Harry B. Soria, Jr.’s knowledge of music has enlightened and entertained listeners for 25 years.
This has been a big year for Harry B. Soria Jr., six-time Na Hoku Hanohano Award-winning (Hawaii’s version of the Grammys) Hawaiian musicologist and foremost advocate of territorial-era Hawaiian and hapa-haole (part-foreign, part Hawaiian) music. In June, his weekly “Territorial Airwaves” radio show now on Hawaiian 105 KINE-FM celebrated its 25th anniversary, and he released a commemorative CD, appropriately titled Territorial Airwaves. The show, currently available on the internet (http://territorialairwaves.com), reaches an audience that is as large as that of Soria’s father, legendary rado host Harry B. Soria, Sr., prior to World War II.
When I started “Territorial Airwaves” 25 years ago on 1420 KCCN-AM (the show moved to 105 KINE in 1999), I looked at my father’s career. In those days, my show didn’t even reach some of the Neighbor Islands, (but) my father had broadcasted (“Voice of Hawaii”) coast-to-coast to the Continental United States and Canada. I wished that I could someday, somehow reach that level. Today, with the real-time streaming and on demand feature on the internet, I’ve actually reached a point where I am duplicating another facet of my father’s career from 70 years ago.”
Ironically, Soria thought he was getting away from Hawaiian music when he decided to go to the mainland in “1960-something” to attend the College of San Mateo in California. It wasn’t that he dislike the romantic hapa-haole songs that described Hawaii as a tropical paradise; it was the fact that those songs were the music of his father and grandfather (Harry G. Soria, also in local radio, known as the “Dean of Hawaiian Radio”). Like many teens in the ‘60s, young Soria preferred rock.
“I grew up with hapa-haole music in the house,” he remembers. “My dad would throw parties, and musicians like Benny Kalama would play. I thought it was great, but as I got a little older, I wanted to do rock ‘n’ roll. So I turned my back on everything and went to college on the mainland.”
After his college girlfriend introduced him to the Sausalito, California-based group, “Dan Hicks & His Hot Licks”, who collected 78-rpm records, Soria realized that old Hawaiian music was pretty “cool.”
When he returned home, he asked his father to tell him about the old days. His dad, a prominent hapa-haole songwriter and radio personality in his own right, had plenty of memories to share.
“He was a living encyclopedia, and luckily, he lived to be 85, so he was able to share all of his collection, memorabilia, memories, advice and personal recollections of people,” the 56-year-old Soria shares. “He was old enough to be my grandfather (Soria, Sr. was born in 1905), so he had one foot into an era that most fathers of kids my age didn’t have. He could tell me things about the 1920s, and he was sharp as a tack.”
Soria was first heard on KCCN in 1976 as a guest on Honolulu Skylark’s midday show, “Melodies of Paradise” after he won an on-air appearance by answering trivia questions. Three years later, he launched “Territorial Airwaves” with Skylark as co-host. He worked with Skylark until 1986, then with Keaumiki Akui until 1999. He’s been solo ever since.
As soon as he was on the air, Soria discovered that some Hawaii residents though the show was a bad idea.
“A feeling existed among some of the younger people – young kumu hula (master hula instructors), as a matter of fact – who told me that this music was a reflection of a bad period in Hawaii’s history that should be forgotten,” Soria recalls. “They said that it was music by people who had forgotten their language and cuture.”
Some self-appointed cultural commissars denounced hapa-haole music as inherently “colonialist.” Others took offense that groups wore uniforms instead of whatever each man had happened to pull out of the closet. Some claimed that hapa-haole music was “non-Hawaiian,” even though Native Hawaiians and longtime island residents wrote many of the songs.
But Soria didn’t quit.
“I was on a mission,” he says. “Older people loved what I was doing. Once a few of the young lions started getting a few years of experience and a few grey hairs, they began to embrace their elders and the music they represented.”
RADIO AND RECORDS
Almost anyone of any significance as a Hawaiian entertainer or songwriter prior to 1959 – Andy Cummings, R. Alex Anderson, Auntie Genoa Keawe, Randy Oness, etc. – has joined Soria at least once on “Territorial Airwaves” since the inaugural show on June 13, 1979.
All of the show’s music comes from Soria’s personal archives. His collection includes thousands of 78-rpm records as well as vinyl albums, 7-inch 45-rpm “singles”, and some of the one sided earliest of discs that represented state-of-the-art technology a century ago.
Soria traces the history of recorded Hawaiian music back to the turn of the last century, but uses 1915 as the starting point for the show. “The recordings of the first decade were on cylinders and the sound quality for air play is really nil. One of the considerations for the show is that the songs have to be listenable. Discs (flat, 78-rpm records) started in 1910; anything prior to that level of fidelity shouldn’t be played on the radio.”
