The Hawaii connection.

Rllink

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I just thought that I would throw this out for discussion. I see that the Hawaii connection is important to a lot of people here. I find the history and the traditions of Hawaii as the birth place of the ukulele to be interesting, but it doesn't really move me. How do the rest of you feel? Does the Hawaiian heritage play a big part in your ukulele experience?
 
The Hawaii connection for me is personal rather than historical. My dad worked for Matson Lines in the late 1930s and travelled from San Francisco to Hawaii regularly during this time, then spent the rest of his all-too-short life going back every chance he got. This meant joining the military and being stationed there in WWII, then returning to recover after being injured in the Battle of Tinian, and bringing me there as a kid in the 1960s and 1970s long after he had retired (we lived for a short time in Kaneohe in the 1970s). I'm not sure if it was because of his Hawaii connections, or just because he was born in the 1920s and had a uke as kid, that he could play, and so he taught me to play a little as well. He knew a lot of Hawaiian musicians and my childhood visits always involved a lot of tourist luaus and such, only instead of attending as tourists we attended on the guest list :)

I got my first uke for my 7th birthday and of course gave it up before I hit my teens. I came back to it in my 40s, and it was in part to sort of try to reconnect with my childhood (complete with a trip to Oahu for the first time in 30 years). So I guess for me there's a lot tangled up in there that has to do with Hawaii, although my actual playing is rarely Hawaiian at all.
 
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I lean towards Hawaiian music. But I spoke I should say at am down to the more modern Hawaiian. There is nothing more fun than playing some Ka'au Crater Boys stuff. I all around like the whole Hawaiian culture stuff.
 
I was there once for an hour and a half on the way to Taiwan, and that's all. But my Godmother was Hawaiian and I loved her a lot. She usta have luaus in her back yard with Hawaiian food, and her daughters would hula. She was a giant woman and very loud. When she took me in her big arms and hugged me, I knew I'd been hugged!

My Mom and Dad usta like Hawaiian music too and usta like the Webbly Edwards show on the TV when I was a kid.
When I was in Taiwan some of the Hawaiian guys roasted a pig, and we had a great party. One of the guys was a close friend of mine, and we usta talk about Hawaii all the time. So I've had some contact with them and their music in the good ol' days. In Basic Training there was a flight of Hawaiians, and they usta march to Hawaiian music--very cool.


My Godmother gave me an old Ka-Lai ukulele in 1963, and it hung on the walls for 50 years. I still have it, and it still plays. I was glad to find out that 6 string ukuleles are used a lot in Hawaiian music, and I bought Jumpin' Jim's "Gone Hawaii".

Aloooha! :eek:ld:
 
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I live in Australia.
I've had a fascination with Hawaiian history and culture for a long time, and since that culture is grounded in place I really. really want to go there some time. I was in Honolulu airport for a stopover to L.A. once - but didn't really have enough time to go through U.S. Customs and see the sights. So I went up to the roof and - on my tippie-toes, saw Diamond Head in the distance, and the palm trees swaying......
The uke connects me to two pools - the golden era of song writing (ie early 20th century) and Hawaii - well as much as someone displaced by 100 years, and 7,607 km (respectively) can get.
I have learned many "Hawaiian" songs, and with them some language. To this day a rendition of "Aloha 'Oe moves a roomful of people to tears.
Why my interest ??? I don't know. We have a rich original culture here in Australia too that has much to teach us, and "Hawaiian culture" may well be very different in it's current form to my illusions, but, still she calls * ..... (* cue "Aloha 'Oe")
 
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I've had a fascination with Hawaiian history and culture for a long time, and since that culture is grounded in place I really. really want to go there some time.

I've never been there, and other than the volcanoes (when I had a bit of a geology hobby) never really had much interest since before coming to the ukulele, and the story of Jake Shimabukuro's life, being ethnically Japanese but growing up in Hawaii was very interesting to me. I later found out that the ukulele is quite popular in parts of eastern Asia, like China, Japan and Thailand.

My current interest in Hawaiian culture is similar to yours, but slightly different due to being born and raised in the USA. :)
 
Rllink asked :
Does the Hawaiian heritage play a big part in your ukulele experience?
... not for me at all. I "re-met" the ukulele a couple of years ago, having owned a couple of wall-hangers back in the '70's, as a side-shoot from trying to learn claw-hammer on a 5-string banjo. That aspect worked for me and I now also use a ukulele to play some lute-music arrangements as well as having a couple of instruments tuned like a mandolin (or a fiddle, if you prefer).

For me the ukulele is a flexible little instrument that adapts well to several styles of music I like to play ... none of which is the traditional strumming style or the more modern strum-along-in-a-group style. I don't have a problem with either ... horses for courses, each to his own etc etc ... just not what I want to play ... YMMV :)
 
I've been to Hawaiii a couple times, and loved those trips. Beautiful land, beautiful people, beautiful climate, what's not to like?

My first handmade ukulele was a tenor, built on the Big Island, mostly of koa, but I didn’t get it to play Hawaiian music — I’m a sixties guy; I like geezer rock and blues and folk, a little country and even some jazz and standards, and the Beatles are at the top of my set lists. (I can manage one Iz song, and it’s the same one everybody else does, and not Hawaiian, save for his flavoring.)

Great music, a lot of it from the Islands, but it doesn’t call to me in particular. Just how I was raised.

Then again, there are some outstanding uke makers in Hawaii, and that’s a real thing for me. You’d expect that, since they started down that road a lot sooner than most of the rest of the world.

However, there are outstanding uke luthiers elsewhere, too, so for me, the provenance of an instrument is more about the builder than the location in which it is made. You can find great ukuleles creators all over the world these days. Same problem there as with the top Hawaiian makers: Getting on the wait lists ...
 
