BYUH Hawaiian Studies instructor Kaipo Manoa traced the evolution of Hawaiian slack key guitar music during the Honors colloquium on March 18 and demonstrated his skill in the distinctive island art form by playing a number of selections in various styles and tunings.
More on the styles and tunings below, but first, Manoa — who graduated from BYU-Hawaii in 1994 with a degree in instrumental music and went to work fulltime for the Polynesian Cultural Center — explained the history of ki hoalu or Hawaiian slack key guitar goes back to the 1830s when the king of Hawaii imported Spanish and Mexican cowboys to begin rounding up wild cattle descended from a gift Captain George Vancouver gave to King Kamehameha a generation earlier in 1793.
The Latin cattlemen, who also started the Hawaiian paniolo or cowboy tradition, brought guitars, "which just blew away the Hawaiians, because they had never seen an instrument like that before," Manoa said. He also speculated that the Spanish style of using a bass guitar for rhythm and another for melody lines was a critical element in the development of the new art form. "Whatever it was, when our Mexican and Spanish friends left, they gave the guitars to the Hawaiians."
"We tried to duplicate what we heard them playing," he continued, noting that over time the Hawaiians started to tune the guitar "to whatever sounded good; and they started to mimic what they heard before, playing the melody, bass and the strumming of chords — all on one guitar at the same time."
"They figured out they could use their thumbs to play a very simple, constant bass line, while the other fingers provided the melody and accompaniment. To make the lower bass tones, they needed to slack [hoalu] the ki [tuning key] or loosen the strings until they came into 'open tuning.'" He explained that occurs when strumming the guitar strings without pressing any of them down on the fret board produces a chord. [A regularly tuned guitar does not produce a chord until the strings are pressed into the fret board in certain configurations.]
"So, in ki hoalu with one finger and four chords, you can play hundreds of Hawaiian songs," Manoa said. "There are also many different tunings, kind of to fit the vocal range... For example, there's one called 'Drop-C tuning'...and another called 'G-wahine'...perhaps because it was often used by females; they could use one finger to play two different chords."
Returning to slack key's history, Manoa noted early Hawaiian guitar players "were idolized," and as others subsequently learned the "new technology," they often tried to keep would-be mimics from learning their moves by turning the instrument away from the audience "so they wouldn't be able to see; or if they laid the guitar down, they would tune it differently first."
"Often, tunings were kept within a family, and stayed within that family for generations. This helped keep the stylings and tunings pure. Slack key wasn't affected much by western culture," he continued, noting that it wasn't until the 1950s when an unlikely artist, the late Gabby Pahinui, recorded Hi'ilawe, when people wondered, "What is that? They knew that sounded different than standard tuning."
"People all over the world were affected by the recording, and since then slack key has opened up to people other than family," said Manoa, who teaches ki hoalu and regular guitar classes at BYU-Hawaii. He also pointed out that lots of slack key information can be found online at Dancing Cat Record's web site.
Subsequent artists — such as Ledward Kaapana, the late Sonny Chillingsworth, Cyril Pahinui (Gabby's son), the Beamer Brothers (as a duet and individually) and others have added their own variations to the slack key genre and even morphed it into other styles. But Manoa feels you can still feel that "cowboy influence, that kind of tap-your-foot music. That's what you get when you listen to slack key."
For example, Manoa said when he jams with other slack key players, "I always have good fun." He also enjoys teaching BYUH students the Hawaiian art form. "I had a student from Idaho who took to it very quickly. When I asked him why, he said he had to sell his favorite horse in order to come to school here. Maybe that's why he was just as good or better than the locals in the class."
— Photos by Mike Foley
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