles across the sea.” The very next page is a “descriptive novelty tone poem” called “The Surfboard Rider,” with the subtitle “As He Is Seen from the Beach at Waikīkī Any Day in the Year.” Composed by Noble, this tone poem is a somewhat breathless “musical lecture spoken and partially sung” (as described in the book) over a frenetic piano accompaniment. The narrator-singer tracks a surfer as he paddles out, catches a wave, builds speed, stands, falls, and paddles out for another wave. The only sung portion is: “Over the waves, oh see him surf. Over the waves . . . Over the waves, oh see him surf, over the waves he surfs along.”
Turning the page of Noble’s songbook, we find a two-column, six-photograph essay, “How to Ride a Surfboard: A Correspondence Course in the Hawaiian ‘Sport of Kings,’ ” by Harold Coffin (fig. 9). The essay claims that “Waikiki is about the only place in the world where successful surfboarding has been practiced to any great extent,” a falsehood introduced by Alexander Hume Ford two decades earlier. Overtly promoting tourism to Hawaiʻi, the essay recommends