Hunting for the Lost Songs of Kohala

Boots Loopenui ‑Hunting for the Lost Songs of Kohala

Aloha mai kākou. This is a story about magic. Not the kind with the top hat, and the rabbit and the haole lady getting sawed in half. [audience laughter] It’s always a haole lady. [audience laughter] Now, I saw real magic. You know how when you see a magician, and they tell you where to look and you’re still amazed when the trick happens? I’m going to tell you right up front what I look. So, the magic I witnessed happen in Kohala. 

Kohala is a beautiful place. It’s full of stories. Some of them are well known like the one about how the people of Kohala saved the infant Kamehameha from being killed, hiding him from whole armies, so that he might grow up and fulfill the prophecy and unite our islands. Kohala did that. I was born here on Oahu, on the windward side in Kaneohe. Right that way. 

Thanks, all my moms. But my roots reach back to Kohala. It’s a beautiful, beautiful place. How many of my moms are here. Even growing up, we’d visit as kids. I knew, I knew that place was special. I didn’t know what to say about it, I didn’t know what to call it, but I knew that was a special place. 

A few years later, I saw the amazing documentaries of Eddie and Myrna Kamae. Yeah, documentaries about special places and a way of life that was disappearing all too quickly. I knew I wanted to make stories like that. I wanted to make documentaries like that. But regular guys, we don’t get to do that kind of stuff. So, maybe better we just leave it to the professionals like Eddie and Myrna Kamae. 

But in the early days of 2017, Eddie Kamae passed away and that line of storytelling ended. Later that same year, my wife, Cheryl, and I, we moved to Kohala. We hadn’t even been there for very long when I ran into a couple of guys I hadn’t met in years, two great Hawaiian musicians. One my classmate and the other my wife’s cousin. They come over for dinner. They bring their wives and their instruments, of course, in that order, of course. We eat dinner, we move to the living room, the cases pop open, the guitars and ukulele come out and we start playing. 

We’re playing old Hawaiian music. We’re playing local music that was on the radio when we were kids. There was a couple of Eagle songs in there, all kind of music. That jam session lasted until 04:00 in the morning. Yeah, our wives were thrilled. [audience laughter] But the whole time I’m sitting there and I’m thinking about how good we sound. We sound like we’re already a band. I’m thinking, I want to keep this feeling. I want to feel this again and again. 

So, later that day, I tell my wife that I’ve had these ideas for telling stories for years, for making documentaries, but I never thought I could do that kind of thing. But Eddie Kamae only had so long to tell stories, and I don’t know how long I have to tell stories. So, I shared my idea. I told her I wanted to go hunting for the old, unrecorded songs of Kohala. I called them heirloom songs, and asked the old families if they could share any songs. 

My wife foolishly agreed to help me, because let’s face it, she married a musician and an artist, and now, apparently, a storyteller. So, clearly, she has poor judgment, [audience laughter] but she can write grant applications. So, she agrees to help and with her help, I get to work. I ask all the film guys, ask the musicians. Everybody says yes, because apparently, everybody else in Kohala has poor judgment too. I get a grant. I started GoFundMe. I named our band, The Kohala Mountain Boys. [audience laughter] Two guys heard us, [audience laughter] and we got to work. 

I put out the word on social media. I asked everybody I knew if they had any songs from any family in Kohala. And immediately, I get a hit. How easy is this? One of my grade school classmates contacts me and says, her grandfather, who was from Kohala, wrote a song in 1940 or 1941. So, I contact her by phone. We catch up after years, and she says, she knows she’s seen the song, but she can’t remember where.

So, her and her husband, they tear that house up. And in the last place they look, they find it, papa’s papers, and they send me the lyrics and she tells me about her grandfather, how he legally adopted her and raised her as his own daughter, how on long weekends and holidays, he would take her back to Kohala so she could meet some of her Kohala family. He’s a good man. 

What she sent me was a page of handwritten lyrics, Mokulele Hawaii in Hawaiian language. My job was to take those lyrics and put them in the form of a finished song. So, I took the lyrics and the time period that he wrote them. I tried to craft a song that I thought might have been a hit on the radio here if you heard it in 1940. And just like that, song number one done. Super easy, right? [audience laughter] But it’s funny. 

When we finally recorded that song for the documentary, we’re standing in the boonies in this ancient part of Kohala, and we’re in front of this old cabin and we’re surrounded by native plants and trees, and there’s a stream running right here. We’re dressed in period clothing and playing instruments that would have been available at the time the song was written. We’re playing this old/​new song. It could have been World War II era Hawaii. 

And yet, right in front of me, there’s a cameraman with a gimbal and a giant camera. And over here, there’s a sound guy with a bank of digital, whatever they are. And I’ve got a wireless digital monitor in my ear. It’s like 1940 colliding with 2019. But we got it done. We got it done and I thought, what is this? Duck soup? This is going to go great. And then, nothing. For months, nothing. Nobody gave me any songs. 

