This issue’s focus on cultural brokerage and glocal soundscapes yields a perfect opportunity to explore a heretofore understudied phenomenon: the role of indigenous people in shaping the sounds of modern commercial musical practices. The settler logic that posited indigenous people as “uncivilized,” passive recipients of “civilization’s” superior cultural palette has long influenced historians to ignore native musicians (and audiences) as figures worthy for study in the history of commercial music. Likewise, for decades before the advent of ethnomusicology, and for years following its genesis, musicologists constructed indigenous musics as the anti-modern, as performances of “tradition,” decisively contrasted with those Western musics seen to exhibit innovation. In many cases, meanwhile, colonial regimes even attempted to police the musical performances of indigenous peoples, and to use Western art or martial marching musics as tools to enforce their agendas of imposed cultural assimilation.Footnote ¹ These academic and political contexts have each worked, whether inadvertently or intentionally, to conceal the presence of native peoples within commercial music histories. Yet when we determine to look for them, we find native musicians and audiences actively engaging this music. And when we expose the early development of the modern, culture industry infrastructure—of global routes and entertainment circuits throughout Europe and Asia—then we discover native people on the centre stage, journeying throughout the world with breathtaking speed, as principal creators of its new, modern scores. Seeking to engage new labour opportunities, to challenge oppressive colonial circumstances at home, and to forge bonds with other indigenous communities and members of their own diaspora, native musicians not only embraced modern entertainment circuits but also used them to fortify their own cultural agendas.

We can contemplate the role of indigenous people in glocal soundscapes by investigating one of modern music’s greatest success stories, that being the rapid proliferation and appropriation of the kīkā kila, or Hawaiian steel guitar. Developed in the town of Lāʻie on the island of Oʻahu in the late 1880s and 1890s by a young man named Joseph Kekuku, the steel guitar applied an innovative technique, style, and technology to the traditional Spanish guitar.Footnote ² Native Hawaiians had embraced the introduction of Spanish guitars in the islands during the nineteenth century, when foreign merchants, sailors, labourers, and missionaries began to visit and settle there. By the 1880s a new genre of Hawaiian music, hula kuʻi, specifically featured guitars and other string instruments.Footnote ³ Hawaiians at that point had typically replaced standard gut strings with wire or steel, developed a variety of open tunings, originated guitar vamps, and chimed harmonics to echo their falsetto singing. In this context, Kekuku began experimenting with guitars by running metal knives, combs, and then fabricated steel bars over the strings, raising the nut to extend the distance between the strings and fretboard, and adopting the guitar as a lead, melodic instrument in Hawaiian mele, or songs. By ignoring the frets as the steel bar glided above them, Kekuku opened a new world of microtones, sustain, glissando sweeps, and melodic vocal effects. The timing was not inconsequential: the kīkā kila was developed during the tumultuous illegal overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom by Americans in 1893, the colonial prohibitions of hula dance and the Hawaiian language in the years that followed, and the islands’ subsequent “annexation” by the United States in 1898. Quickly adopted by Hawaiians throughout the Islands, the instrument facilitated new musicking that provided a soundtrack of resistance to the unwelcome occupation of the Hawaiian Kingdom by the United States.Footnote ⁴

Kekuku and other musicians left in droves following the “annexation” of their homelands. Displaced from their ʻāina, or land, and forced to choose between plantation labour or clerical work for what they roundly considered an illegal colonial regime, they turned to what they observed as the liberating circumstances that the new global entertainment circuits provided them—circuits that did not prohibit their language or their music, and that paid them far more than they could earn at home. The attraction for young musicians to work these circuits is clear in terms of the economic gain and adventure that such transient labour would yield; what is surprising is the speed by which these circuits could distribute their influence. Kekuku left for San Francisco in 1904; by the 1910s he and his fellow Hawaiian guitarists had engaged all the mediums and channels of the adolescent U.S. music industry. Vaudeville and Chautauqua tours and theatrical productions set in Hawaiʻi such as Richard Walton Tully’s Bird of Paradise led them into small towns throughout the country, while their success at world fairs, particularly the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition, brought millions of people to them. Meanwhile, the industry’s recorded mediums of wax cylinders and 78 rpm records gave name recognition to the islands’ most prolific and talented guitarists, including Pale K. Lua, July Paka, Walter Kolomoku, Kekuku, and Frank Ferreira. In 1916, by industry accounts, Hawaiian guitar music was outselling every other recorded genre in the country. Within twenty years of Kekuku perfecting his steel guitar, cutting-edge indigenous musicians came to shape the modern sounds of American string bands. The U.S. music industry genres that emerged in the 1920s—particularly “hillbilly,” or country music, and “race records,” including the blues—featured the Hawaiian steel guitar as the lead instrument of choice.Footnote ⁵

