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CHAPTER 1

Trouble in Paradise

The History and Reinvention of Surfing

Na Kane i hee nalu Oahu

He puni Maui no Piilani

Ua hee a papa kea i papa enaena

Ua lilo lanakila ke poo o ka papa

Ua nahaha Kauiki

Kane surfed at Oʻahu,

And all around Maui, Island of Piʻilani,

He surfed through the white foam, the raging waves,

The top of his surfboard in triumph rose on the crest

As waves crashed against Kaʻuiki.¹

These are the opening lines of the third part of an extensive nineteenth-century mele (Hawaiian chant) catalogued in Honolulu’s Bishop Museum as “He inoa no Naihe” (Name Chant for Naihe), which also bears the evocative titles “Deification of Canoe for Naihe” and “A Surfing Song” (audio example 1). Naihe was a chief associated with the Hawaiian royalty, and an accomplished surfer. He was born toward the end of the eighteenth century and died in 1831. Thus this is a late-eighteenth- or, more likely, early-nineteenth-century mele. The mele was later adopted for King Kalākaua,² the last reigning Hawaiian king, who died in 1891. He was nicknamed “the Merrie Monarch” because of his appreciation of and support for some of Hawaii’s traditional arts, including surfing, mele, and hula, the latter popularly known as a Hawaiian dance style but better understood as visual poetry. The following fragment from the same mele celebrates King Kalākaua’s own surfing prowess (audio example 1):

Kaili Kalakaua i ka nalu,

Pau ka nalu lilo ia ia,

Ka hemolele a ke akamai,

Hee a ka lani i ka nalu.

Kalākaua rode the waves,

He rode on every wave deftly and skillfully.

The chief rode on the waves,

On the swirling waves.³

Much of what we know about pre-revival surfing comes to us from Hawaiian legends and mele—the original surfing music. Since at least the surviving mele tend to focus on Hawaiian nobility, they skew our picture of surfing history a bit. However, Hawaiian legends and early accounts by Hawaiians and non-Hawaiians leave no doubt that just about everyone surfed—royal and commoner; men, women, and children.⁴ Yet the fact that nobility routinely surfed is a powerful reminder of the establishment role of surfing in pre-contact Hawaiian society.

By pre-revival surfing I mean surfing by Hawaiians up to the end of the nineteenth century. As the nineteenth century turned into the twentieth, many commentators claimed that surfing was on the verge of extinction. Recent research has shown that this was not the case at all but rather a myth propagated by non-Hawaiians, first out of ignorance and later in a deliberate effort to encourage tourists to visit Hawaiʻi: by suggesting that Hawaiians had abandoned surfing, it cleared the way for tourists to colonize the sport.⁵ Even though surfing was never abandoned by Hawaiians and never died out in Hawaiʻi, it was “revived” in the sense that it was given new life in the first half of the twentieth century by tourists and white settlers in Hawaiʻi, and also by its spread to other coastal areas around the world. With this revival came great changes, changes so great that I believe surfing was also reinvented in the twentieth century. I use the term New Surfing to refer to what surfing became in the twentieth century as it was redefined and resignified by new surfers—in Hawaiʻi, more overtly in California, and then quickly around the world. The act of riding waves while standing on boards remains fundamentally unchanged; that is not what I mean by New Surfing. Nor do I intend to suggest that New Surfing is in any way better than pre-revival surfing. My interest here is in surfing as a cultural practice with accompanying rituals, habits, conceptions about who surfs and why, and of course musical ideas and practices.

Just as ancient mele tell us much about pre-revival surfing, changing music associated with surfing in the first half of the twentieth century informs us about the reinvention of surfing. Using musicking about surfing as my guide, in this chapter I retell the history of surfing, beginning with pre-contact surfing in Hawaiʻi, followed by the reinvention of surfing during the first half of the twentieth century. Where possible, the story is told through music associated with surfing, beginning with Hawaiian mele, then Hawaiian popular music during the first half of the twentieth century, up to a genre called Surf Music, which is the focus of the next chapter. There are some pages in the middle of this chapter where I don’t write about music but instead present a history of the rumored demise of surfing, followed by its reinvention as it was globalized. The balance of the chapter and of the book, however, does address musicking among surfers.