I am a Southern California native who was a frequent visitor to Hawaii as a kid. My mom got a place on Maui in 1979 and when I was growing up we spent pretty much all our family vacations there. I love Hawaii and I was interested in the music and culture, but it was pretty much just in the background when I was a kid. I took guitar lessons starting in fourth grade but had kind of stopped taking lessons and did not play as much after I was done with high school.

Fast forward a few years and I met the woman who would become my wife. She happened to be Hawaiian by birth, but her family moved to Southern California when she was in elementary school. She has a large family (four sisters and three aunts and uncles all with kids) and there was always lots of Hawaiian stuff going on at their homes, whether it was Hawaiian food or two of her sisters that danced hula competitively practicing or musicians jamming in the backyard (kanikapila).

So, we got along really well because I was familiar with all the Hawaiian stuff, and fit in with her family even though I am haole.

My journey to ukulele came about because after sitting there listening to Hawaiian music being played in the house, I finally dusted off my guitar and realized "I can play that!" and started to join in. Then I thought that if I got an ukulele, I could take one with me much easier than traveling with a guitar. I pretty much never looked back, and now I play ukulele almost exclusively. I also now have a deep appreciation for Hawaiian music and culture, and moved to Oahu three years ago.

My next goal is to perform Hawaiian music here. It has already happened in a couple of isolated incidents, and I hope I can make it a regular thing.
 
To me it's a happy, fun instrument with a surprising (to most) range. Pretty much everyone to whom I've mentioned the ukulele smiled when they brought it to mind. I've always seen it as a bit of a rebel instrument. Something that, through history, found a way to be played and enjoyed. It's portable, discreet, but fits in pretty much anywhere as long as people dismiss assumptions. Whether the original machete de rajao or cavaquinho, it made its way to Hawaii from Portugal and found a new purpose. So when I sought out to learn an instrument to maintain my sanity with work and "growing up", I reached for the ukulele. It's a big reason why I went with an LFdM. It's an ukulele crafted by a Spanish luthier who spent his youth in Portugal. Some have criticised the type of bracing he applies to the top, but to me he strives to create an instrument that can exceed its popular potential. There was never a strong Hawaiian connection for me. Personally, I've never been fond of simply strumming when playing solo, and love finger picking songs. That said, I'm having one built right now and selected Milo wood for the back and sides as a homage to its homeland as it seemed appropriate. Yeah, I know, I'm all over the place with my thinking.
 
I respect it, but it does not play a big part - maybe because I grew up in the eastern part the U.S.

I am more interested in its Portuguese roots.
 
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The "Hawaii connection" is central to my interest in the ukulele. My great-great-great grandparents were haole seafarers who married in and settled in Honolulu in 1834. The wife was supposedly the first woman of European descent to be married in the Islands (though I am well aware that Hawaiians had been getting married for centuries, so the significance of this is more in the nature of trivia and not particularly important in the overall scope of Hawaiian history). My mother was a mainland girl, but she was close to her Hawaiian roots, her grandfather having been a subject of the Kingdom of Hawaii who emigrated to Seattle in the late 1800s and served there as Consul for the Kingdom before the overthrow of Queen Lili'uokalani. When I was a small child, she used to get out her 78 records of Hawaiian music and practice the hula in full regalia. I still have her ukulele, an undistinguished "Royal Hawaiian," and my grandmother's wonderful Nunes. I had my own Favilla as a child in California but gave up the ukulele about the time I went to high school and didn't get back to it for about forty-five years.
 
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I respect it, but it does not play a big part - maybe because I grew up in the eastern part the U.S.

I am more interested in its Portuguese roots.

I was going to post something just like this but actadh was ahead of me. So, this is a long ditto.
 
Nah. I can appreciate it, but I don't feel connected to it.

I've been to Hawaii, got hitched there, and it was nice but it isn't someplace my heart longs for.
 
I've never been to Hawaii, and I actually came to the ukulele on a whim; shortly after buying a Fender Telecaster guitar, I was flipping through a Musicians Friend catalogue and saw a Mahalo uke styled after the Telecaster, so I bought it just because it would be cute hanging next the my Telecaster. The week I received it, I also received a postcard from the Los Angeles Music Center announcing their Ukule-Along summer series. I decided to sign up since I now had a ukulele. That's about a year and a half ago and I've gone through 12 ukes, now have 7, and 3 short basses (with one more on the way). So I don't have any connection to Hawaii, just to the ukulele.
 
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I don't feel a Hawaiian connection, but I do find the history of the ukulele interesting, and I have watched Blue Hawaii with Elvis Presley many times. I imagine though, that the 1961 Hawaii depicted in Blue Hawaii is probably hard to find. My wife and I used to do epic vacations, but we never made it to Hawaii. I guess that it never called to us. And now we have two homes that we divide our time between, one being in a tropical locale, so I don't see it in the future any time soon. I was wondering though. Every ukulele book that I have has several Hawaiian songs in them, none of which ever resonate with me, so while I work my way through them for the practice sometimes, I seldom add them to my list of songs that I like to play. And because I have to find them somewhere on youtube so that I can hear how they are supposed to sound, a lot of times I just skip them. Anyway, I was wondering about others think about it.
 
I'm banging my way through the "Jumpin' Jim" book. When I have trouble sight singing them, I play them on my flutes. I have to play them up an octave though. They're too low for the flute but just right for my voice.

Where there's a will, there's a way! :eek:ld:
 
Trying to put a connection with hawaii and your uke is like putting a connection with you and God, you know it's there :)
 
Trying to put a connection with hawaii and your uke is like putting a connection with you and God, you know it's there :)

You know it's there, it's just so damned mousy.
 
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