All summer long, we’ve been celebrating the diverse mix of composers who make American music so special. One of those composers not only impacted American music, but also the very fabric of the United States – Lili’uokalani, the first and last queen of Hawaii.
Songwriter
She was born Lydia Lili’u Loloku Walania Kamaka’eha in her grandfather’s grass house in Honolulu on September 2nd, 1838. As members of royal families, she and her other siblings and cousins were educated at boarding school by Christian missionaries, and it was at this school that Lili’uokalani had her music education. While there, she learned to play the piano, guitar, ukulele, and even the zither!
From the very beginning, Lili’uokalani’s love for music was closely linked with her faith. She played organ during church services and sang in the choir. When she began writing her own compositions, she combined the harmonic structures of these American hymns with the sacred Hawaiian traditions of oral chanting and poetry. She would spend her life preserving these traditions through her music and her writing.
She wrote one of her most beloved songs, “Aloha ‘Oe,” while on a horse riding trip in Maunawili. The story goes that before her party left to return to Honolulu, she had witnessed a farewell embrace between her friend Colonel James Harbottle Boyd and a young woman. On the ride she began humming the song, and by the time they reached Honolulu the whole traveling party had begun to hum along with her. It was published and premiered in San Francisco in 1883, but the mythology of the song was not complete quite yet.
Sovereign
Following the death of her brother, King Kalākaua, Lili’uokalani took an oath to become the first queen of Hawaii on January 29, 1891. She came to power at a tenuous time in the nation’s history. For decades, a small but wealthy class of American and European plantation owners had dominated the sugarcane industry. In 1888, they had managed to ratify a constitution that undermined the power of the monarchy and took voting rights away from native Hawaiians and Asian immigrant workers. One of Queen Lili’uokalani’s first acts as the reigning monarch was to begin writing a new constitution that put power back in the hands of her people.
However, with aid from the U.S. government, the plantation owners staged a coup. Queen Lili’uokalani was illegally deposed on January 17, 1893, a little less than two years after her ascension to the throne. Another two years after that, in 1895, she was arrested and forced to abdicate. Fearing that she might not survive her imprisonment, she began working tirelessly to preserve the sacred poetics of her culture. She translated the Kumilipo – or Hawaiian creation chant – which had been passed down to her orally through her grandmother. And although she wasn’t allowed to have musical instruments, she continued composing using only her voice.
She later wrote of this time, "I found great consolation in composing, and transcribed a number of songs. Three found their way from my prison to the city of Chicago, where they were printed, among them the 'Aloha ʻOe' or 'Farewell to Thee', which became a very popular song."
Symbol
After her release from house arrest, Lili’uokalani spent a brief sojourn in Brookline, Massachusetts with her husband’s family, where she began to write her memoir, Hawaii’s Story by Hawaii’s Queen. For the rest of her life, she would split her time between Honolulu and Washington D.C. in order to protest annexation by the U.S. government. Although the United States did eventually annex Hawaii in 1898, she never stopped fighting for the return of her beloved country.
Queen Lili’uokalani passed away in 1917 at the age of 79. As her funeral procession wound its way through the streets of Honolulu, the crowds joined their voices together to sing “Aloha ‘Oe” as one final goodbye for the last sovereign of Hawaii.