For Hawaiian musicians, the United States offered but one market of economic opportunity and cultural influence, however; this essay will trace the efforts of several Hawaiians who laboured in other parts of the world as they stitched together a global embrace of Kekuku’s steel guitar. Indeed, Kekuku and fellow Hawaiian steel guitarists moved to Western Europe in the 1910s via small, roving troupes of Hawaiian string bands, through the horns of Victrolas, and through Bird of Paradise and other productions that trudged through each country on vaudeville and theatrical circuits, from one week to the next, setting up the scenery, striking their strings, and spreading the new Hawaiian sounds, village by village. In Australasia and Micronesia, Hawaiian musicians such as Ernest Kaʻai and married couple Queenie and David Kaʻili worked in similar fashion, moving seamlessly between vaudeville halls that catered to the masses, and hotels that catered to the elites. Meanwhile, Tau Moe, a Samoan migrant to O’ahu, introduced the steel guitar to audiences in East and South Asia, where it would leave an indelible mark on raga, Bollywood, and Indian classical music. Those who saw or heard these musicians play would never look at a guitar in the same way. The following stories of travel, exploration, and labour—of the indigenous trafficking of a new, guitar-centric sound—are gathered largely from the personal accounts of Hawaiian musicians who crafted a remarkably agile indigenous musical globalization.

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Soon after steel guitarists embarked upon tours of the United States, they began to capitalize on Europeans’ burgeoning interest in Hawaiian music. Visits in the nineteenth century by aliʻi nui, or Hawaiian nobles, as well as vaudeville tours and campaigns by the recorded music industry sparked interest within new European entertainment circuits and markets. By the end of World War I, several Hawaiian musicians had already established successful careers throughout Europe. Steel guitarist Kiwini Panui’s letters from London to his mother in 1920, published while he was abroad in the Hawaiian language newspaper, Ka Nupepa Kuokoa, open a window into the world of musicians and their loved ones traveling the British Isles in the aftermath of World War I. Such letters expressed their love and affection toward their families, but when published in Hawaiian newspapers, they also served as important news sources. Panui, like others who left home, detailed the whereabouts and welfare of fellow Hawaiian musicians whom they encountered abroad.

Panui encountered over a dozen Hawaiian entertainers working in London when he arrived in 1920, including Joseph Kekuku.Footnote ⁶ Other entertainers had already left London after squandering their money, as Panui put it, or losing their contracts; they had to work on ships, some “pouring oil into the engine,” in order to return to the United States, where the work was more plentiful in the aftermath of the war. Panui’s troupe had secured consistent work, however, most recently at the restaurant in London’s high-end Selfridges department store, which claimed to accommodate five thousand diners. Mekia Kealakaʻi’s troupe also performed regularly at the department store, where patrons eagerly requested such mele as “Pua Carnation,” and where many “bought” seats near the stage for the duration of Panui’s residency. For those under contract, he wrote, the money was good and the hours were short. This gave them ample time to explore their new surroundings.Footnote ⁷

Explore they did. Panui described London’s architecture, as “like the houses you see in Fairy Tale books,” though he preferred the vistas and beauty of the skyscrapers in New York. The city still exhibited destruction unleashed by German zeppelin raids during the war, but he was awed by the size of the Palace of Westminster and the Abbey. The zoo also delighted him—“its size is maybe the same as the town of Honolulu”—and was filled with “monkeys, elephants, giraffes, rhinoceroses, hippopotamuses, all sorts of birds, eagles, tigers, llamas . . . snakes” and more. He enjoyed the “huge” market at Piccadilly, watched a world championship bantam boxing match, and thrilled at his first performance before a motion picture camera. Panui and his friends took in the city’s famous fog, quite literally, when it invaded not only the performance hall but also their throats as they sang—“it is as if you had no voice,” he complained. They were quite taken by the habits of Londoners, as well, from their unusual expressions, to drinking rum on any occasion, such as “when the British see that there is a lot of fog,” to drinking tea . . . all the time: “I believe that the British are the most fanatical behind the Chinese and the Japanese. You wake up in the morning at 7 a.m., and drink tea; at 9 a.m., drink tea again; at 12 noon, you drink tea; at 4:30 p.m., you of course drink tea; at 6 p.m., you have tea while you dine.”Footnote ⁸

Of course, Panui also missed home. He expressed how he missed his family and enjoyed receiving his mother’s letters and newspapers from home: “I was delighted to read the news of my beloved land.” In particular, he missed poi, noting that while his mother was certainly enjoying pig with poi at the celebration of the New Year, he was stuck in London, “having chicken on this side of the world.” Fortunately, his troupe eventually found a chance to eat poi palaoa (made with flour and water) with stew and raw mackerel (“like opelu”) when fellow Hawaiian musician John Moa invited them to his London flat. He wrote that he planned to return to Hawai’i soon, and added, “if I accumulate a sufficient sum, I am coming home for good.”Footnote ⁹ Indeed, he returned to Honolulu with the others on 1 June 1921.Footnote ¹⁰