I asked everybody I knew. I asked everybody I knew to ask everybody they knew and nothing. And I’m thinking, these grant deliverable deadlines, they’re going to come and they’re going to go, and all that money is going to have to be paid back and I don’t even know what kind of limbs I’m going to have to sell to make that happen. But it’s not so magical now. But I started this, and a small group of people stood up with me. I knew in my bones that there is magic here. So, I just had to keep trying. So, I did. 

And a week before the film crew was to come up and shoot for the one and only time, my bass player tells me, ​“I know a lady who has a song, but she’s not going to give them to you.” [audience laughter] I don’t even know what that means, but [audience laughter] I’m desperate. So, I call the phone number and then I find out what that means. She grilled me on the phone. She grilled me forever. And then, she tells me to come to her house for round two of the interrogation. [audience laughter] So Hawaiian, just trying to root out my intentions. Okay. 

So, I go and I sit down with her and she tells me about her dad, about how he used to run a crew that maintained the famous Kohala ditch trail. Yeah. And how he would take a couple crew members and some pack animals and hike into the forest. They’d stay in this little cabin next to the ditch trail for days on end while they worked on it, and the whole time missing his family. And at night, he would lay in his cot. While he’s thinking about his wife and kids, the beautiful scent of gardenias from all the wild gardenia bushes around the cabin would come wafting in the screen windows. He wrote a love song for his wife, comparing her to the lovely gardenias all around him. She thought it would have been about 1939 or so. At the end of this hour, she smiles at me and says, ​“I think I’m going to give you my daddy’s song.” Yes. 

And then, she says, ​“It goes like this,” and she starts humming ​“La, da, da – ” No, no, no, no, no, it’s not how. No. What? That’s it. That’s it? After all of that. That’s it? Humming? [audience laughter] So, I said, does it have lyrics? And she said, ​“Oh, yes,” and she pulls out a notepad and a pencil, and she starts trying to remember what they might have been. [audience laughter] Right about then, I started feeling like I was getting COVID, [audience laughter] and I think I was contracting it from this song. [audience laughter] But I recorded her humming on my phone, and I took her scratch paper lyrics home to write this song with now six days left. 

Just like the first one, I was shooting for a song that would have been popular here back in the day, in 1939 when he wrote it. This one was easy. This one wrote itself. It was something about it that I felt like all I had to do was play it out loud and it would be real and it was, just like with the first song we recorded it in the bushes on the rock wall of a kalo patch. We got it all done on time. 

The last day of filming, Sunday afternoon, the crew comes to me and they say, ​“We got all the interview footage shot. We got all the song footage shot. We got all the B roll shot. But we still have no idea what the story is that we’re editing this footage into.” There’s no way I could have storyboarded any of this. 

Now, this crew is leaving to go back to the airport to fly back to Oahu in a couple of hours, and I still don’t know what the story I’m telling is. So, now, I’m in my head, I’m running through all the interview footage, trying to play it back. It hits me that I’ve overlooked the most important piece of this whole puzzle. I took my eyes off of the spot where the trick was happening. Both the ladies who gave me songs for this story, for this project, one at the beginning of the project and one at the end of the project. We’re both from the same old Kohala family, and yet they had never met. They had never even heard of each other. 

I didn’t know how that was possible. But then, it hit me that I can tell the finished story with one last shot. So, I tell the crew to go get the first lady, the one who grew up on Oahu. Take her to the family graveyard in Kohala. It’s a beautiful little plot. She’d never been there before. Don’t mic her up. Ask her to wait in the car, because I don’t want her to explore that graveyard on her own. I go to get the other lady, the one who grew up in Kohala, and I asked her to come back to the family graveyard to meet a cousin of hers for the very first time. And she says, ​“Yes.” 

We filmed them meeting in the graveyard, hugging and kissing the one woman pointing out the graves of both women’s shared ancestors. They’re holding hands, and they’re smiling and walking and talking and without microphones. We don’t get to know what they’re saying. That’s not for us. That conversation belongs to their family. It gives me chicken skin even now. I think about the fact that the only people who heard those words were those two women and their ancestors. And I was honored. I stood outside that graveyard and I was honored to just be a silent witness to this sweetness in a graveyard. And that was it. There was the trick. It was revealed. 

What I finally realized before I set up that last shot, was that both of these composers, both of these men who had died decades ago, had somehow conspired from beyond the grave to make this documentary, so I could bring the two arms of their family together. Did they just point me at these two women? Did they block me from getting songs from other families, so I would only pay attention to their family? [audience laughter] Did they create the conditions that allowed us to move to Kohala in the first place? Was it that far reaching? I don’t know. 

I was watching the whole time, and I still don’t know how the trick was done. But what I do know is these two guys, these two men, these two sons of Kohala, they love their family and their home so much that even after death, they were moving things around just to try and reunite or unite their descendants in their homeland. What kind of place, what kind of special place raises people who hold that kind of love and passion and loyalty even after death? Like I said, I don’t know, I still don’t know how the trick was done and I don’t care. 

Because I saw real magic. I saw what happens when an amazing place raises loving, loyal children. I saw real magic. No top hat and no rabbit and no getting cut in half. Real magic. Mahalo.