Kaleponi

It was a few years ago that I seemed to suddenly hear this song everywhere. It’s a familiar pattern – we learn a new word or concept and suddenly it appears all around us – but I was really grateful and excited about this discovery because the song was both so charming and so mysterious.

The melody is absolutely infectious, and one version in particular, Gary Haleamau‘s vocal featuring western swing fiddles in the hook, had me bouncing around and humming and grinning while Sonny Lim‘s solo slack key instrumental inspired me to find the notes for my own arrangement.

But the lyrics and translation were so mysterious, so puzzling. A shining steel cable? A cliff connected to a rooster or chicken? A land that looks like California? What can be going on? My search for understanding was made more difficult because the usual name of the song has been compressed into one word – Paliokamoa. Eventually I stumbled on a source, an essay by a relative of the composer that explained some of the mystery (but introduced a bit more).

The title refers not to the appearance of the cliff, or the presence of a chicken flock, but to the demands made on the workers at the sugar mill located there. They were expected to be at work before the rooster crowed at dawn. And the steel cable going down to the sea was part of the local transportation system – with no anchorage in the area and a strong offshore wind, sailing ships would be tied to a steel cable dropped from the cliff, and passengers and freight were winched up and down the cable. The “land that looks like California” turns out to be a literal description of the area around Upolu Point, where the vegetation and terrain appears strikingly similar to forested areas on the mainland.

I’ve worked on this song for years, it was one of the tunes that compelled me to learn to use Leonard’s C or “drop C” as it’s often called. This clever tuning is one string away from taropatch open G, and is reached by lowering the sixth string one whole step from D to C. The result is a tuning that is not “open” – not a major chord without fingering, but a very useful tuning nonetheless because it allows an easy switch between the keys of G and C. By using a capo and these two tunings the whole range of keys is readily available.

So here’s Pali O Ka Moa performed under the mango tree in the backyard of our friends the La`a family in beautiful Kailua, O`ahu, HI.