Beyond providing a first-person window into the leisure activities of musicians on the road, Panui’s letters reveal the expansive travels of Hawaiian musicians during this period, their impact on local entertainment industries, as well as the interconnectedness of the diaspora. This window also enables us to reconstruct the travels of the many Hawaiians he encountered in England. Several of those mentioned in his letters, for example, were on tour under the leadership of troupe manager and steel guitarist Joe Puni. Born in Honolulu in 1868, by 1901 Puni was managing various Hawaiian troupes as they performed in New England and the southeastern United States.Footnote ¹¹ After playing for eight years at Coney Island, he sailed for Paris in 1913 with fellow steel guitarist William Kulii Kanui on a three-month contract.Footnote ¹² This modest contract, in fact, ultimately sparked for Puni a solid twenty-six–year run of tours that spanned four continents.Footnote ¹³

But on the occasion that Panui met him, Puni was in London to accompany a Hawaiian ensemble for the first British production of Bird of Paradise, which debuted at the West End’s Lyric Theatre in September of 1919.Footnote ¹⁴ Puni was accompanied by a married couple, John and Lily Moa, brothers William and John Kamoku (William was assigned to play the steel guitar in this production), and Diamond Kekona, who had married an Englishwoman years before and enlisted in the British army during the war.Footnote ¹⁵ Puni was for a time married to a French woman from La Fère named Lucia, though it is unclear if she had accompanied him for the London contract.Footnote ¹⁶ This Bird of Paradise production, postponed by the war but soon after introduced to the London stage with great fanfare, ran for 310 performances before closing in June of 1920. Long before the end of the first run, however, Richard Walton Tully had organized and deployed yet another Bird of Paradise company—his twenty-ninth such ensemble, in fact—to take the show to Portsmouth and other towns in the British Isles.Footnote ¹⁷ With Hawaiian guitarists traveling throughout the U.K. to perform in the show in the years that followed, the production was revived once more in London at the Garrick Theatre in 1922.Footnote ¹⁸

Although the Bird of Paradise productions, like those in the United States, perhaps should receive the most credit for so early and so quickly introducing the steel guitar to residents of cities and hamlets in Great Britain, many British and other European audiences had already become primed to hear Hawaiian music. Considering the long list of aliʻi nui who had conducted visits and diplomatic missions to England, from Kamehameha and Kamamalu’s journey in 1824, to the visits of King Kalākaua and his successor Queen Liliʻuokalani, to Princess Kaʻiulani’s abrupt departure following the overthrow, the British court had long exposure to Hawaiian sovereigns and their mele.Footnote ¹⁹ Makaʻāinana (non-elite Hawaiians) had visited as well, however: soon after the overthrow, a hula troupe that had trained in Kalākauaʻs court toured Europe. A charm bracelet, once belonging to hula practitioner Kini Kapahu, and in the 1980s found in the hands of a Honolulu stamp and coin dealer, gives us a sense of the places they visited: stamped into the bracelet are charms from Hamburg, dated 28 April 1894; Munich, 10 May 1894; Chemnitz, 6 June 1894; and Berlin, 6 June 1894.Footnote ²⁰ Yet we know that they also performed in Paris and toured England for two months before sailing for the continental United States.Footnote ²¹ Doubtless more soon followed; a 1912 letter to Hawaiian newspaper Kuokoa Home Rula indicates that several musicians from the islands had performed in England, Germany, and France in more recent years.Footnote ²² The steel guitar quickly followed, if it had not arrived before: Pale K. Lua seems to have performed in London with David Kaili and the rest of the Irene West Royal Hawaiians group in 1914.Footnote ²³ Finally, Hawaiian steel guitarist Lui Thompson relocated to Europe in 1914 and performed and recorded regularly in England and France over the next several years, invoking a colourful series of aliases along the way.Footnote ²⁴ By 1919 he had performed with his steel guitar in Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Holland, Germany, and several other European countries. By early 1920, at least, London music stores were responding to customer demand by stocking steel guitars with “Kamiki Method” instructional materials.Footnote ²⁵

Joseph Kekuku, for his part, arrived in London in 1919, alongside Mekia Kealakaʻi and William Kamoku, and at the behest of Joe Puni, to fulfil a contract at the prestigious Savoy Hotel.Footnote ²⁶ Soon after their arrival, however, Kamoku signed onto the first English Bird of Paradise production, while Kekuku worked in Europe for the next eight years both independently and with Hawaiian troupes. While assuming residences in Paris and London, he performed in Spain, Switzerland, Belgium, Italy, Germany, Portugal, Sweden, and Denmark.Footnote ²⁷ Consistently referred to in the British press as the “originator of the Hawaiian steel guitar,” he taught the instrument in England, performed in a number of stage productions, and eventually developed a successful vaudeville routine before returning to North America.Footnote ²⁸ The work of Kekuku, Panui, and their compatriots generated a longstanding passion in Europe for the Hawaiian guitar, as amateur and professional “Hawaiian” troupes made up of Europeans donning leis and grass skirts, and taking up ʻukuleles and steel guitars soon emerged all over the continent.

