The Kohala Mountain Boys play Traditional Music of Hawai’i Island: Homegrown Plus

Welcome to our latest post in the Homegrown Plus series, featuring the Kohala Mountain Boys from Hawai’i Island. Just like other blogs in the series, this one includes a concert video, a video interview with the bandleader, and connections to Library of Congress collections. (Find the whole series here!)

This post is also also special, however, in that the concert was held partly to celebrate a brand-new collection that’s already gone online. That collection, Unearthing the Lost Songs of Kohala, features a full-length documentary film, and we’ve decided to embed that film in this blog as well. It features songs and interviews with singers and musicians, so it serves as a beautiful complement to the concert and interview, as well as an ideal introduction to the rest of the extraordinary collection.

The Kohala Mountain Boys were here as part of a two-day symposium about the American Folklife Center’s Community Collections Grant program. The Community Collections Grants (CCG) program is a core component for the Library’s Of the People: Widening the Path initiative, supported by the Mellon Foundation. Since 2022, twenty-nine CCG projects have been supported, enabling community members to document their contemporary music, dance, crafts, food traditions, community celebrations, and sacred events in diverse communities across a wide range of geographical contexts – from Caribbean and Pacific islands, to urban, suburban, and rural areas of the U.S. South, Midwest, and East and West coasts. The symposium has also been recorded on video, and we’ll be adding those videos to the blog in due course. For now, you can find the individual symposium videos here.

Led by Boots Lupenui, the Kohala Mountain Boys play songs documented through the CCG project Unearthing the Lost Songs of Kohala, as well as other music important to that region of Hawai’i. They are committed to uncovering and preserving musical treasures that helped to define the moku of Kohala on Hawai’i Island. In Boots’s words:

“Old-time Kohala music is soulful, playful, poetic and fierce, the manifold voice of a vibrant and extraordinary people. We want to recover and share the heirloom songs currently known only to a few isolated and precious old voices, their words and tunes unsung for years. The ancient musical essence of our beloved and mystical Kohala may be lost in this generation. Reclaiming our heirloom songs strengthens our ancestral ties to our homeland. It is a source of pride that can be shared by all the families and all the people of Kohala, for generations to come.”

Watch the Kohala Mountain Boys in the player below!

Boots Lupenui, leader of the Kohala Mountain Boys, is also a documentarian driven to preserve the unique songs of his region of Hawai’i. In the interview, He told John Fenn about his background, how he was called back to Kohala after years on Oahu, and how he conceived of his documentary project. Boots also talked about the origin of the Kohala Mountain Boys and how the AFC staff tricked him into getting the band back together to perform this concert! See their conversation in the player below.

You can find both of these videos with more bibliographic information on the Library of Congress website. You can also find them on the Library of Congress YouTube channel.

Collection Connections

If you enjoyed the lecture and interview, you’ll want to check out the Collection Connections below for more materials related to Hawaiian music and culture.

Unearthing the Lost Songs of Kohala

First and foremost, we’d love you to explore the collection Unearthing the Lost Songs of Kohala. One item in the collection is the finished documentary film of the same name. Watch it in the player below!

Now please visit the entire Unearthing the Lost Songs of Kohala collection at this link!

Guides

Check out our Resource Guide to Hawaii Collections.

Homegrown Plus Blogs and Other Homegrown Concerts

• Homegrown Plus Premiere: ‘Ukulele Master Herb Ohta, Jr.
• Homegrown Plus: Ledward Kaapana
• Homegrown: Unukupukupu Halau Hula
• Gary Haleamau: Traditional Hawaiian Music from Las Vegas

Other Blogs

• Aloha! Community Collections Grant Project Unearthing the Lost Songs of Kohala Is Live and Online
• Community Collections Grants: An Interview with Mark Boots Lupenui
• How Hawaiians Saved Their Language
• King David Kālakaua: Royal Folklorist
• Hidden Folklorists on the Folklife Today Podcast (includes King David Kālakaua and Queen Lili’uokalani)
• Holehole Bushi: Franklin Odo’s Botkin Lecture on Work Songs of Japanese Sugarcane Workers in Hawai`i
• Hawaiian Delegation Explores the Collections of the American Folklife Center
• A List of all Folklife Today blogs that mention Hawai’i

Community Collections Grant Projects

Find the growing list of online CCG collections here

You might also want to explore:

• Blogs at Folklife Today on the CCG projects
• Blogs at the Of the People: Widening the Path blog about CCG projects
• Information on the CCG symposia
• Videos of the first CCG symposium

Mahalo!

Thanks for Watching! You can find more Homegrown Plus blogs here!