HAWAIIAN SURFING: THE SPORT OF KINGS AND QUEENS (AND EVERYBODY ELSE)

Ka nalu nui, a kū ka nalu mai Kona,

Ka malo a ka māhiehie.

Ka ‘onaulu loa, a lele kaʻu malo.

O kakaʻi malo hoaka,

O ka malo kai, malo o ke aliʻi.

E kū, e hume a paʻa i ka malo.

E kaʻikaʻi ka lā i ka papa ʻo Halepō

A pae ʻo Halepō i ka nalu.

Hōʻeʻe i ka nalu mai Kahiki,

He nalu Wākea, nalu hoʻohuʻa,

Haki ʻōpuʻu ka nalu, haki kuapā.

The big wave, the billow rolling from Kona,

Makes a loincloth fit for a champion among chiefs.

Far-reaching roller, my loincloth speeds with the waves.

Waves in parade, foam-crested waves of the loin-covering sea,

Make the malo of the man, the high chief.

Stand, gird fast the loincloth!

Let the sun ride on ahead guiding the board named Halepō

Until Halepō glides on the swell.

Let Halepō mount the surf rolling in from Kahiki,

Waves worthy of Wākea’s people,

Waves that build, break, dash against our shore.

(“He inoa no Naihe” [A Name Chant for Naihe])⁶

Seafaring people around the world have found pleasure from the boost of speed provided by an ocean swell as they returned from the open seas to shore.⁷ Heading into the water for the sole purpose of enjoying wave riding, most commonly practiced by children, was historically widespread throughout Polynesia. Ben Finney and James D. Houston, in their book Surfing: A History of the Ancient Hawaiian Sport, note that in most islands of East Polynesia, all ages, male and female, also took pleasure in wave riding, usually riding prone on short wooden boards. In Tahiti and Hawaiʻi, surfers took it a step further. There they developed longer boards, six feet or more in length, and rode them while standing.⁸ Stand-up surfing was most highly developed in Hawaiʻi, where it was thoroughly integrated into society. Surfing was rich with rituals associated with everything from the making of surfboards to the act of surfing itself, and with taboos about who could surf where, when, and with whom. Legends and mele tell of elaborate surfing contests with associated activities from gambling to courtship. And of course there were chants about surfing and surfers.⁹ Even if surfing did not necessarily originate there, Hawaiʻi remains the mythical font of surfing, and it is certainly the place from which stand-up surfing spread around the world during the twentieth century.

And surfing mele show us that Hawaiians knew that surfing came to them from elsewhere—that they had some sense of global surfing before anyone was using the term globalization. The extract of the mele at the beginning of this section refers to Kahiki as the origin of a particular surfing swell (audio example 1). Kahiki could mean Tahiti specifically, though in this context it probably refers to any distant place beyond Hawaiʻi.¹⁰ The Hawaiian Islands were most likely first settled by Marquesans around 300 C.E. but were then conquered and resettled by Tahitians around 1100 C.E.¹¹ Whether or not the particular swell celebrated in this and other mele literally originated in the waters around Tahiti is not the point. The mele can be interpreted as paying homage to an earlier homeland for these seafarers from whence Hawaiian people and cultural practices came—cultural practices including surfing.

The description in Naihe’s name chant, excerpted above, of waves as “worthy of Wākea’s people” is also a key to Hawaiian myths of surfing. Wākea and his wife, Papa, are the legendary ancestors of all Hawaiian genealogies, especially the chiefly clans.¹² Beyond the fragment reproduced above, the mele goes on to mention other notable ancestors and notable surfing spots, such as Kahaluʻu, on the Big Island, Hawaiʻi, a surfing beach looked over by Kuʻemanu, a large surfing heiau (temple) built by Hawaiians long ago. Such temples were used by nobility to pray for good surfing swells, and they typically also provided a favorable vantage point from which to watch surfing contests.¹³ Thus in this mele, as well as in others, surfing is clearly associated with Hawaiian nobility and rituals that reaffirmed the power of the royalty, as well as with the geography of the Hawaiian Islands and beyond. Surfing was clearly integral to Hawaiians’ self- and social conceptions, and to their sense of place both geographically and socially.

