Hawai'ian Slack Key Guitar -- KiHo'alu - Seattle Style
 Every
once in a while, if you're real lucky, you walk through
a door that opens up a whole new world. Three years ago,
I bought a ticket to a Hawai'ian slack key guitar concert
at an unassuming high school auditorium just south of
Seattle, called the Highline Performing Arts Center. The
show featured Ledward Ka'apana, the late Sonny Chillingworth,
Cyril Pahinui, Ozzie Kotani, and George Kuo. A lot of
interest was brewing locally in slack key, and I wondered
if we could present a taste of the real stuff at the Northwest
Folklife Festival. Little did I know that I was discovering
what would lead to the focus for the following year's
Folklife Festival, as well as the amazing performances
that comprise this live recording.
The slack key show at Highline was an eye-opener. The
house was packed -- this for a show that was advertised
almost exclusively by word of mouth -- and the feeling
of community warmth in the crowd was extraordinary.
After each song came shouts of "hana hou!" (encore!).
At one point, the entire crowd -- about one third ethnic
Hawai'ian, one third Japanese Hawai'ian, and one third
"haole" (white Hawai'ian, pronounced "howly") -- spontaneously
sang what I presume was the Hawai'ian national anthem.
Individuals shouted from their seats for requests or
made friendly overtures like "Your cousin in Burien
says, 'Hi,' Sonny!" A relative danced a hula. |
After the concert, I introduced myself to the producer, Moodette
"Moody" Ka'apana, who runs the Pula Mahia Hula Academy. Moody
in turn introduced me to Milton Lau, the Honolulu promoter
who had made all this happen. Did he think it might possible
to bring some slack key to Folklife? Lau, a slight, soft-spoken
man who plays bass and has been producing slack key festivals
on Hawaii's beaches for thirteen years because he loves the
music, said he'd been wanting to do exactly that for several
years.
Then a bit of serendipity came into play. Folklife's development
director, Dana Giddings, was about to go home to Honolulu
for a visit. Dana wrote a proposal to Hawaii's Department
of Business, Economic Development and Tourism (DBEDT), where
Milton had a contact. A few weeks later, she came back to
Seattle with a sponsorship from DBEDT not only for a slack
key show, but for Chinky Mahoe's Halau Hula 'O Kawaili'ula,
plus exhibits of photographs, artifacts, and musical instruments
from the world-renownd Bishop Museum. With that momentum,
Folklife was soon speaking with Hawaiian Airlines, which generously
came forward as a sponsor. The result was "We Are Polynesia,"
a music and arts program at the 1993 Folklife Festival that
included the performances at the Opera House and the Arena,
on the campus of Seattle Center, that you hear on on this
recording.
As you can tell from the sound of the crowd, there was an
enthusiastic and receptive contigent of Hawai'ians and others
ready to welcome this roster of slack key guitarists. Program
Directors don't usually get to see much of their own shows,
but one of the most gratifying moments at the 1993 Festival
was peeking in through side curtain at the Opera House, just
as Gary Haleamau was finishing one of his intense, falsetto
ballads, and seeing that entire audience rapt and attentive.
That, and the enthusiastic cries of "Hana Hou!" at the end,
let me know for sure that we had chosen well to bring slack
key to Seattle.
Unbeknownst to most people, even Seattleities, Hawai'ians
have a long history in the Northwest. One of the many gifts
Hawai'ians brought to the Northwest is their sweet and soulful
style of finger picking the solo guitar - ki ho'alu, or "slack
key." Ki ho'alu means, literally, "to loosen the key," and
refers to the practice of adjusting selected strings up or
down -- or "slacking" them -- to achieve various tunings,
many of which become idiosyncratic to particular performers.
Ki ho'alu technique also includes "chiming," i.e., sounding
harmonics, quickly "hammering on," and "pulling off" the strings,
to imitate vocal sounds in the Hawai'ian language. Slack key
songs often speak reverently about the land, or a particular
lake, mountain or spring where something of importance has
occurred, and in that sense it is a vessel of oral tradition
and history. Sometimes, as in the blues, sexual double entendres
are invoked.
Slack key guitar originated in Hawai'i in the 19th century,
when Mexican and Spanish cowboys were imported by King Kamehameha
III to manage cattle herds on the islands. The island cowboys,
or "paniolo," who learned from these guests, took in cowboy
repertoire and techniques -- hence, on this recording, the
"western" tunes such as "The Yodel Song," or a chestnut such
as Stephen Foster's "There's No Place Like Home" -- as well
as the resonant romanticism of Spanish guitar. When the cowboys
left Hawaii after a few years, Hawai'ians blended what they
had learned with their own sense of the beautiful, applying
a home-made tuning technique that became uniquely Hawai'ian.
