Don who? Don Ho: Hawaiian Pop Culture and US Modernity

• In Event: Transnational Bodies in Pain and Pleasure

Abstract

From the early 1960s into the early 2000s, Don Ho was the quintessential experience of Hawaii for tourists. Throughout his career on stage, on television and in the recording studio, Don Ho’s untroubled lounge persona exuded an outsider/insider relationship to the mainland United States. His shows rose in popularity during civil rights organizing, the Vietnam War and the Hawaiian cultural renaissance, his easy melodies like “Tiny Bubbles” apparently floating above the contemporary political landscape. He was at times rendered a romantic vestige of Hawaii’s vanishing native population (“You’ll never find another Kanaka Like…Don Ho,” as one 1960s album cover announced), and at other times an emblem of Hawaii’s racial melting pot who stood for the nation’s future as a whole.

Don Ho’s live performances in Honolulu, where he had his longest residency until his death in 2007, are in many ways a touchstone for understanding the shifting meanings of his native status in the context of late twentieth-century global modernity. This paper explores Don Ho’s self-fashioning as Hawaii’s resident fun guy from the period of Hawaii’s statehood in 1959 onwards. One focus is on how Don Ho’s embodied racial meanings interplay with his gender, that is, how his Hawaiian masculinity merges with or departs from long-standing colonialist fantasies of Hawaii as a feminine, sexually submissive place. Another is on the brand of commercial Hawaiian culture he purveyed for the masses, which marketed Hawaii as both exotic and all-American: its b-side middlebrow aesthetics, its registers of breeziness and cheeziness, its encouragement of silliness and audience participation. My sources for this include Ho’s programs, LPs, his short-lived “The Don Ho Show,” his memoir Don Ho: My Music, My Life, as well as music journalism documenting his career.

Overall I bring a transnational lens to bear on this cultural archive in order to illuminate how Don Ho’s career in popular entertainment captures the contradictions of U.S. settler colonialism and global modernity, structures in which the native’s erasure is a foregone conclusion if not a condition while at the same time, as scholar Andrea Smith observes, the native “must always be disappearing.” My transnational approach does not only pursue a top-down critique of modernity in these terms but, as my source material suggests, contributes a reading of Don Ho’s own movements and maneuvers that are sometimes synchronized with and other times deviate from this colonial context. This paper’s title is taken from the Brady Bunch goes to Hawaii episode, where, after Don Ho serenades the two youngest Bradys on the ukulele, Bobby squeaks, “Hey I know who you are. No wonder he sings so good. He’s Don Ho,” to which Cindy inquires, “Don who?” The studio audience titters at the pun as the camera turns back to the entertainer who informs her in a tone of part amusement, part muted irritation, “Don Ho.” As in many moments in his career, Don Ho manages the joke that is meant to be on him. It can be funny—but the timing and the terms are his.

Author

• Chase Smith, University of California, Los Angeles (CA)