The ghosts of Ernest Kaai
emember the “free-roaming, vaporous, full-torso apparition” at the New York Public Library in the opening sequence of the 1984 film Ghostbusters? It spewed cards from the card catalog, blew books from the stacks and scared the socks off the prim librarian. Only in the movies, right? Well, think again. Ghosts do exist. Particularly in libraries. I’ve seen one.
Let me tell you my story …
INT. APARTMENT, ST. PETERSBURG, FL, CIRCA 1990–DAY
He stares out at me from the dust jacket collage of George Kanahele’s Hawaiian Music and Musicians, a hand-tinted taropatch player perched on the left shoulder of King Kalakaua and flanked by Tandy Mackenzie and the Brothers Cazimero. It’s Ernest Kaai—Hawaii’s Music Man—the preeminent ‘ukulele player of his generation. I flip to the entry on Kaai; page 193. There he is again, same picture but cropped to just a head shot with the caption “Ernest K. Kaai. From his book The Ukulele.”
The three pages of text on Kaai in HMM probably comprise the most extensive biography of the man ever written, appropriately brief but full of wonderful facts: “…mandolin virtuoso, vocalist, publisher, composer/arranger, teacher, bandleader, impresario. Performed at Yukon Exposition in Seattle (1906); toured Australia (1911); recorded for Columbia in Honolulu (1911); featured at San Francisco and San Diego expositions (1915-1916); published ‘ukulele instruction manual (1916).”
As far as knowing his way around the bouncing flea, Kanahele observes:
“On the ‘ukulele Kaai was a virtuoso performer. Johnny Noble, in fact, called him “Hawaii’s greatest ukulele player.” In his time, he was undoubtedly the most knowledgeable person on the instrument. Certainly he was the first to study it systematically, as he published the first explanatory and instructional books on the subject: The Ukulele: A Hawaiian Guitar (Honolulu: Wall, Nichols & Co., 1916).”
Hey, I think. I have a copy of Kaai’s 1916 method in my stack of ‘ukulele primers. It’s a beauty, too: full-folio with chocolate-brown paper wrappers and a marvelous half-tone frontispiece portrait of Kaai. But something’s not right. The title of my Kaai 1916 is The Ukulele and How It’s Played, not The Ukulele: A Hawaiian Guitar and the picture isn’t the one referenced by Kanahele. And it was published by The Hawaiian News Company, not Wall, Nichols. And I have a bunch of ‘ukulele methods published in California in the early 1910s. Way before 1916. What’s up with that? And would Kaai really have published two different methods with two different Honolulu publishers in the same year?
INT. HAWAIIAN COLLECTION, HAMILTON LIBRARY, UNIVERSITY OF HAWAII AT MANOA, SUMMER 2000–DAY
I sneak away during a family vacation to spend a couple of precious hours doing research. Through the internet, via telnet, I learn there is a copy of a Kaai method at the Hamilton Library with the same title and publisher as the one in Kanahele—The Ukulele: A Hawaiian Guitar—but apparently with a copyright date of 1910! I’m here to scope it out. Most of the books in the Hawaiian Collection have to be paged and the Kaai is no exception. I surrender my driver’s license as collateral, fill out the page form and turn it in at the desk.
And wait.
And then I have it in my hands. Octavo, paper wraps with a nicely engraved illustration of an ukulele. Entitled: The Ukulele: A Hawaiian Guitar and How to Play It, REVISED[!!] 1910.
And the picture of Kaai is …
… not the one in Kanahele. Arghh!!
I make a photocopy of the damn thing …
INT. RENTAL CAR EASTBOUND ON H-1, THE LUNALILO FREEWAY–DUSK.
… and drive back to my brother’s condo hoping no one noticed I was gone.
INT. HOUSE, ST. PETERSBURG, SPRING 2001–WEE HOURS OF THE MORNING
I’m ensconced in front of my PowerMac 7500 surfing the web, googling kaai, and up comes an index to aid in locating Hawaiian songs in published Hawaiian songbooks:
HAWAIIAN MUSIC: PUBLISHED SONGBOOKS
________________________
Project to index Hawaiian songs
in published Hawaiian songbooks
________________________
compiled by Amy K. Stillman
December 1988
I scroll down the screen to the entry I’m looking for:
Kaai, Ernest K. The Ukulele: A Hawaiian Guitar and How to Play It. Honolulu: Wall Nichols, Ltd., 1906.
There it is. Holy Moley, 1906. That would explain the 1910 revised edition at the Hamilton Library. I dash off an email to Dr. Stillman at the University of Michigan and ask where the Kaai 1906 is located.