Today New Surfing is strikingly male dominated, despite the increasing numbers of female surfers during the first decade of the twenty-first century.¹⁴ This is doubly striking and troubling when we realize that ancient Hawaiian mele concur with other sources to show conclusively that women, too, surfed (and were sometimes praised for surfing better than men). These few lines from the surfing mele for Queen Emma, the queen consort of King Kamehameha IV during the latter half of the nineteenth century, reveal several interesting images of Hawaiian surfing at that time (audio example 2):

He nalu ka holua no Waiakanonoula,

He nalu ka lio me ke kaa i uka o ka aina,

He nalu ke olaʻi naueue ka honua

He nalu ke anuenue me ka punohu i ka moana,

He nalu ka awa kau a ka manu iluna o ka laau

He nalu ka popolo me ka laulele,

E kaha ana ke kane me ka wahine,

E hee ana ka luahine me ka elemakule,

Pae aku, pae i ka nalu o Mauliola.

The hōlua sledding is the surfing of Waiakanonoula

The horse and buggy are surfing upon the land

The earthquake is surfing that shakes the earth

The rainbow is surfing and so is the low-lying rainbow on the ocean,

The awa planted by the birds on a tree is a “surf,”

The popolo and the laulele weeds are “surfs,”

Upon which men and women glide,

The old women and old men surf,

And land on the surf of Mauliola.¹⁵

I selected this fragment from the long mele in honor of Queen Emma because it starts with a mention of a ho-lua, a wooden sled used for sliding down the sides of volcanoes, reaching speeds upward of fifty miles per hour.¹⁶ The passage continues with other metaphors of surfing on land that provide insight into the modernizing Hawaiʻi of the mid–nineteenth century; horses had been introduced to the islands only in the first years of that century. The mele then extends the metaphors of surfing to create an atmospheric image of Hawaiʻi—earthquakes, rainbows, foliage, and fowl—before returning to the liquid waves we usually associate with surfing. There we are reminded that women did surf, even old women who “land on the surf of Mauliola”—literally, “the breath of life” or “life and healing.” Queen Emma’s mele shows us that, among many other things, at least some nineteenth-century Hawaiians understood the health benefits of surfing, and they considered it integral to many aspects of their ancient and modernizing lives—perhaps even a metaphor for life and movement itself.¹⁷

Queen Emma’s mele illustrates another key quality of surfing mele: the naming of places, especially prime surfing locations. Mele effectively create poetic maps of the Hawaiian Islands. Queen Emma’s surf mele begins on the island of Hawaiʻi, mentioning in line 6 “beautiful Waipio, whose surf is ridden by visiting chiefs. . . .” Waipio is on the northern shore of Hawaiʻi Island and contains an ancient surfing spot.¹⁸ In the passage reproduced above, sledding on Waiakanonoula, not far from Waipio, is compared with surfing. Later in the mele, places like Kapohakau (now the name of a mountain summit on Kauaʻi, but possibly the name of a surf beach in the past), Wahinekapu (a bluff near Kīlauea, Hawaiʻi, the taboo residence of a god), Puaenaena (probably Puaʻena, an ancient surfing area on Oʻahu),¹⁹ and many other significant locations are named. As noted above, Naihe’s name chant mentions the surfing spot Kahaluʻu, which is overlooked by a surfing temple, and his chant includes other named locations. Finney and Houston note that old Hawaiian stories and mele mention more named spots for surfing on the Hawaiian Islands than were commonly surfed in the mid-1960s.²⁰ We do not know if surfers today yet appreciate all the potential surfing breaks that Hawaiians enjoyed on the islands centuries ago.

Extending place naming beyond the Hawaiian Islands, relatively modern mele, such as Queen Emma’s surfing mele, remind us that Hawaiʻi was part of the globalizing world. These lines are heard near the end of Queen Emma’s surf chant (audio example 2):

He kulana hee nalu o Farani,

He huʻa o ka nalu o Maleka,

He ika no ka nalu o Rusini,

He paena na ka nalu o Beretane

A place to surf is at France,

The last of the “surfs” is America,

The force that carries the “surfs” along is Russia,

The place where the surf lands is England²¹

During Queen Emma’s lifetime, none of these places were surfing destinations, though they all are now, including most recently Russia.²² All were also empires with aspirations to colonize Hawaiʻi. Rather than being literally about surfing, these lines remind us that, as the wife of King Kamehameha IV, Queen Emma was a player on the world stage.

