ANN ARBOR, Mich >>> One of the curiosities of the University of Hawaii football team’s first visit here today will be the University of Michigan marching band’s playing of its game-day tradition, “The Hawaiian War Chant.”

Or, as UH coach Nick Rolovich put it, “They play … what?”

Indeed. In Hawaii the basis of the music is best known as “Kaua i ka Hua‘i,” a love song experts say has nothing to do with war.

For going on 50 years now the percussion beat has been a crowd favorite at the Big House, with many of those in attendance at the 107,601-seat stadium waiting around to hear “The Hawaiian War Chant” and the accompanying “Temptation” before battling postgame traffic.

As a longtime Michigan Stadium public address announcer used to put it, “You can’t have one without the other.”

First arranged as part of a Michigan marching band salute to world music in a 1953 halftime show, it was revived in the early 1960s after a stirring victory and has come to be played wherever the Michigan band has performed, a band spokesman said.

Jonathan Kay Kamakawiwo‘ole Osorio, a professor at UH’s Kamakakuokalani Center for Hawaiian Studies and a composer, singer and Hawaiian music recording artist, said in an email, “How it became tagged ‘The Hawaiian War Chant’ is a bit mysterious but might have something to do with a bad translation.”

Osorio said, “Kaua i ka Hua‘i is a playful love song written by the high chief Leleiohoku, younger brother of Kalakaua and heir apparent to the throne. Sadly he died at the age of 27, and Lili‘uokalani was named the heir at that time. The song is about two lovers in the spray of the ocean. Or, it could mean two lovers who are discovered.”

Osorio said, “Kaua means we two. Kaua is the word for war. My guess was that some haole Tin Pan Alley publisher got hold of this song and printed it, taking tremendous liberties with its meaning because it would help it sell and because he couldn’t care less about its actual provenance. However, several on-line references blame Johnny Noble for reinventing the song with the original Hawaiian lyrics and billing it as the war chant. Noble was a Native Hawaiian orchestra leader at the Royal Hawaiian and a composer of many hapa haole numbers.”

What is known is that in 1953 for Michigan’s taste of world music halftime show, a student arranger, Jerry Bilik, had planned to use “Aloha Oe.” But after being asked to come up with more of what today would be called a drum-line piece, he chose “The Hawaiian War Chant” unaware of the music’s contorted past.

The arrangement was largely forgotten until the early 1960s, Bilik said, when the band, hurriedly casting around for something to add to its postgame performance, revived the song and it immediately caught on.

Osorio said, “You would not believe how many times this song appears in films and television shows featuring haole singers who butcher the words. But I haven’t seen anything recently and had sort of hoped that the song had died a natural death.”

Osorio said, “I do not think that the appropriation of this song by Michigan is the most offensive thing I have encountered. But it still makes me hope that we kick their ass (Saturday).”

Reach Ferd Lewis at flewis@staradvertiser.com or 529-4820.