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On the other side of the world, meanwhile, the call for Native Hawaiian string bands spread quickly as news of their talents rippled throughout the Pacific Rim. In 1905, the Astor House Hotel of Shanghai delivered a request through the Honolulu Advertiser to “procure the services of the best quintette club in Honolulu to go there for a six months’ contract.”Footnote ²⁹ The hotel offered to pay transportation both ways, along with free board and lodging, and a “tidy sum daily” to the musicians to perform twice daily, every day of the week.Footnote ³⁰ New labour opportunities for Hawaiian musicians beckoned from afar, while the allure of travel sprang from a variety of sources—some sought adventure, others prestige, while others may have sought to leave as the new American territorial government tightened its grip on Hawaiian lands.

Ernest Kaʻai, the most powerful musical impresario in Honolulu during the early twentieth century, was one of the first Hawaiians to lead a string band to the lands of the southwest Pacific Rim. Born in Honolulu in 1881, he was the son of Simon Kaʻai, a cabinet member for King Kalākaua, a member of the House of Royals before the overthrow, and since then, a “staunch royalist.”Footnote ³¹ Coming of age after the overthrow, Ernest Kaʻai made his mark performing and singing Hawaiian music; he achieved exceptional ability on the ʻukulele and mandolin, and was also skilled on the violin and steel guitar. Kaʻai was in 1904 the first to organize string bands into larger “dance orchestras” in Honolulu, and he would come to operate around a dozen bands to perform in clubs and hotels in downtown Honolulu and Waikiki.Footnote ³²

Kaʻai toured the continental U.S. in 1906, and five years later organized a tour of Australia and New Zealand.Footnote ³³ Kaʻai travelled with a sizable cohort that included his family and eight others from Hawaiʻi. The women wore white dresses while men dressed in white shirts and trousers with purple sashes and ties, recalling the dress of Hawaiian troupes before the overthrow; they all wore leis around their necks to remind them of their homelands. Despite the fact that they mainly performed Hawaiian compositions unintelligible to foreign audiences, their audiences were riveted.Footnote ³⁴ As a result, the troupe remained there for some time, with Kaʻai hiring more musicians and dancers to join him from the islands. His troupe also tapped into local indigenous traditions more familiar to some of their audiences, at least, with one member learning to perform Maori haka dances.Footnote ³⁵ One new member of the troupe, Esther Kapuaahiwalani, wrote home after she arrived in Melbourne that April, and her family sent the letter to the Hawaiian language newspaper Ke Aloha Aina to share her news. She reported that after Kaʻai and the rest of the group met her, she was able to take in the city with its “new sights for me that I will not be able to forget for a long time to come,” though after experiencing the cold weather of the Australian fall, she thought back “to her homeland so warm with aloha.” Their troupe was “very well received by the people of this city,” and she reported that “all of the members of the group are well, the boys and girls; and we are all looking forward to the day that we will once again set foot on the beloved sands of Hawaiʻi. This is news that our friends should know.”Footnote ³⁶

Kaʻai returned in 1917, performing first with a Bird of Paradise production, and then, along with Henry A. Peelua Bishaw, settling in Sydney for a time as a ʻukulele and steel guitar instructor.Footnote ³⁷ It is unclear whether the steel guitar appeared in the Western Pacific before the Bird of Paradise tours, but Australians seemed familiar with the instrument by early 1918, when players from the Bird of Paradise productions would take secondary gigs at cafes and clubs in Adelaide and elsewhere, billing themselves, for example, as a “Band of Hawaii[a]n Ukulele and Steel Guitar Players.”Footnote ³⁸ By that point, more and more Hawaiians had begun to tour not simply Australasia, but Asia and Micronesia as well. One group toured Japan and China in 1912, and while Robert Akeo was performing with a troupe in Shanghai in 1917, he noted in a letter published in Kuokoa that “there is much admiration for Hawaiian music in China … they are constantly asked to fulfil the desire of those people for Hawaiian music and hula.”Footnote ³⁹ He continued, “in order to grant the wishes of Shanghai’s people for hula, one of the boys transformed himself into a woman by putting on women’s clothing, and he would dance with one of his fellow boys, as most of the rest of them play music while the others hula and sing all at once.”Footnote ⁴⁰ By 1918 Hawaiian musicians were featured regularly in variety shows on Australia’s Tivoli Circuit, and Kaʻai, for his part, in 1919 embarked on an ambitious tour of Malaya, Sumatra, Borneo, Java, Burma , and India.Footnote ⁴¹ Like many Hawaiian musicians, he integrated his family members into his troupes so that they could work together as itinerate troubadours: when his daughter Thelma became old enough, she became his featured steel guitarist.Footnote ⁴²