Close readings of surfing mele also show us that pre-revival Hawaiians rode waves in ways that many surfers in the New Surfing era thought were possible only with recent advances in surfboard technologies. For example, riding obliquely across the face of a wave just ahead of the break where the top of the wave pitches over or topples down to form what surfers call “whitewater” is the skill foundation of modern surfing. It was assumed that without fins or skegs on their surfboards, ancient Hawaiian surfers would have had very limited directional control of their boards, and would have typically ridden more or less straight in with the direction of the swell—certainly not obliquely, nearly parallel to the swell itself. Fins were added to surfboards in the early twentieth century, and there is no evidence that pre-contact surfboards ever had fins. However, these lines from a pre-revival mele, “He inoa no Naihe,” reveal that Hawaiian surfers were able to ride across a wave obliquely (audio example 1):

Lala a kou ka nalu a pae i Oahu

Auau i ka Waiuli, Wailena

Ride in obliquely till you land at Oʻahu

To bathe in the living waters, the waters of life.²³

Royalty generally used long, narrow, thick, heavy boards called papa olo (fig. 5). They ranged from fourteen to sixteen feet, or even longer. Commoners used the more typical papa alaia (fig. 6), ranging from six to nine feet, flat on the deck and bottom, and much lighter.²⁴ This mele was for a surfer of the Hawaiian chiefly class, so it is assumed that he was riding a board fit for his class—a long, narrow, heavy olo board, which would be much easier to catch waves with, but much more difficult to hold in an oblique angle across a wave’s face.

While it is likely that modern surfers have come up with moves that are new, it is also presumptuous to assume that surfing is fundamentally more advanced today than it was in pre-contact Hawaiʻi. After compiling and translating the earliest references to surfing by Hawaiians, Hawaiian surfer and historian John Clark concluded that “traditional Hawaiian surfers were as at home in the ocean and as skilled in riding waves as any surfer today. While they rode solid wood boards without fins, boards that limited the extent of their maneuvers, they still did all the basics that surfers do now.”²⁵ This included riding inside barreling hollow waves, and riding very large waves. Surfers today do not know or fully appreciate the full extent of pre-revival Hawaiian surfing skills, but mele contain hints that ancient Hawaiian surfers were far better than we have imagined.

FIGURE 5. Engraving from 1825 depicting a domestic scene in Hawaiʻi, with a papa olo surfboard thirteen to fifteen feet long prominently displayed. Iles Sandwich: Maison de Kraimoku, Premier Ministre du Roi; Fabrication des Etoffes. By Villeroy, after A. Pellion. Image courtesy of the Bishop Museum, Honolulu, Oʻahu, Hawaiʻi (www.bishopmuseum.org).

FIGURE 6. Man holding a papa alaia surfboard at Waikīkī Beach, with Diamond Head in the background, ca. 1890. Photographer unknown. Image courtesy of the Bishop Museum, Honolulu, Oʻahu, Hawaiʻi (www.bishopmuseum.org).

THE DEMISE OF SURFING?

The surfing mele referenced above span the late eighteenth century to the late nineteenth century—a period of increasing contact with Europeans and North Americans, as well as with sailors and explorers from the rest of the world. This was a time of rapid change in Hawaiʻi, and of a corresponding decline of surfing. I include a question mark in the subheading for this section because the decline of surfing tends to be both exaggerated and misattributed in surfing histories. In an article that he titled “The Reports of Surfing’s Demise Have Been Greatly Exaggerated,” Patrick Moser traces the often repeated notion that surfing was on the verge of dying out to a 1854 article by one George Washington Bates, whose words are then repeated in histories of surfing up through the twentieth century and still now in the twenty-first.²⁶ Careful not to cast blame, and recognizing his own European heritage, Moser tactfully points out that the reports of surfing’s demise are all by Europeans and Anglo-Americans, or what Hawaiians call collectively haole (“foreigner,” usually implying white). Many Hawaiians in touch with their own surfing heritage know better; the rest of us just have not been listening.

