Hawaiian Favorites--Akoni Lani and His Islanders, Danny K. Stewart and His Aloha Boys (Acorn 672)

 

I couldn't resist this cover, for some reason.  I wasn't expecting much in the music department, though--but how wrong I was.  These tracks--by Akoni Lani and His Islanders and Danny K. Stewart and His Aloha Boys (we'll accept these as real names)--are outstanding, with excellent, swinging steel guitar work (with Fort St. Rag the standout) and more than adequate group vocals.  Everything bounces along just beautifully in a polite 4/4.  And we get (There's a) Yellow Rose in Hilo, which of course is better known as The Eyes of Texas.  Er, I mean, The Yellow Rose of Texas.  With different words, of course.

Fun trivia: Yellow Rose was originally a 19th century minstrel number about a "yellow girl"--i.e., a light-skinned black woman.  At one time, evidently, light-skinned black women enjoyed greater social status within the community--thus, we have Howlin' Wolf, in his 1951 or 1952 Brown Skin Woman, actually singing "I don't want no black woman, to lay her hands on me."  I was genuinely stumped by those lyrics the first time my ears beheld them.  And there's Leadbelly's Yellow Gal.  But I digress...

The back jacket promises "Stereo Phonic" sound, while the label guarantees "Stereo Fonic" sound; I guess they're the same thing.  "Made from the finest stereo tapes," no less.  Actually, this was issued in some of the worst fake, rechanneled stereo I've ever encountered, but fortune smiled on this post, and I was able to isolate the one good channel and EQ it back to something close to normal.  Save for a couple of distorted spots (during vocal crescendos), the sound is pretty solid.  Okay, save for the occasional tape dropouts.  I guess Acorn didn't use the finest stereo tapes, after all.  Or maybe the tapes were initially fine, prior to a few hundred plays.  We'll never know.

I kept the owner's writing on the back jacket because I wanted to document the year of purchase--1963.  (For 77 cents, no less.)  You see, Acorn was a subsidiary of Eli Oberstein's Rondo label, which was sold to P.R.I. Records in 1961, with some Tops label material showing up on Acorn.  As in this case--this LP is much better known in its Tops version, originally released in 1957 with the same cover photo.  However, I don't know if that's the year the tracks were waxed, and I very much doubt it in the case of the Akoni Lani numbers, which appeared on an earlier ten-inch Tops offering (a Tops Masterpieces offering, to be precise!):

Anyway, great stuff, and if it sounds like western swing, I guess that's because western swing so often sounded like Hawaiian music.  Now that we've solved that mystery...

DOWNLOAD: Hawaiian Favorites--Akoni Lani and His Islanders, Danny K. Stewart and His Aloha Boys

Akoni Lani and His Islanders

Hawaiian War Chant

Song of the Islands

Maka Pueo

Lovely Hula Hands

My Little Grass Shack

Huki Lau

Danny K. Stewart and His Aloha Boys

Silhouette Hula

The Pupuli Hula E

Knock-Kneed Hapua

Fort St. Rag

One More Aloha

(There's A) Yellow Rose in Hilo

Lee