Slack key and Hawai'ian music culture in general took a leap
in the 1880s and 1890s, when King David Kalakaua officially
sponsored the revival of traditinoal music, dance, and chant.
But while Hawai'ian steel guitar enjoyed a huge flowering
in the 20th century, and a long and fruitful symbiosis with
country and western music developed on the mainland, slack
key, by the 1940s, was in decline. Enter Gabby Pahinui, known
as the "father of modern slack key." Pahinui's 1947 record
"Hi'ilawe" ushered in a renaissance of slack key. Gabby Pahinui
was soon followed by other ki ho-alu artists, most immediately
by Raymond Kane, who here pays tribute to Gabby's early recording,
"Wai O Keaniani."
There are several strains of slack key, one of the most most
important being "slack key jazz." Ledward Ka'apana, with his
nimble and accurate fingers and lickety-split improvisations,
plays solidly in this tradition. As Krash Kealoha points out
in his introduction at the concert, slack key is generally
associated with male performers. Haunani Apoliona came to
tell us that the stereotype wasn't true.
In recent times, slack key has become part of a widespread
ethnic cultural renaissance with multiplie social resonances.
At Folklife, we soon discovered, for example, that 1993 was
the 100th anniversary of the overthrow of Queen Lili-uokalani,
Hawaii's last monarch, a coup effected by a 19th century American
government bent on extending its influence to the Pacific.
Over the past 15 or 20 years, as this dark centennial approached,
a slow but sure movement grew in Hawaii addressing questions
of identity and history and the legal issues surrounding the
transfer of land after the Queen's overthrow. This awareness
today is called the sovereignty movement, and includes a wide
spectrum of political views, from esthetes interested in preserving
Hawai'ian heritage to politicos who would actually secede
from the United States and return Hawaii to its pre-contact
virginity.
As in other countries where a vital movement for change has
arisen -- Brazil in the 70s, the U.S. in the 60s -- music
has preceded politics. The force of the music -- its sweet
reverence for the land, it respect for native language, its
concern for historical accuracy -- has been the main catalyst
in reviving a sense of yearning for identity among ethnic
Hawai'ians. That was the spirit I was feeling in that crowd
at Highline that night three years ago, without knowing what
it was. That was what made the concert there -- and this one
at the Northwest Folklife Festival -- so special. That was
the door that had opened. Please accept our invitation to
walk through it, too.
-- Paul de Barros
Reprinted in part from the Ethnic Heritage News, May 1993
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 The
Music of Joe Heaney
James R. Cowdery
Joe Heaney was fond of telling a story about the time that
the American television host Merv Griffin visited Ireland.
At a local pub, Griffin was astonished to see a particular
photograph on the wall. "That's my doorman!" he exclaimed.
"That," the bartender solemnly declared, "is Ireland's greatest
traditional musician."
|  Seosamh
Ó hÉanaí, known to the English-speaking
world as Joe Heaney, was both. Heir to the majestic sean-nós
("old-style") singing tradition of west Galway through
his father and other outstanding local singers, Joe emigrated
to England as a young man. By the time I met him in 1979,
he had moved to New York City and was working as a doorman
at a posh apartment building. It was not until the last
years of his life that he would find a position worthy
of his art, as a teacher of Irish traditional singing
at the University of Washington in Seattle. Like Griffin's
bartender, many Irish music lovers considered him the
finest living exponent of sean-nós singing,
and even people who preferred a different local style
invariably acknowledged him as one of the greatest masters
of traditional song. No one could surpass his genius for
giving a song just the right mixture of dignified elegance
and emotional expression to create an artistic communication
of extraordinary depth. His intricate vocal ornamentations
were never gratuitous: "There's some places you want to
hold on more than other places, that's when you put the
grace notes there, you know. So that takes out the full
depth and meaning of the song, you know, and you hold
on to that particular place. . . .I love it so much that
I don't want to leave it. I just want to hold on to it
as long as I can while I'm singing it. That's the way
to treat a good song."
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These recordings offer a rare opportunity to hear Joe's music
in its proper context, as a gift given to an audience. He
recalled the customary shyness of many sean-nós
singers--"they sat down like that, you know, this is the way
they used to sit [sits slouched and hunched, eyes closed].
