The Making of the Eddie Kamae Songbook: Storytelling to Perpetuate Legacy

 

Have you ever thought about wanting to collect, organize and save something important? Maybe to keep for yourself or to share with family or others? It could be a collection of storied pieces: family recipes, photos, recollections, or even family histories. It could be community stories and information about a beloved place. Perhaps you need to go out and collect new stories and images to add to what you already have. This is storytelling: curating a series of artifacts—whether recollections, images, or objects—to tell a story about what happened before or what is happening now in order to preserve and share it.

Why? Because you have a sense that this information is important! This is what Eddie Kamae and his wife Myrna did for decades with their non-profit, The Hawaiian Legacy Foundation: collected, researched, organized, and produced award-winning stories in the form of 10 award-winning documentaries. In 2020, a core team of three people, including Myrna at the helm, began putting together the Eddie Kamae Songbook: A Musical Journey to document the 34 most important songs in Eddie’s life in the hope of inspiring faculty, families, students, practitioners, and others to learn about Hawaiian ways of knowing through music. The deeper goal was to encourage people to collect their own knowledge and perpetuate it.

Video Series

What follows is a guide to how the core team who created the songbook did this and how you can gather your tools, frame the effort, organize it, and find the resources and passion to see it through. It focuses on the videos of four groups of people who were involved in the effort which culminated in a robust, online, completely free resource available at eddiekamaesongbook.org. The four videos are:

  • The Hui Hana Core Songbook Team: positioning the songbook for an educational vision and mission
  • The Hawaiian Legacy Foundation Board: finding the right people and resources to help you do your work
  • The Archivists: capturing, documenting, preserving, and sharing
  • The Musicians and Composers: creating space for the community to engage and innovate

Episode 1: The Hui Hana Core Songbook Team

LO 1: Find your “why?” to provide the foundation for your project and frame your work.

Question 1: What was the Kamae’s “why?”

Question 2: What is your “why,” the reason you want to do this project?

LO 2: Develop one to three lessons you’d like to share with your intended audience.

Question 1: Who is your intended audience?

Question 2: What common threads do you see running through the storied pieces, or artifacts you are collecting?

Question 3: How can you use the lessons and common threads to organize the information you have collected?

Episode 2: The Hawaiian Legacy Foundation Board

LO 1: Brainstorm one to three names of people who could help turn your idea into a completed project.

Question 1: Think about the Hawaiian Legacy Foundation board. What roles can the support group play?

Question 2: What help can the support group provide?

Question 3: Who might be missing from the team as you progress in your project?

Episode 3: The Archivists

LO 1: Create an archival plan for your project.

Question 1: How did ʻUluʻulu become the home for the Kamae archives?

Question 2: What did the staff members of ʻUluʻulu describe as some of their responsibilities with archiving information and collections?

Question 3: How will you preserve and make accessible the storied pieces that you have collected?

Episode 4: The Musicians and Composers

LO 1: Create an outreach plan for your project.

Question 1: How did the Eddie Kamae songbook inspire Chadwick Kamei and what resulted from that?

Question 2: How can your project inspire others?

Question 3: What groups of people do you have access to who might benefit from your project?

LO 2: After your project is completed and shared, reflect on it and address its effectiveness, value, and process.

Question 1: What went well and what could be improved?

Question 2: What value did the content of the project offer to your intended audience?

Question 3: What advice would you offer someone who wanted to do a similar storytelling archival project?