More and more audiences in Oceania and beyond became exposed to the steel guitar through these tours, and particularly, by the 1920s, through the efforts of Queenie and David Kaili.Footnote ⁴³ David Luela Kaili, born at Joseph Kekuku’s birthplace of Kahana, Oʻahu, in 1890, had achieved early fame through a series of records that he had made in the 1910s with steel guitar virtuoso Pale K. Lua. As part of the Irene West Royal Hawaiians, Lua and Kaili, toured the U.S. and Great Britain together and in fact recorded over twenty of the bestselling 78 rpm Hawaiian records of all time, all cut between 1914 and 1916.Footnote ⁴⁴ Lua passed away a few years later, however. Kaili eventually began to record as a steel guitarist in his own right, and married a Hawaiian singer and guitarist named Mary Louise, or “Queenie.”Footnote ⁴⁵ Together, as their scrapbooks gingerly document, they joined Ernest Kaʻai for a tour of Singapore, Australia, and New Zealand that ran for several years starting in 1923.Footnote ⁴⁶

The Kailis featured prominently in the acts. During the first half of the show, they would perform a set of mostly instrumental Hawaiian pieces; in the second half, the troupe would sing and perform hapa haole (a hybrid Hawaiian genre translating to “part Hawaiian, part foreign”) and more jazz-oriented, popular songs.Footnote ⁴⁷ Described by a Perth newspaper in 1930 as a “high class vocal tsar,” Queenie sang, played instruments, and danced, while audiences revelled in the Kailis’ sense of humour.Footnote ⁴⁸ David Kaili’s performances on an acoustic, hollow-necked steel guitar seemed to command encores repeatedly through the shows, and were captured in a series of popular recordings made by the Kailis in Australia in the late 1920s. In addition to the steel guitar, these featured Hawaiian chants and vocal techniques.Footnote ⁴⁹ He and Kaʻai were “the most popular performers” on the show in Rockhampton, while in Melbourne, “Mr. Kaili, with his steel guitar, was loudly applauded.”Footnote ⁵⁰ Their reputations began to precede them: by 1930, an Australian critic now long familiar with the Kailis noted, “David’s wizardry on the steel guitar has always been a source of delight to audiences everywhere.”Footnote ⁵¹ A critic in Perth remarked after a 1928 performance that “the undiminished popularity of the Hawaiians, Queenie and David Kaili, was reflected in the sustained applause they received, especially from the gallery.”Footnote ⁵²

Indeed, the enthusiasm from “the gallery,” suggests that Hawaiian musicians were quite popular across all strata of Australian and New Zealand society. This seems to have been the case particularly among New Zealand’s Māori population. New Zealand’s Manawatu Times reported that at a 1911 performance by Kaʻai’s troupe, “in the audience were a large number of Māori folk [who came] to see what like were the people of Hawaiki descended from the same ancestors, and they were most enthusiastic and encored every item, while they also carried on animated conversations from stalls to dress circle and across the building during the interval, and made many an appreciative comment during the performance.”Footnote ⁵³ Evidence of indigenous cross-cultural learning and collaborative opportunity proliferated as the Kailis and other Hawaiian performers continued to work in the Māori homelands. For example, one New Zealand musician recalled in the 1920s witnessing a troupe consisting of between six and eight Māori musicians at an agricultural show. He wrote, “they appeared as a sideshow, most of them played steel guitar, all standing up. The guitars were hanging around their neck, there were a couple of them playing rhythm. I’d never heard anything like it.”Footnote ⁵⁴ David and Queenie Kaili included snapshots of their trip to the Māori Museum in their scrapbook from a tour of New Zealand in 1924 and 1925, as well as a photograph of their colleagues and friends in the musical outfit, Walter Smith & His Māori String Band.Footnote ⁵⁵

Māori and Hawaiian musicians collaborated and influenced one another as they continued to appropriate other musical technologies then circulating worldwide. Formed in 1922, Princess Te Puea’s string band troupe, Te Pou o Mangatawhiri, featured steel guitar, banjos, mandolins, and ‘ukuleles.Footnote ⁵⁶ Their tours of the far north prompted a revival of Māori music and kapa haka, and also featured hula and Hawaiian music. On clear Saturday nights, NZ Radio Record reported in 1929, “numbers of native chiefs would gather to listen through the static [of Auckland’s station 1YA] to Island Nights’ Entertainments, especially enjoying the Hawaiian music on guitars and ukuleles.”Footnote ⁵⁷ Cross-cultural indigenous engagements continued to reveal themselves: Emera Hite (also known as Mati Hita), born in 1914 in Taranaki, became, according to one scholar, “the first New Zealand steel-guitar virtuoso.” He wrote that Mati was “a natural showman . . . some patrons would stop dancing to watch as he played complicated licks while conversing; another of his stunts was to play the guitar behind his back.”Footnote ⁵⁸ One observer wrote that “at speed, he would mix multiple single notes, third and fifth harmonies, chords, octaves, harmonics—and at the end of the number you would not be able to remember where he had put what. . . . [The vibrato he performed on the steel guitar] was that of the Māori voice.”Footnote ⁵⁹ Such glimpses of the tight connection reinforced through the steel guitar between Māori and Hawaiian music, and indeed between Māoris and Hawaiians, suggest that both adapted to new opportunities for expressing and maintaining old relations, as the Pacific Ocean, connecting a “sea of Islands,” had long facilitated relationships between the myriad indigenous peoples inhabiting the vast region of Oceania.Footnote ⁶⁰

