Phoenix - The Elvis Forum

Deleted due to doubts about the information

colonel snow

Toots seemed to like it so much that I think we should hear it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ydZTxu4X3IY

‘Aloha ‘Oe: Settler Colonial Nostalgia and the Genealogy of a Love Song’

American Indian culture and research journal 37(2):35-52 · June 2013.

Abstract:

Hawai‘i’s most renowned song, “Aloha ‘Oe,” was composed by Queen Lili‘uokalani before she was deposed by missionary-settlers. Circulating in the cultural imaginary since the late nineteenth century, “Aloha ‘Oe” was transformed from a love song into a dirge that erased the sovereign rights of Lili‘uokalani in and beyond Hawai‘i. This article theorizes “settler colonial nostalgia” as a gendered material and symbolic process of effecting indigenous displacement and expropriation. Providing an alibi for settler society and its beneficiaries, performances of the song center settler subjects as nostalgic witnesses to, rather than participants in, the loss of the Hawaiian kingdom. Yet the politics of melancholy prove unstable, as Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) and islander musicians continue to resignify “Aloha ‘Oe” as performances that sustain Native counter-hegemonies.

Full article available as PDF:
https://www.researchgate.net/publicatio ... _Love_Song

I have accidentally stumbled upon an obscure recording of this song that seems to originate from the 40s, but I don't have an exact date for it.

It's performed by Lani McIntire, a legendary Honolulu-born musician who enjoyed considerable popularity from the mid 30s until his death in 1951. He even recorded a few songs accompanying the great Jimmie Rodgers.

It looks like McIntire recorded the song more than once, because if you look at YouTube there's another, better sounding, version of the song by him. This one is also shorter, but it sounds more haunting and appealing to me.

I have also found an image of a 1944 record label that could, or could not, belong to the record I'm posting.

Another cool variation on this theme, this one released by Atlantic in the summer of 1958 :


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r05nTFPpKiQ