Alumna helps Mid-Pacific Institute reclaim long-lost melody

Even before the girls began to sing, kumu Michael Lanakila Casupang was crying.

“I was thinking, ‘Here is the moment. Here are the voices of 100 years ago.’”

Casupang started teaching at Mid-Pacific Institute in 1987. Soon after, the school’s director of development, Sue Francis, gave him the lyrics to a song she had found in an old publication. The song was written for Kawaiahao Seminary for Girls, one of the mission schools that combined to form Mid-Pacific in 1908. There was no sheet music, so they didn’t know the tune. All they knew was that it had been last sung on campus in 1914.

Casupang studied the lyrics and composed a new melody for the piece. “It talks about how endearing the school was for them,” he said. “It says, ‘This time of my childhood was filled with happiness.’”

For the last 30 years, the senior girls of Mid-Pacific’s halau, Pupukahi I Ke Alo O Na Pua, have been performing a hula to the song at their last performance before graduation. It has become a cherished tradition. “I always wondered what it sounded like,” Casupang said.

In 2014, the halau performed at Hawaii Theatre. Tomiko “Koco” Conner was in attendance, saw the Kawaiahao hula and was moved by the song.

“It’s hard to describe how deeply it touched me,” she said.

The ’79 Mid-Pacific grad heard there was a century-old recording of Kawaiahao girls singing the song, part of a four-song set released on 78-rpm records. “That’s when I started to dig,” she said.

Conner, who has a background in public health but no training as an archivist, scoured online newspaper databases, genealogy sites, historical collections and the school’s own archives. She searched eBay and queried Facebook groups for collectors of old Hawaiian music. She bought an antique Victrola just in case she found an actual record.

She eventually located a recording of one of the four songs, “Waipio,” in the collection of the New York Public Library.

The library told her the school could not have a copy of the recording, though she was welcome come to New York to listen to it.

“We went back and forth,” Conner said. “I said that it means more to us at the school than over there in a collection.” Finally, the library made a one-time exception so that Mid-Pacific could have a “legacy” copy of the song.

Conner continued to track leads. Several European collectors told her she really needed to talk to a guy named Mal.

When she finally got Mal’s contact information, it turned out he lives on Maui and has been there with his vast collection of Hawaiian music for years. Mal — Malcolm Rockwell — told her he thought he might have the Kawaiahao recording on a cassette tape someone had given him years ago, a recording of the recording, stored under his house. He graciously offered to hunt for it.

What followed was a series of anxious emails.

OK, he found it. But it looked to be in bad shape.

OK, the tape looks intact, but the rollers are frozen.

OK, the rollers are unstuck, but maybe it won’t play.

“Finally, I got an email from him and I could see there was an attachment,” Conner said. It was a digital file of the song, scratchy and tinny, but the same voices as the other song she found in New York.

“This is the Holy Grail,” she wrote back.

During her research, Conner discovered the composers of the song, originally known as “Ku‘u Home,” were two students at the seminary, Julia Ku and Hattie Kauwe.

Last week, at the Pupukahi concert, the senior girls danced to Kawaiahao once again. But before that, all the young women of the halau stood together and sang the song of their forebears in the original melody. Casupang had painstakingly transcribed the recording and taught it to his dancers.

The gym was packed. The tears flowed. The song had come home.

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Reach Lee Cataluna at 529-4315 or lcataluna@ staradvertiser.com.

Reach Lee Cataluna at 529-4315 or lcataluna@staradvertiser.com.