Always. And they had the cap pulled out, you know [mimes pulling
a cap over his eyes]. . . Wouldn't face the crowd at all,
that's it. And beautiful songs came out, you know"--but Joe's
own style of delivery was stunningly direct. Hearing these
recordings, I can see him again: standing tall and straight
as a tree, almost glaring at the audience, his rugged features
hardening fiercely as he decried the enforced poverty of "The
Rocks of Bawn" or softening into the profoundest compassion
as he sang of the Virgin Mary's grief in "Caoineadh na dTrí
Muire." "I respect an audience," he told me, "I always have
done. . .What they say at home: abair amhrán, inis
scéal, say a song, tell a story. They don't tell
you to sing a song. Say a song. . .that means you're telling
a story--in a nice way. And without the story, the song is
lost; and without putting the story over in the song, the
song is lost on an audience. . . That's the whole thing, to
'put the song over,' as they say. It's no good singing a song
unless you put it over." At last, this collection provides
a chance to hear Joe "putting it over" in the situation which
allowed the fullest flowering of his artistry: live performance.
Some of Joe's deepest songs are here. The magnificent Eileanóir
a Rúin, composed by the eighteenth-century Irish
poet Carroll Ó Dálaigh, was one of the songs
closest to Joe's heart, with its ringing declaration of "my
love to you at first sight." Róisín Dubh
is an outstanding example of Ireland's tradition of camouflaging
anticolonialist defiance in what appears to be a love song:
Ireland is characterized as a "dear dark rose" whose suffering
will be ended one day. In Óró Sé do
Bheatha ´Bhaile! a woman released from bondage represents
a free Ireland. Another example of this genre is the starkly
haunting An Raibh Tú ar an gCarraig? with its
unusual question-and-answer structure. In this song, everything
is a symbol for an illegal celebration of the Catholic Mass
under Protestant rule: "the rock" is the hidden forest site
of the gathering, "my love" and "the beautiful woman" are
the Virgin Mary, and so on. An Tiarna Randal is an
unusual Gaelic version of the British ballad "Lord Randall,"
a primal tale of murder which also is set in a question-and-answer
format, between a mother and her dying adult son. Bean
Dubh an Ghleanna is a classic expression of the pain of
passionate obsession, with a sweeping melody which is often
played as a "slow air" by instrumentalists. The wryly touching
An Buinneán Buí was composed by the eighteenth-century
Irish poet Cathal Buídhe Mac Giolla Guna; seeing a
dead bittern on a frozen lake, he imagined that it had died
of thirst--a fate which the poet did not fear, given his prolific
drinking. Joe's signature song for many years, The Rocks
of Bawn is a passionate indictment of the absentee landlord
system which pushed Irish farmers from the richest agricultural
areas to the barren, rocky land of the west coast, forcing
them to work endlessly to pay rent to British landowners whom
they would never even meet. We see "gallant Sweeney" rising
in the morning to try once again to till his impossibly rocky
field, only to give up in despair as the landlord's agent
curses him. In the wrenching final verse, Sweeney's hopelessness
and desperation finally drive him to seek the only possible
future left for him: a career in the English army, valiantly
imagining that he will be fighting "for Ireland's glory" rather
than for the continued imperialism of his own oppressors.
Although Joe seldom openly professed any religious affiliation,
the rare religious songs in his repertory were very dear to
him, and especially moving to his audiences. Oíche
Nollag tells the story of the Nativity, but with much
more gravity than most Christmas songs: for half the song,
the child Jesus is prophesying to his mother, telling her
of his future suffering. The Good Friday story is told in
Caoineadh na dTrí Muire (Lament of the Three Marys)
from the viewpoint of the lamenting women who must watch Jesus's
death. "Amhrán na Páise," a song that tells
the Resurrection story, formed a triumvirate with these two;
it can be heard on Joe's Gael-Linn recording, Ó
Mo Dhúchas, Sraith 2 (CEF 051). Unlike most of
his songs, Joe associated these with his mother, and he poured
all of his expressive power into singing them.
Joe recalled from his boyhood the custom of the "American
wake" and the music associated with it. Held in honor of a
person about to emigrate to America, this event embodied both
the solemnity and the gaiety which characterized the traditional
Irish wake for the recently deceased. The funereal quality
was real: all present knew that there was a good chance they
would never see this person again. This collective mourning
was often expressed in song with the poignant A Stór
mo Chroí (Dearest of My Heart). But these gatherings
always ended with an affirmation of life through dance, and
certain dance tunes were given pride of place due to their
titles: My Love, She's in America and Off to California.
