Boots Lupinui

I called them heirloom songs and asked the old families if they could share any songs.

My wife foolishly agreed to help me because let's face it, she married a musician and an artist and now apparently a storyteller, so clearly she has poor judgment.

But she can write grant applications.

So she agrees to help, and with her help, I get to work.

I ask all the film guys, I ask the musicians, and everybody says yes, because apparently everybody else in Kohala has poor judgment too.

I get a grant, I start a GoFundMe, I name our band the Kohala Mountain Boys, and we got to work.

I put out the word on social media, I asked everybody I knew if they had any songs from any family in Kohala.

And immediately, I get a hit.

How easy is this?

One of my grade school classmates contacts me and says, her grandfather, who was from Kohala, wrote a song in 1940 or 41.

So I contact her by phone, and she says she knows she's seen the song, but she can't remember where.

So her and her husband, they tear that house up.

And in the last place they look, they find it, Papa's papers.

and they send me the lyrics and she tells me about her grandfather, how he legally adopted her and raised her as his own daughter, how on long weekends and holidays he would take her back to Kohala so she could meet some of her Kohala family.

It's a good man.

What she sent me was a page of handwritten lyrics, in Hawaiian language.

My job was to take those lyrics and put them in the form of a finished song.

So I took the lyrics and the time period that he wrote them, and I tried to craft a song that I thought might have been a hit on the radio here, if you heard it in 1940.

And just like that, song number one, done.

Super easy, right?