I Hear Music--Sweet, Sweet (Island) Music

(Luana:) History is often dry and dusty and impersonal, but sometimes it just reaches out and grabs you in the gut--and that happened to me in the Lyman Mission House Museum in Hilo. We were looking at the museum exhibits when Bob called out to me from across the room, “Luana, isn’t this your godfather?” Short answer: No. It was my godfather’s brother. But still very cool. More on that later.

First, let me backtrack a bit: My Hawaiian name (Luana means “take it easy“) has often been a mispronounced annoyance, but I’ve always loved the Hawaii connection my parents bestowed on me. My Dad was stationed at Hickam Field in Honolulu, next to Pearl Harbor, from 1948 to 1950, and those apparently were two of the happiest years of my parents’ lives. So, even though I wasn’t born until their next assignment in slightly less exotic Indiana, they gave me a Hawaiian name as well as Hawaiian godparents: Clarence and Florence Kinney. I was named for their daughter Luana Kinney.

Clarence was a musician and composer who wrote some well-known Hawaiian songs of the ’20s, ’30s and ’40s. His brother Ray was even more famous as a composer and performer, at least according to my parents. But the display at the Lyman Mission confirmed their story -- in fact it elevated it. According to the Hawaiian Music Hall of Fame, Ray scored higher than Rudy Vallee and Guy Lombardo in a popularity poll of American singers taken in New York in 1938. He performed all over the mainland, including New York, where his band was in a Broadway show that included Hawaiian music. He also headlined at a famous hotel nightclub. Clarence, my godfather, didn’t reach Ray’s level of popularity on the mainland, but the whole Kinney family (there were six brothers) were known in the Islands for their beautiful Hawaiian music. I know my parents tossed down many a beer listening to them play in clubs around Honolulu and got to be very good friends with them. The Christmas cards and letters continued throughout their lives, and I finally got to meet them on my first trip to Hawaii in the late 1970s.

Even though our shipboard Internet connection is slow and balky, I managed to find some of my godfather’s music online and listen to little snippets of it. If you’d like to hear one of my godfather Clarence’s songs, go to http://www.territorialairwaves.com/index.php?page=3 and scroll down to the song Holoholo Ka’a and click the little arrow button. It isn’t sung by him, but I’m still hoping to find one that is. He also wrote a song about the Aloha Tower, which is where we are supposed to dock in Honolulu. What a thrill! It gives me goosebumps.

Mahalo, Mom and Dad. Aloha!