HAWAIIAN MUSIC – ‘The Real Stuff !!’ (part 6)
Sol Hoopii (1) and His Hawaiians – ‘Memories of Hawaii’. (repeat)
Sol Hoopii is the most imaginative Hawaii guitar player and falset singer from the Golden Age of the Hawaiian Music.
78rpm records
The radio programmes broadcasted in the second half of the 1930s in the United States were produced at Atlas Radio Corporation and Bruce Eells & made on 16” (=40.64 cm) 78rpm records. A few copies were needed to send to other radio stations on the continent. When the tape recorder became standard, these records were simply ‘thrown away’. Luckily some fanatic and energetic people managed to save some of the records from complete vanishing.
The Indian Dutch Dirk P. Vogel, who emigrated to the U.S. in the early fifties, led the Aloha International Steel Guitar Club in Minneapolis (Minnesota) and became an authority in collecting and gathering knowledge about the 78rpm era. For many compilations on LP or CD, people made use of his knowledge. He managed to gather a set of the fourteen-minute radio programmes of Sol Hoopii. That is how these uncut records, directly transferred from a 78rpm to a Compact cassettes, find their way to the compiler of this programme, who was a friend of Dirk Vogel.
When the plans to make a programme about this phenomenon became certain around December, the Australian Bruce Clarke appeared to have put the whole set of Dirk Vogel onto a CD in 2006, just before he passed away in 2008. Unfortunately, because of his death, these treasures are no longer for sale.
Gerrit Venema, secretary of the institution for Hawaiian music and Dutch Culture, fortunately just managed to gather the CDs and was willing to lend ‘The Real Stuff!!’ for the broadcasts of Hawaiian Music. So now we can really go back in time, more than 75 years ago, and listen again to the uncut programmes of Sol Hoopii and His Hawaiians in ‘Memories of Hawaii’.
1st repeat: Saturday night 10 January 2015 04:00-05:00
2nd repeat: Saturday night 10 January 2015 23:00-24:00