Also in 1915, a troupe from the islands introduced Hawaiian music to America at the Pan-Pacific Exposition in San Francisco. “The Expo exposed 30,000 people a day to the influence of the hula, ukulele, steel guitar, and Hawaiian culture, in general,” Soria explains. “It created a craze that went all the way to Tin Pan Alley (in New York City).”
Soria goes on to say that this craze actually buoyed the Island music industry for a while. Local entertainers went to the mainland to record and tour between 1915 and 1922.
“It was a huge phenomenon,” Soria says.
Webley Edwards’ “Hawaii Calls” radio program (launched in 1935) and Bing Crosby’s recording of “Sweet Leilani” from “Waikiki Wedding” (which won the Academy Award for Original Song in 1937) renewed Hawaiian music’s national popularity a decade later. Hapa-haole music remained popular for the next quarter century and was an important part of the Hawaiian experience for tens of thousands of people who passed through Hawaii during that period.
TWO TURNTABLES AND A MICROPHONE
Just as cylinders gave way to flat disc, 78-rpm records gradually gave way to the 12-inch 33-rpm albums of the postwar era. The combination of larger size and slower speed allowed for longer playing time. Plus, the move from shellac or lacquer toward “unbreakable” vinyl records was another big step because the 78-rpm disc was heavy and fragile.
It appeared that “records” of all types – and turntables needed to play them – were becoming extinct by the late 1980s. As audiophiles and nightclub disc jockeys led a revival of 33-rpm vinyl albums and turntables in the ‘90s, they became easier to find.
Soria’s modern turntable has been rebelted for 78-rpm records and equipped with a Stanton cartridge and needle. He stores his 78s in reinforced 12-sleeve convers – a 78-rpm “album” consists of several discs packaged in separate sleeves in a photo album-type book. The discs are stored on edge rather than in stacks on a set of oak shelves 20 feet across and 12 feet high.
Soria cleans his 78s using Windex and a tissue. Using water “just moves things around,” and cloth can leave lint. He uses as little Windex as possible and takes care to keep it off the label. There was a time when he played 78s for his own enjoyment but preserving them takes precedence these days.
“A needle ages your record every time you play it, so I only play them for the show. I use my computer to assemble the program, and I record just those songs (burned to a compact disc). Thanks to Michael Cord (of Cord International), we’re getting more of them commercially re-released on CD so I can listen to it for enjoyment. Technology is always improving.”
Soria also produces records with Cord in the re-issuing of out-of-print Territorial-era recordings. This year’s “Territorial Airwaves” anthology is his 20th project for Cord’s “HanaOla Records/Cord International label (cordinternation.com).
Other technological advances have made it possible to electronically restore “unplayable” copies of 78-rpm recordings. Soria took the lead in making out-of-print Hawaiian recordings available first as the producer and annotator of the “Hawaiian Masters Collection” for a small Los Angeles-based record label, and then, for more than a decade, working with Cord.
Soria says that although some residents think of hapa-haole music as “tourist music”, much of it is at least authentically Hawaiian as the reggae-style music popular with many young island residents today.
“This music is just as viable and credible as the music that’s being put to this generation’s Western cultural influences from the mainland. The music that I’m playing was done by people who may be 80 now, but when they did it, they were 20 and were just as hip as the trendsetters are now.”
• PAU
MELE COMES TO THE BIG APPLE
Soria will go to New York City this winter to perform as master of ceremonies at the Hawaiian Concert at Carnegie Hall on Dec. 1, 2004. The festivities will feature Nina Keali’iwahamana, Danny Kaleikini, Gary Aiko, Iwalani Kahalewai, Bev Noa and other veterans of the “Hawaii Calls” radio show. For more information, contact the Carnegie Hall box office at www.carnegiehall.org.
CAPTIONS TO PHOTOS IN THIS STORY
Harry B Soria Jr. began his “Territorial Airwaves” vintage Hawaiian music radio program in 1979 on KCCN-AM, following in the footsteps of his father and grandfather, who were Hawaii radio pioneers.
Soria celebrates the “Anthology of the Year” award for “Legends of Falsetto”, which Soria produced, at the 2001 Na Hoku Hanohano Awards dinner.
Harry B. Soria’s “Territorial Airwaves” can be heard every Sunday on Hawaiian 105 KINE-FM from 5 to 6 p.m., HST. Mainlanders can also listen the program on demand via the internet by visiting http://territorialairwaves.com.