As the Kaʻais and Kailis worked their way through Australia and New Zealand in the 1920s, they left in their wake a number of awed enthusiasts who began to establish Hawaiian “clubs” and instrument stores, such as Sydney’s Hawaiian Supplies Unlimited. It appears that thousands of students attended music classes at Sydney’s Hawaiian Club alone, where Tui Hamilton taught.Footnote ⁶¹ According to one scholar, “Hawaiian-influenced music dominated the first boom in New Zealand’s local recording industry, starting in 1948 with the gentle weep of Jim Carter’s steel guitar in ‘Blue Smoke’ and reaching its zenith in the 1950s. But the phenomenon had been building for decades.”Footnote ⁶² By the 1950s, recalled musician Mac McKenzie, “if it had a steel guitar in it, it was a Hawaiian band, and they were everywhere in Auckland.” Indeed, every region in New Zealand featured steel guitar stars at that time, from Wellington (Mati Hita), to the Hauraki Plains (Fred Radich) to Rotorua (Tawhao “Bronco” Tioke).Footnote ⁶³ Meanwhile, the Hawaiian steel guitar phenomenon continued to spread, with Tongans and Samoans taking great interest. One Tongan, Charlie Sanft, after having travelled to Utah to study at the behest of Mormon missionaries in the 1930s, returned home via Hollywood, where he acted in films. There he met a large contingent of Hawaiian musicians and actors who taught him to play the steel guitar. He soon returned home to teach the instrument. One of the most popular bands in Auckland, Bill Wolfgramm and the Islanders, was composed principally of Samoans, Māoris, and Tongans.Footnote ⁶⁴ Non-Hawaiian, indigenous practitioners of the steel guitar quickly multiplied and gained influence in the Pacific. In fact, likely the most well-travelled and internationally recognized Hawaiian steel guitarist of all time was none other than a Samoan named Tau Moe.

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In 1918, ten-year-old Tau Moe and his family relocated to Lāʻie, Oahu, from their Samoan village, where the influenza pandemic had killed more than 20 percent of the population. In Lāʻie he quickly adopted the Hawaiian language and became enthralled with Hawaiian guitar records, the first being a wax-cylinder recording of Joseph Kekuku that he heard soon after he arrived. His sister saved the money she earned from a Chinese laundry to order him a guitar from a Montgomery Ward catalogue.Footnote ⁶⁵ He quickly converted the standard guitar to a kīkā kila by installing a raised nut, while he filed the ridges off a metal file to serve as a bar. Recognizing the additional need for fingerpicks, he used his mother’s hairpins to craft his own.Footnote ⁶⁶ Within a few years he began performing in Honolulu, and soon joined a troupe that featured his half-uncles and his future spouse, Rose Kaʻohu. Under the management of a French entertainment entrepreneur named Madame Claude Riviere, in 1928 they embarked upon a five-year tour that would extend far into South and East Asia.Footnote ⁶⁷

In 1929 alone, the group, billed variously as the Royal Samoan Dancers, The Samoan Troupe, and Madame Riviere’s Hawaiians, performed for audiences in Manila, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Beijing, and Hangzhou, as well as several cities in Japan. The group cut thirteen sides in a Tokyo studio before moving on to perform in Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Burma, as well as Kolkata, Delhi, and many other cities and towns in India, where they continued to work through 1933.Footnote ⁶⁸ After performances in Karachi and Manila, where they ran into Queenie and David Kaili, Rose and Tau established a career as a duo, all the while training their young son Lani, who was born in Kyoto, to join their act.Footnote ⁶⁹

In those first years, however, the troupe toured under the aegis of Riviere. Her shows were very particular—she marketed them as “educational” performances by attempting to demonstrate Samoan and Hawaiian lifeways both before and after their contact with “civilization.” Such a trope was not original to Riviere; it was previously common in Wild West shows and other entertainments featuring indigenous peoples.Footnote ⁷⁰ Tau Moe described how Riviere instructed them to provide a “before and after” presentation in quite stark terms: “Madame Riviere had us wear our hair all bushed out to look li[k]e savages, you know. We couldn’t speak English or wear jewellery. I had to take my watch off…. At the opening of the show, I had to climb up a big tree on stage and go up, way up, to pick a coconut…. The second part of the show was Occidental—Hawaiʻi today. Here we dressed modern and I played tunes like ‘Show Me the Way to Go Home,’ and ‘Yes Sir, That’s My Baby” while Rose danced.Footnote ⁷¹ Tau intimated that while she succeeded in keeping the troupe booked for nearly five years—no easy feat—she ultimately treated the troupe members as children unable to take care of themselves.Footnote ⁷² The steel guitar figured prominently in both halves of Riviere’s shows, as programs from Tau and Rose Moe’s scrapbooks attest.Footnote ⁷³

