Eddie Kamae, an Innovator and a Historian on Four Strings, Dies at 89
By NATE CHINENJAN. 24, 2017
Eddie Kamae, who expanded the realm of possibility for the ukulele and helped lead a resurgence of traditional Hawaiian music and culture, died on Jan. 7 at his home in Honolulu. He was 89.
His death was confirmed by Myrna Kamae, his wife of 50 years, with whom he also made a series of highly regarded documentary films.
Mr. Kamae was one of the most influential Hawaiian musicians of the second half of the 20th century, at once an innovator and a diligent steward of folkloric customs. He is best remembered as a founder of the group the Sons of Hawaii, which made a handful of widely emulated albums in the 1960s and ’70s that set the terms for the revivalist movement known as the Hawaiian renaissance.
The Sons of Hawaii originally featured Gabby Pahinui on vocals and slack-key acoustic guitar, with Mr. Kamae on ukulele, Joe Marshall on upright bass and David Rogers, known as Feet, on steel guitar. Drawing from the cadences and content of Hawaiian chants as well as the consonant twang of country music, the group combined historical reverence with show-business appeal.
The lilting, light-textured yet rhythmically assertive sound of the band became the gold standard for Hawaiian music.
But even before forming the Sons of Hawaii, Mr. Kamae had established a reputation for his head-turning proficiency on ukulele, a four-stringed instrument previously relegated to basic strummed accompaniment (or, on the mainland, exotic novelty purposes). He brought a sophisticated harmonic understanding to the instrument, along with a new technical vocabulary.
“He was the first virtuoso on the instrument,” Jake Shimabukuro, the most prominent of his countless younger inheritors, said in an interview. “He came up with techniques to apply to the ukulele that no one ever dreamed of doing back then.”
Edward Leilani Kamae was born on Aug. 4, 1927, in Honolulu to Samuel Hoapili Kamae and the former Alice Ululani Opunui. One of 10 children, he grew up in downtown Honolulu and in the summer would accompany his mother to the island of Maui to visit his grandmother, who had danced in the royal court of King Kalakaua.
The ukulele became a focus by happenstance: When he was 15, his oldest brother, a city bus driver, had found one left on a seat and brought it home.
Mr. Kamae took to the instrument immediately. He began playing for tips at a jam session at Charlie’s Cab Stand, where he met another bright young ukulele player, Shoi Ikemi. They formed an instrumental duo, the Ukulele Rascals, which joined the bandleader Ray Kinney on a coast-to-coast mainland tour in 1949.
At the time, Hawaiian music was not a priority for Mr. Kamae, though his father had urged him to pursue it. “I thought it was too simple,” he recalled in 2010. Instead, he was busy adapting jazz standards, Latin music and pieces from the classical repertoire.” “Heart of the Ukulele,” an album he made in 1959, gives some indication of his early approach.
Mr. Kamae had an epiphany playing with Mr. Pahinui at a jam session in rural Waimanalo. “When he started to play, and I heard this rhythm,” Mr. Kamae recalled, “I said, ‘This is why my father asked me to play Hawaiian music.’”
The Sons of Hawaii took shape in 1960 and quickly became a local sensation. Their first album was titled “Gabby Pahinui and the Sons of Hawaii.” Because he was under contract to another label, Mr. Kamae was listed under a pseudonym, Johnny Maunawili.
Among the group’s other albums were “Music of Old Hawaii” (1962) and “The Folk Music of Hawaii” (1971), widely known to fans as “the Five Faces album,” for its cover illustration of the members by the artist Herb Kane.
When Mr. Pahinui left the band for a solo career, Mr. Kamae took over and began featuring other gifted slack-key guitarists: Leland Isaacs, known as Atta, and Dennis Kamakahi, who was also a prolific songwriter. In the ’70s, as the Hawaiian renaissance began taking hold, the band adopted a uniform: checkered palaka shirts, a vestige of the plantation era and a symbol of working-class pride.
Inspired to seek out Hawaiian culture at the source, Mr. Kamae studied with several elders, notably the folklorist Mary Kawena Pukui and the poet and songwriter Sam Li’a Kalainaina. He himself wrote several songs that became Hawaiian standards, notably “E Ku’u Morning Dew,” composed with Larry Kimura.
The first feature-length documentary that Mr. Kamae made with his wife was “Li’a: The Legacy of a Hawaiian Man,” in 1988. Among the others is a more recent and personal effort, “Sons of Hawaii: A Sound, a Band, a Legend” (2000).
Mr. Kamae received honors for his films as well as for his music, including a lifetime achievement award from the Hawai’ian Academy of Recording Arts. In 2007 he received a National Heritage Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.
In addition to his wife, his survivors include a brother, Alfred.
Mr. Kamae had recently revived the Sons of Hawaii after a long hiatus, releasing two volumes of an album titled “Yesterday & Today” on which some tracks date to the 1970s and others are newly recorded.
Among the highlights is “E Ku’u Morning Dew,” which, in the original recording, featured Moe Keale on lead vocals. Mr. Kamae sings this version, his voice softened by age. According to his family, “E Ku’u Morning Dew” was playing in the background as he died, in his sleep.
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