INT. HOUSE, AT THE COMPUTER A COUPLE OF DAYS LATER–DAWN
I open the email with the subject line, RE: KAAI 1906; Dr. Stillman has been gracious enough to respond to my query. She informs me she made copies of the incipits of all the books in her index—and their locations—but can’t find any of the references for the ‘ukulele methods. They’re missing. However, she suggests I try some of the libraries she visited on the East Coast, one in particular:
The New York Public Library.
INT. HOUSE, LATER THAT DAY
I call the NYPL reference desk and ask if they have the Kaai 1906. The librarian puts me on hold. It’s an interlude full of expectation. She gets back on the line and says no, they don’t have it.
Shoot.
I try all the other East Coast libraries listed on Dr. Stillman’s index including the Boston Public Library, the Loeb Music Library at Harvard University, the Phillips Library at the Peabody Museum, the Hay Library at Brown University and the Library of Congress.
No dice; I’ve been slimed.
Librarians and researchers have a name for books that show up in bibliographies and other reference works but don’t otherwise exist. They call them ghosts.
The Kaai 1906 is a ghost.
INT. MY BROTHER’S CONDO, HONOLULU, AUGUST 2001–DAY
After ten days at the Hawai‘i State Archives and the State Library I have added significantly to my research: I now know the Kaai 1906 is not in the collections of either of those institutions, nor is it in the Bishop Museum Library, according to the librarian there. I’ve found wonderful things; just not the Kaai 1906 method. I’m packed for the flight back to Florida.
INT. HOUSE, ST. PETERSBURG, 2001-2003—OFF AND ON, DAY AND NIGHT
I occasionally thumb through Kanahele, randomly reading the entries. As always, there is Kaai, peering back at me, an enigma, a phantasm. But that image had to come from somewhere. Over time, I learn that the info in Kanahele is not always reliable. Take the entry on Kaai. The year Kanahele cites for Kaai’s method is 1916 when it should have been 1906 (I was certain, based on Amy Stillman’s research; the 1910 REVISED edition which suggested an earlier version; that damn photo of Kaai, and a receipt from Kaai’s studio dated 1906 for six lessons and an “ukulele book” that Tom Walsh showed me). A typo? Not likely; Kanahele cites the date 1916 twice in his entry on Kaai and repeats it in his entry for the ‘ukulele. Just a coincidence there really was a Kaai 1916 method, just not the one Kanahele cited? Oh, well. A book without mistakes is a mistake, right?
One day I notice the credit line on the headshot of Kaai, the apparition:
“Courtesy Hawaiian Mission Children’s Society.”
I’ve seen that credit dozens of times, had hoped to check it out in 2001 but the HMCS Library was closed in August 2001, at least it was when I was there. It’s one of a grocery list of disappointments I’ve had to suffer on my research trips to Honolulu, from the prolonged closure of the Hawaiian Collection at UH due to asbestos removal to the flash flood in Manoa Valley in 2004 that closed that same institution a week before I arrived.
(OK, like a trip to the islands for the most pedestrian of reasons wouldn’t have some pleasant, if unplanned, fringe benefits. Heck, the library’s closed; guess I’ll have to hang at the beach. Bummer.)
I mull calling the Hawaiian Mission Children’s Society Library and after a few weeks, I do. They have it. Will they send me photocopies of the incipits? It’s fragile but they agree. The envelope arrives; it’s proof positive that the Kaai 1906 exists. It’s no ghost.
But curiously, Kanahele’s Kaai 1916 is as ghostly as they come and cited throughout the literature now for nearly three decades.
EPILOGUE
hey say you always find the things you’ve lost in the last place you look. The HMCS Library wasn’t simply the last place I looked, it was the last place to look. I visited the library in 2004, compared their Kaai 1906 to a copy of the Revised 1910 and noted the differences—not many: re-engraved, some corrections, of course a different picture of Kaai—the one in Hawaiian Music and Musicians. The head librarian, Marilyn Reppun, was kind enough to make a photocopy for my records which I picked up the next day.
Recently I acquired an original of the Kaai 1906, from a Goodwill store in Oregon. Black paper wrappers printed with gold ink, a small octavo-size, just right to slip into an ‘ukulele case. And do you know what’s funny? It has one less piece than the copy at the HMCS Library. Nothing is missing from either one; there are just two states. I believe mine is the earlier: on page 21 (out of 39 pp.), Kaai references ‘preludes’ when there is only one prelude to be found. In the HMCS Library copy, a second prelude is printed on page 40, the verso of page 39, which is blank in my copy. It was apparently left out of the first printing and inserted out of sequence in the next. What’s wonderful about the copy I have is that it’s filled with annotations and corrections by Kaai himself. The original owner obviously took lessons from “Hawaii’s Music Man.”
I mean. Honolulu, 1906. You wanna learn how to play the ‘ukulele.
Who you gonna call?
Text © 2007 by John King