News of their act preceded them throughout South Asia as their bookings multiplied. Tau delightfully recalled that in 1932, “it was because of my steel guitar that we met Mahatma Ghandi,” with whom he then engaged in long conversation.Footnote ⁷⁴ Such attention paid to Tau’s steel playing created tension between he and his uncles, who, playing in Bombay one night in 1933, suddenly quit the Riviere troupe and signed a contract with Ernest Kaʻai.Footnote ⁷⁵ Tau, Rose, four-year-old Lani, and Riviere then formed the “Royal Hawaiian Entertainers,” and over the next year and a half began working their way through contracts in Singapore, Shanghai, Kuala Lumpur, Penang, Bangkok, Manila, and Mumbai. Tau, who recalled that by 1935, they “had already played every town in India,” was at that point celebrated by name in playbills as “the Kreisler of the Steel Guitar.”Footnote ⁷⁶ Yet by the end of that year, after Riviere was swindled out of the entirety of the group’s savings by a carnival operator, the trio—now featuring six-year-old “Baby Lani”—for the first time found themselves broke and without contracts. Taking a chance, they sailed, without Riviere and without contracts, for Port Said, Egypt.Footnote ⁷⁷

The Moe family scrapbooks feature clippings that document their travels over the next two years.Footnote ⁷⁸ After quickly finding work in Alexandria, by January of 1936 they were playing the Continental Cabaret in Cairo with the already famous American blues singer Alberta Hunter.Footnote ⁷⁹ Tau Moe’s recollections of Egypt indicate that Hawaiian guitar records were by that point selling well all over the world:

After several successful months in Cairo, they moved on to Abu Qir, Egypt, then Istanbul, Greece, and Belgrade, Yugoslavia. They continued to introduce their steel guitar trio to new audiences in Albania, Bulgaria, and throughout Eastern Europe, before moving on to Denmark and Sweden. In 1938, after tours in western Russia and Poland, they settled into a significant run in Germany, during which time they assisted recently-deported Jewish friends by smuggling their valuables (and sometimes their friends) out of the country.Footnote ⁸¹

The situation in Berlin became increasingly tenuous, however, and in 1940 the family finally fled, reaching Bombay before the war prevented further travel.Footnote ⁸² Their daughter Dorian was soon born in Kolkata; upon the conclusion of the war the family continued to tour the world for another thirty years. For the duration, their reach extended well beyond the affluent audiences who encountered them in the early days of ritzy hotel contracts in Kuala Lumpur and Bombay. According to Dorian, Tau spent much of his “off-time” jamming with locals, in whatever city they were contracted to perform in at the time. Tau Moe recalled having returned to Athens two years after they had last resided there, when he had provided local residents steel guitar lessons during the day. On his return, however,

Italians demanded he record “O Solo Mio” and “Santa Lucia” on the steel, and in Berlin and Vienna he recorded with their symphony orchestras.Footnote ⁸⁴

Of the dozens of countries in which Tau Moe performed on the steel guitar, however, it was in India that his influence was particularly profound. Indian audiences had been familiar with the Moes since the 1930s, when they performed for them in Riviere’s troupe. Even earlier, Ernest Kaʻai and perhaps Queenie and David Kaili had toured the country.Footnote ⁸⁵ In addition, parallels already existed in technique between the Indian gottuvadyam and vichitra vina and the steel guitar. However, Tau Moe’s increased exposure in India during the 1940s and 1950s, particularly through the popularity of his locally-recorded music, his lessons to children, and the Moe’s routine radio broadcasts, clearly brought about a revolution in the country’s vernacular musics. Indian musicians, enamoured of the instrument’s sound and versatility, began adapting the steel guitar to their ragas.

Tau Moe’s lasting influence as the source of inspiration for modern Indian guitar music began with his star student, Garney Nyss, who later recorded Hawaiian and other songs in India with a group of Anglo-Indian and Goan musicians who called themselves, The Aloha Boys.Footnote ⁸⁶ Like Tau Moe’s radio broadcasts and records produced in India, Nyss’s output became well known throughout the country, not simply in Kolkata, where Moe’s family lived for many years. Modern-day Indian steel guitarist Kay Das emphasizes the impact of both Moe and Nyss when recalling his initial interest in the instrument. Das’s parents developed a strong interest in Hawaiian music beginning when he was about ten, in the mid-1950s. His mother bought an acoustic steel guitar and took lessons in Secunderabad from a local woman, one of two people teaching steel guitar in that town, before she eventually passed the instrument along to him. When I asked how he learned to play the instrument, Das responded,

