We’ve talked often about the beginnings of jazz and the debt we owe Louis Armstrong for crafting it in a way that gave us a basis for everything that followed. But there are also other stories of origination, other ways that certain types of music came to popularity and broad use.
Take for example, the music of Hawaii. If you’ve traveled to the Islands, you have been entertained by musicians, dancers as well as singers and instrumentalists, playing a distinctive type of music, characterized by simple, flowing, pretty melodies. That music began as storytelling chants. Hawaiian history was not written but preserved orally, using two types of chants, unaccompanied and accompanied by dance.
Of course the iconic Hawaiian instrument of modern times is the ukulele. At any event for tourists that includes music, and most will, you’re likely to be treated to someone singing to the background of a ukulele and accompanied by hula dancers.
While Don Ho is certainly the most internationally famous Hawaiian singer of popular music, the medley of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” and “What a Wonderful World” in 1988 by Israel Kamakawiwo’ole was an international success, surpassing Ho’s “Tiny Bubbles” of the 1960s as the biggest Hawaiian hit of all time.