Hawaiian surfer and historian Isaiah Helekunihi Walker hopes to set the record straight. Drawing from hitherto inaccessible or ignored Hawaiian-language newspapers published in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and from his ethnographic research among Hawaiian surfers, Walker shows that surfing did not die out among Hawaiians, despite all odds.²⁷ Surfing—along with everything else Hawaiian—did, however, go through a tough patch in the nineteenth century. Missionaries had dramatic intended and unintended impact on Hawaiian society beginning in the 1820s. Some of them discouraged and disparaged surfing, usually for its associations with gambling, sex, and, perhaps worst of all, inutility,²⁸ but missionaries never directly legislated against surfing as is sometimes claimed. They didn’t need to. The establishment of labor-hungry plantations on the islands and a shift by the royalty toward European signifiers of status (instead of traditional Hawaiian signifiers of status such as surfing prowess), together with new ideas about gods introduced by missionaries, destabilized just about everything in Hawaiian society.²⁹ Added to this social, spiritual, and economic upheaval was the decimating effect of disease on the formerly isolated islanders. The population of the Hawaiian Islands was estimated to be between five and eight hundred thousand when Captain Cook arrived in 1778, but disease introduced by Cook and his men and subsequent visitors reduced the population of native Hawaiians to 134,925 at the 1823 census,³⁰ and their numbers continued to diminish to the end of the century. By the 1890s Hawaiians were a minority people on the Hawaiian Islands.³¹ Of course there were fewer Hawaiians surfing by the end of the century: there were fewer Hawaiians, period.

The impact on surfing of social upheaval and decline in the native Hawaiian population was most noticeable at centers of colonial influence, such as Honolulu—especially that former hotbed of surfing, Waikīkī. Yet if one moved away from the centers of foreign influence, it became much more likely that one would encounter substantial groups of surfers out on a good day. Such was the firsthand account of traveler Samuel S. Hill, who in 1849 visited the remote village of Keauhua, Hawaiʻi, only to find it empty of people. When his party finally encountered a few women, they were informed that everyone else from the village was down at a nearby bay surfing.³² Hawaiians never gave up on surfing despite their hardships, but as more and more haoles began to learn surfing themselves in the twentieth century, they may have needed new myths that presented themselves as the 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 “Peanuts” Larson, San Onofre, 1937. Photograph by Dr. Don James. From Surfing San Onofre to Point Dume, 1936–1942: Photographs by Don James (San Francisco: 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 that the visitor wishing to learn to surf “supplement this correspondence course with several weeks (at least) of actual practice in the hands of an expert Hawaiian instructor in Honolulu.” We should not be surprised to find printed in large font at the bottom of the page: “Used by Permission of the Hawaii Tourist Bureau,” an organization supported by Honolulu businesses that early on saw the advantages of using both music and surfing to advertise Hawaiʻi.⁴⁸

Singing through the songbook, our initiation into a Hawaiian lifestyle continues with the next song, “Kamaaina” (“The Old Timer” is the title translation provided by Noble, but kama‘aina literally means “child of the land” or “native born”). This song is in the voice of a man who has come to Honolulu, finds it paradise, and wants to become a native. The very next song in Noble’s collection completes the transformation: “I’m Not a Malihini Anymore.” A malihini is one from somewhere else, a foreigner. In the song, the singer claims, “I’ve learned to eat fish and poi, and swim like a real beach boy,” and concludes, at the end of the song, “I’m not a malihini any more I’m telling you, I’m just a Kamaaina now.”

Our singing protagonist may have gone native, but if hapa haole songs are our guide, he and his ilk stick close to Honolulu, especially the Waikīkī neighborhood, including named tourist hotels such as the Royal Hawaiian—at least in the English-language songs.⁴⁹ In Noble’s book, we have a cosmopolitan view of at least Honolulu as a nice place to visit, maybe even settle down. Surfing is one of the many attractions of Hawaiʻi, along with local women, stunning scenery, and temperate weather.

FIGURE 9. “How to Ride a Surfboard,” by Harold Coffin. Published in Johnny Noble’s Book of Famous Hawaiian Melodies (New York: Miller Music, 1935), 8.