Joe sings these tunes using a practice known as "lilting,"
a vocal imitation of instrumental playing. (He remembered
whole evenings of delightful social dancing in poor communities,
where lilting was the only musical accompaniment.)
The light songs are here too, and rightly so: Joe cannily
understood the need to intersperse his richer songs with less
demanding ones, for the sake of both his voice and his audience.
Songs like The Galway Shawl, The Wife of the Bold Tenant
Farmer, Red is the Rose, I Wish I Had Someone to Love Me,
The Claddagh Ring, and Will You Come Over the Mountain?
provided resting places in his concerts and, sometimes, opportunities
for the audience to sing along. As these recordings attest,
Joe always sang such songs with sincere feeling, bringing
out their more universal themes and staunchly avoiding oversentimentality.
And finally, there are the tender Seoithín Seó,
Óró mo Bháidín, and Coochenanty,
songs for soothing little children. When Joe sang such songs
he almost seemed transformed into a child himself: evidence
that his formidable artistic power was so complete that he
could even relinquish it and communicate simply, directly,
and deeply to the child within each of us.
James Cowdery, Ph.D., is a composer and ethnomusicologist
and teaches at Sarah Lawrence College. He is the author of
The Melodic Tradition of Ireland (Kent State University Press,
1990).
Joe Heaney in the Pacific Northwest
Sean Williams
One of my first questions to Joe Heaney after he moved to
Seattle in the early 1980s, was how he felt about our perennially
soggy weather. "It reminds me of home, don't you know," he
answered. "The soft rain in the afternoon, and the colors
of the sky reflecting on the waters." He sometimes owned umbrellas,
usually gifts from his students, but he either left them behind
or did not use them. "At home I simply ran between the drops,
and I'll be doing it here, too." During the next several years,
he frequently remarked about the similarities between west
Galway and the Pacific Northwest, and about how right he felt
about living in Seattle. He lived in a small basement apartment
but was frequently outside and en route to or from the University
of Washington, the neighborhood bakery (La Boulangerie, which
he referred to as "Bouge-bouge"), or any one of the local
shops where he was known as a regular. As a visiting artist
in the University of Washington Ethnomusicology Department,
he worked closely with dozens of graduate students. He also
spent a considerable amount of time during his final year
in Seattle doing residencies at local schools, giving public
concerts, teaching adult education classes, and performing
at a number of rural Northwest libraries.
I was a graduate student in the ethnomusicology program at
the University of Washington when Joe arrived in 1981. Because
I had studied Irish for several years prior to meeting him,
we concentrated almost exclusively on the older songs in Irish.
I was a young scholar with little experience, but my studies
were drawn quickly into focus by Joe's profound knowledge
of his art, his strong opinions on everything from tea bags
to guitars, and his stunning ability to make the distant Irish
past come sharply into the present time and place. Other Northwest
musicians and singers report similar experiences. Mary Molloy,
a vocalist and fiddler who was in Seattle during the late
1970s, mentions that she found in Joe a type of "musical grandfather."
Her own grandfather was from the same region of Ireland as
Joe; a great singer according to family legend, he had passed
away just prior to Joe's arrival in Seattle. Mary has felt
both a strong connection and a lasting influence from Joe
on her own music.
Joe Heaney has continued to have a considerable impact upon
singers, musicians and others since his death from emphysema
in 1984. As his illness became increasingly serious, he called
upon me to substitute for him in classes. At one point, in
the hospital, he clasped my hand (after telling the nurse
that I was his daughter) and said, "You'll have to carry it
on for me, dear." I took his words and his intent seriously.
Now, several dozen American students who sing in sean-nós
style consider themselves to be Joe's "grandchildren." They
have listened carefully to Joe's singing, discussed the meaning
of the songs and the traditional context for them, and have
come to an understanding of sean-nós. These
students are largely of Irish descent, and several have traveled
to Ireland and brought not only the knowledge of some of the
grandest songs of the west Galway tradition with them, but
a deep respect for the tradition. Sean Johnson, a student
who visited Joe's burial place in Ireland after studying with
me, feels that there has been no deeper way to tap in to the
spirit of his Irish ancestors than singing Joe's songs. Learning
sean-nós has helped him and others to build
a connection with an older Ireland. Joe would be proud to
know that his songs and the memories of his performances are
still strong in the Pacific Northwest, and it would very likely
please him to know that people are still learning to perform
sean-nós singing from his recordings, years
after his death.
Sean Williams, Ph.D., is an ethnomusicologist on the faculty
at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington.
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