“Kika Kila: How the Hawaiian Steel Guitar Changed the Sound of Modern Music”

John W. Troutman

University of North Carolina Press, $35

The history of Hawaiian music since 1778 is a story of Hawaiians adopting haole (non-Hawaiian) ways of making music and then adapting them into something uniquely Hawaiian. The haole machete became the Hawaiian ukulele, and from the haole guitar came the Hawaiian technique of ki hoalu (slack key) and the Hawaiian steel guitar.

Several people in Hawaii are believed to have experimented with the idea of sliding something along the strings of a guitar, but Joseph Kekuku is recognized as the person who perfected the technique, modified a standard guitar to create the steel guitar and then took the new instrument to audiences outside Hawaii.

With “Kika Kila: How the Hawaiian Steel Guitar Changed the Sound of Modern Music,” John W. Troutman covers the history of the steel guitar from Kekuku’s early experiments to its place in Hawaiian music today. It is an important contribution to the documentation of Hawaiian musical history. The 83 pages of notes that follow the main text are uniformly fascinating.

Troutman’s biggest contribution is his research on the impact of Hawaiian steel guitar players on the music of the American South. The influence of the steel guitar on what became “country music” is well known, but Troutman takes it another step: He matches the first published reports of African-American slide guitarists with the documented tour schedules of Hawaiian steel guitar players in the South and makes a convincing case for the theory that African-American slide guitarists developed that style of guitar playing after they saw Hawaiians playing steel guitar.

Troutman puts the development of the steel guitar deeper into its historical context with a chapter on the history of the original six-string guitar in 19th-century Hawaii. He also devotes a significant amount of space to the activities of the enemies of the Hawaiian nation in the 19th century and the ugly aftermath of the overthrow of the legitimate Hawaiian government in 1893.

Troutman generally avoids the strident campus-radical analysis some academics use when writing about Hawaii, but his repeated suggestion that Hawaiian music reinforced notions of white supremacy in the 20th century stretches credibility. The idea that the steel guitar is somehow responsible for the annexation of Hawaii or that it brought shame to Hawaiians is ridiculous, although possibly made with tongue in cheek.

The Hawaiian Renaissance of the late 1960s is often seen as representing a complete rejection of hapa haole music, the steel guitar and musicians in matching uniforms, but Troutman’s narrative refutes that perspective. The Sons of Hawaii, the purist of the traditionalist “grass-roots” Hawaiian groups, predated the Hawaiian Renaissance by almost a decade and included steel guitar from the beginning. The pioneers of the musical renaissance played Hawaiian-language music rather than hapa haole but played much of it in a contemporary rock-influenced style that was far from traditional. And almost all of them wore matching clothes, albeit not the white-clothes-with-red-sash style popular during the territorial era.