The third songbook considered here was compiled by Charles E. King. Eminent Hawaiian ethnomusicologist and performer Amy Kuʻuleialoha Stillman refers to Charles E. King’s songbooks as “bibles” of Hawaiian music that “could be found in many a piano bench across the islands.”⁵⁰ One-quarter Hawaiian, King was fluent in the Hawaiian language and was close to the royal family. Queen Emma was his godmother, and Queen Liliʻuokalani was one of his music teachers.⁵¹ Though a contemporary of Sonny Cunha’s, he represented a more conservative approach to Hawaiian music—one that reflected the aesthetics of the last quarter of the nineteenth century, when the monarchy was still in place, rather than the first half of the twentieth century, when the mainland consolidated its influence over the islands. While critical of hapa haole songs, King included some in his later compilations,⁵² including one of his most popular compositions, “The Pidgin English Hula” (first copyright 1934). Thus King’s attitudes toward Hawaiian music provide a counterpoint to those of Cunha and Noble, though there are some structural similarities to the way he presented his song collections.

The first edition of King’s Book of Hawaiian Melodies was published in 1916.⁵³ Though I am using the 1948 and final edition of this collection of 101 songs and mele, it has much in common with the original edition and can be read as a history of popular Hawaiian songs from the first half of the twentieth century. I find only two songs that mention surfing. The first is “Kaimana Hila” (Diamond Head), by King (copyright 1916), where in the last verse the singer proclaims:

We all went to the Seaside Hotel

And looked with wonder at all the riders of the surf

Gliding swiftly.

The second, “Honolulu Maids,” is also attributed to King and again has an original copyright date of 1916. This song is “after an old style of hula,” though the protagonist is depicted as a visitor to Honolulu, and indeed the style and content could easily be heard as hapa haole.⁵⁴ It contains six short verses in which the protagonist is beguiled by the maids of Honolulu and, in the last three verses, learns how to surf and has an exchange with one maid in particular:

With those charming beautiful maids of Honolulula,

I learned to ride the surf like a kamaaina la.

I said to one beautiful maid of Honolulula,

“May, oh may I ride on life’s ocean with you la?”

Oh that charming beautiful maid of Honolulula,

Gazed at me and said, “Aole hike la.”

I take the proposition to “ride on life’s ocean with you” to be a marriage proposal, and I find rather nice the reference to surfing used as a metaphor for sharing life together. I also imagine the beautiful Honolulu maid smiling warmly as she gazed at her suitor and replied in Hawaiian, a language he did not understand: “Aole hike la” (No, never can do, la). Poor haole. He never knew what hit him. That Honolulu maid probably gets a proposal every weekend. Leaving our haole’s heartbreak aside, I note that in this song, it was the Honolulu maids who taught the tourist how to surf, not their male counterparts, the famous Waikīkī Beachboys.

Like Noble’s book, King’s overtly promotes tourism to Hawaiʻi in song and in photographic inserts that celebrate Hawaii’s attractions. These include a two-page spread featuring a map of the Hawaiian islands, labeled “The Paradise of the Pacific, Territory of Hawaii, USA,” that shows shipping routes to Vancouver, Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, the Panama Canal, South America, the Antipodes, and “the Orient”—all radiating out from prominently marked Honolulu and Waikīkī Beach. On two corners of the spread are photographs of swimmers at “Waikiki in January” and “Surf-riders at Waikiki.” Even more interesting for our purposes is the photograph on page 101 featuring, in the center, Duke Kahanamoku, flanked by two bits of text (fig. 10). On the left side:

You may travel the world over but you can find no sport so exhilarating and intensely exciting as surfing. The Hawaiians are children of the sea and they love to play with the waves as they sweep towards the shore by riding majestically on them with surf board or canoe. Waikiki beach affords the sojourner in Hawaii the best opportunity for enjoying this harmless pastime of the natives.

And on the right:

Duke Kahanamoku, Hawaii’s favorite son and the champion swimmer of the world, is here depicted with his winning smile and reliable surfboard. He is ready for a plunge into the waters of Waikiki.⁵⁵

With surfing’s greatest ambassador in the center, two now familiar tropes of Hawaiian surfing are rehearsed: Hawaiians are amphibious “children of the sea”; and Waikīkī is the best place in the world to learn to surf.

