The Kohala Mountain Music Project is an ongoing, exciting artistic search for ancient musical treasures that helped to define the moku of Kohala on Hawai‘i Island. Kohala is a storied place with a unique musical heritage that is in danger of vanishing. Boots Lupenui and Chadd ‘Onohi Paishon, leaders of The Kohala Mountain Boys, are committed to uncovering and preserving as many of these “heirloom songs” as possible.

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.

Why is this important?
Our intention is to capture some of the essence of regional Hawaiian music of a bygone age. What strains still survive of these faint, fleeting tunes known now only to our kūpuna (elders)? What might they remember from a time when paniolo still rode their horses home after a long day of work in the saddle to sit by a wood stove and serenade sleepy little ones before bedtime? Somewhere in Kohala there is an old man sitting on his porch with old songs playing in his heart and in his mind. But if we fail to sit down with him and other kūpuna like him and learn these songs, they will pass into the mist along with their family custodians. Our mission is to reclaim these cultural treasures and celebrate the poetic mastery of our ancestors.

Our approach
Our first film documents our historic search for two unrecorded songs, “Ku‘u One Hānau” and “Lovely Gardenia,” passed down within families for generations. We are humbled by Kohala families who may have an old shoebox filled with scraps of paper, or a tūtū who remembers the lullaby her own grandmother hummed to her, willing to share these stories of old with us so they can be brought back to life for all to enjoy and deepen pilina (relationship) with this special place. Our interviews with the composers or their surviving family members chronicle the lyrics and provide context to our understanding of the songs, and performances transport us to the time and place in which the songs were composed, to give listeners a better idea of what these songs would have sounded like performed at the time of their initial creation.

We wish not only to document the history, but to recall the easy grace of old Hawai‘i and the aloha felt for our honored homeland. Please join us and enjoy this journey!