By the 1960s, the Hawaiian steel guitar had created what one Indian music scholar called a “craze” for Hawaiian music in Northern India.Footnote ⁸⁸ This craze translated into a significant growth of steel players and teachers in the country, who in turn began to reshape a number of its genres. Garney Nyss taught Sri Brij Bhushan Kabra, who later recorded a breakthrough album, not of Hawaiian music, but of Indian classical music (shastriya sangit) adapted to the steel guitar.Footnote ⁸⁹ His 1967 album, Call of the Valley, featured his steel, modified with a drone string, alongside traditional Indian instruments.Footnote ⁹⁰ Illuminating the possibilities of the Hawaiian steel in Indian music, Vishwa Mohan Bhatt further modified his Hawaiian guitar to create a new instrument, the mohan veena, that, in addition to melody strings played with a steel bar, incorporated four chikari drone strings and twelve tarab sympathetic strings to create the buzzing sound of the sitar.Footnote ⁹¹ Another prodigy, Barun Kumar Pal, had mastered the sitar under the instruction of Ravi Shankar and Nikhil Banerjee; yet the Hawaiian guitar was his first love, and in 1973 he applied their instruction to a steel guitar that he modified in similar fashion to Bhatt’s.Footnote ⁹² Other established Indian steel guitarists working in the 1950s and 1960s included Van Shipley, a major figure in Bollywood soundtracks, and others who recorded mostly Tagore, Nazrul and filmi songs, including Batuk Nandy, Kazi Aniruddha, Nalin Mazumdar, Mohon Bhattacharya, Robin Paul, Hazara Singh, Sujit Nath, and Sunil Ganguly.Footnote ⁹³ One of the greatest contemporary Indian steel guitarists is Debashish Bhattacharya, one of Kabra’s students, who during one of his tours stopped into Lāʻie to visit and thank Tau Moe, who had recently retired from the road. Tau remained sought out by Indian guitar royalty through the end of his life because, quite simply, they all understand his significance: Moe created a steel guitar culture during the 1940s in India that has come to shape in profound ways the sounds of modern Indian music and film today.Footnote ⁹⁴

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Hawaiian steel guitarists and Tau Moe, a transplanted Samoan, criss-crossed the hemispheres during the first half of the twentieth century, continuing a longstanding Hawaiian tradition of vast exploration into uncharted territory. While doing so, they engaged sprawling new entertainment circuits that seemed to stitch together a new global, cultural economy, town by town. Our information on their fates is uneven, and at times scant. Yet we know, for instance, that Joseph Kekuku eventually married an Englishwoman with whom he relocated to Chicago in 1926, and eventually to Dover, New Jersey, where he died from a cerebral haemorrhage in 1932. Joe Puni, who was touring North America by 1901, and Europe by the 1910s, continued to tour for decades to come. After surviving World War I in Paris and London, he and his Hawaiian troupe made their way through Europe, North Africa, Asia Minor, and South America, picking up, like the Moes, several languages along the way. He did not return to the Hawaiian Islands for forty years, until the end of 1940, at seventy three years of age, when he was evacuated along with 800 other American refugees from German-occupied France.Footnote ⁹⁵ Ernest Kaʻai left Hawaiʻi in 1941, shortly before the war reached the islands, and opened a music store near Miami while living out his days in semi-retirement.Footnote ⁹⁶ Queenie and David Kaili were not as fortunate; while working in Manila during the war they were tortured by Japanese troops, and David soon succumbed to his injuries.Footnote ⁹⁷

The two world wars seemed to bookend an indigenous, global phenomenon, the rapid proliferation of the Hawaiian steel guitar. We have recounted the experiences of only a handful of guitarists, but the more one looks in the annals of this period, the more one finds. Even during the war-torn early 1940s, according to one observer, “the night clubs of Shanghai were packed to capacity every night. The Chinese patrons demanded at least one session of Hawaiian music before the night was over.”Footnote ⁹⁸ After Tau Moe started performing on Athens radio in the mid-1930s, “just about every Greek record after [that] through the late ’30s ha[d] a Hawaiian guitar on it.”Footnote ⁹⁹ Likewise, although the ever-popular Hawaiian music was banned in Japan during World War II, it grew even bigger afterwards. Today, Hawaiian music is probably more popular in Japan than in any other part of the world outside of Hawaiʻi. The instrument sparked imaginations throughout Africa as well; a Griqua guitarist from South Africa known as Kimo Koa learned the technique directly from Joseph Kekuku when the two toured Europe together.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ According to African music scholar Gerhard Kubik, a “Hawaiian guitar craze” led guitarists in Zimbabwe, Malawi, and Zambia to seek ways to “reproduce the glissando effect of Hawaiian guitar music.”Footnote ¹⁰¹ They named the technique and its accompanying open tuning as “Hauyani…. an adaption of the English word ‘Hawaiian’ in the languages of South-east Africa, such as Cinyanja/Chicewa…. ‘Hawaiian guitar’ playing was extremely popular in Malawi during the late 1940s and the 1950s,” and was popularized there by a number of players, including Ndiche Mwarare and Daniel and Donald Kachamba.Footnote ¹⁰² And by the 1970s in Nigeria, juju music legend King Sunny Adé was featuring the sounds of Demola Adepoju’s steel guitar as a fundamental component of his music.Footnote ¹⁰³ In only a few short decades, an indigenous, technological revolution, that of the Hawaiian steel guitar, had seemed to reverberate within and transform musical soundscapes in nearly every pocket of the world.