FIGURE 10. Duke Kahanamoku featured in King’s Book of Hawaiian Melodies (Honolulu: Charles E. King, 1948), 101.

The last collection of songs I consider here, the online source Hapa Haole Songs, rendered proportionately about the same number of references to surfing as the three publications considered above. Of the approximately 560 songs featured, only seven mention surfing (or heʻe nalu); a few others feature canoeing. Four of the songs mentioning surfing are dated after 1960, and represent a different era for surfing—one that I discuss in the next chapter. This leaves a scant three songs that reference surfing. These include a song from about 1930 by Paul Summers called “I’ve Gone Native Now,” which, like Noble’s “I’m Not a Malihini Anymore,” includes surfing as one of the marks of going native:

I go surfing every day

Way outside, catch a big wave

Riding kahakai ‘a ‘ole kapakahi

I’ve gone native now.

As any surfer today understands, it is not enough to know how to ride a wave. One must also know a bit of surfer lingo: kahakai ‘a ‘ole kapakahi (riding beachward without turning around, or straight in).

One particularly interesting if late song from the era is Jack Pitman and Bob Magoon’s 1952 “My Waikiki Girl.” The third verse paints this impressive picture:

And when the sea is dark and stormy,

Out in the surf you’ll find her there.

She rides the breakers on a surfboard

With a hibiscus in her hair.

This song is notable for breaking the general rule of New Surfing that surfers are male. Furthermore, in this song the “Waikiki Girl” is depicted as surfing when the sea is dark and stormy, suggesting large, rough seas. She was an accomplished surfer.

THE NEW IMAGE OF SURFING

Hapa haole and Hawaiian songs such as these were a major global export for Hawaiʻi, and many of these songs are still popular among the dozens if not hundreds of ukulele clubs that thrive around the world. During at least the first half of the twentieth century, they constituted the core repertoire of the earliest active musicking about surfing among surfers outside Hawaiʻi. These songs were considered Hawaiian. And even though some hapa haole hits were written in New York by Tin Pan Alley composers, key influential sources of this genre were, as I have shown, composed by musicians from Hawaiʻi or working in Hawaiʻi, even if they were not all ethnically Hawaiian. While popular in Hawaiʻi, these songs were also promoted to and popular in the mainland United States, the United Kingdom, Japan,⁵⁶ and wherever else there was a market for potential tourists to Hawaiʻi. The songs broadcast worldwide images of Hawaiʻi and the emerging New Surfing.

New Surfing in hapa haole songs is decontextualized. No longer is surfing richly woven through chant into Hawaii’s system of hierarchy, taboo, ritual, and geography. The only named surfing spot in these twentieth-century Hawaiian popular songs is Waikīkī; lost is the mapping of countless surfing beaches as found in mele. New Surfing also loses social context—with the exception of King’s “Honolulu Maids,” in which surfing is part of the protagonist’s courtship of a Hawaiian woman. In the other songs, surfing is depicted as something to be marveled at, or to learn as an individual who wishes to go native. Though that is very interesting in and of itself, there is no suggestion in these songs that certain individuals should ride only certain types of boards, at certain locations, in the company of certain people. Surfing is reduced to a flat (a nasty word in modern surfing parlance, meaning “no waves”) achievement, at best a way of demonstrating one’s attachment to Waikīkī. Lost are the elaborate descriptions of named surfers, of named surfboards, and of the particular qualities of waves. In other words, lost is all the detail that makes surfing exciting. A corollary is hula, especially as depicted in English-language hapa haole songs. Hula is reduced to an attractive display of the exotic female body—a “naughty little wiggle,” to quote one of Sonny Cunha’s 1909 compositions.

There is much that we can learn about surfing across time and space through the musical practices of surfing communities. Surviving mele from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Hawaiʻi show us that surfing was thoroughly integrated into Hawaiian society and the Hawaiian worldview, and that the skillful riding of long papa olo surfboards by Hawaiian kings and queens was the ultimate symbol of establishment power. New, reinvented surfing originally found musical inspiration from the mimesis of popular Hawaiian music, especially hapa haole songs, but these already suggested a renegotiation of Hawaiian society where women are objectified, as is surfing. Both are attractions to the islands, even while surfing becomes a major export.