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
