"Exhaustively researched and elegantly written,...
Kīkā Kila is a tour de force"
--Amy Kuʻuleialoha Stillman
"Kīkā Kila is a magisterial work"
--William Ferris
"That Guy Broke the Code!"
--Luther Dickinson
Superbly written, beautifully illustrated and packed with anecdotes . . . this remarkable book is a gem and should find a readership far beyond guitar obsessives.
--The Blues Magazine
If you've ever felt the lure of slide guitar, Kika Kila is a fantastic book that offers new listening material, colorful stories, and vibrant history, and exposes you to great guitarists who made history.
--Acoustic Guitar
A "landmark contribution..." An "illuminating and insightful" book that "challenge[s] much of the received wisdom on American music history."
--The Journal of Social History
“Kīkā Kila presents a stunning example of the nation’s cultural mélange.”
--Oxford American
Since the nineteenth century, the distinct tones of kīkā kila, the Hawaiian steel guitar, have defined the island sound. Here historian and steel guitarist John W. Troutman offers the instrument’s definitive history, from its discovery by a young Hawaiian royalist named Joseph Kekuku to its revolutionary influence on American and world music. During the early twentieth century, Hawaiian musicians traveled the globe, from tent shows in the Mississippi Delta, where they shaped the new sounds of country and the blues, to regal theaters and vaudeville stages in New York, Berlin, Kolkata, and beyond. In the process, Hawaiian guitarists recast the role of the guitar in modern life. But as Troutman explains, by the 1970s the instrument’s embrace and adoption overseas also worked to challenge its cultural legitimacy in the eyes of a new generation of Hawaiian musicians. As a consequence, the indigenous instrument nearly disappeared in its homeland.
Using rich musical and historical sources, including interviews with musicians and their descendants, Troutman provides the complete story of how this Native Hawaiian instrument transformed not only American music but the sounds of modern music throughout the world.
Additional Praise:
"Deeply researched. . . . Essential for anyone who wants to know more about the tremendously fertile--and horribly imperialistic--world of 19th and early-20th century Hawaii, when new ideas and poured in and amazing music poured out."
--Ukulele
Kīkā Kila is "a treasure chest of impassioned investigation."
--Honolulu Magazine, which named Kīkā Kila its favorite stocking stuffer for bookworms, 2016
"John Troutman's Kika Kila is a deeply researched, definitive history of the Hawaiian steel guitar, but more than that, it is an eloquent and convincing argument for the influence and centrality of Hawaiian music--and, in particular, Hawaiian musicians--in the broader history of American music."
--Elijah Wald, Ph.D, author of Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues
"Kīkā Kila is a tour de force, documenting the steel guitar’s indigenous Hawaiian roots, while also challenging longstanding conventions in the music industry and in scholarship on American popular music. Exhaustively researched and elegantly written, Troutmanʻs book is a gift of insight and appreciation for the steel guitar, arguably the most endearing sonic icon of Hawaiian music."
--Amy Kuʻuleialoha Stillman, Professor of American Culture and Music, University of Michigan
"Kīkā Kila is a magisterial work. John W. Troutman eloquently links the steel guitar with the arrival of white missionaries and the dispossession of indigenous Hawaiian people from their land in the nineteenth century. The instrument became a powerful voice for the Hawaiian people and inspired music throughout North America in the twentieth century."
--William Ferris, author of Give My Poor Heart Ease: Voices of the Mississippi Blues
"A model of richly detailed yet accessible narrative history, John W. Troutman’s book will force scholars and lovers of popular music in the United States to change some of their most basic and long-held assumptions."
--Karl Hagstrom Miller, University of Virginia
"John W. Troutman’s compelling and lovingly written book cements the centrality of the steel guitar, Kanaka Maoli musicians, and Hawaiian history in the evolution of American cultural history. Deeply informed by scholarship on music, expressive culture and performance, diaspora, imperialism, resistance, politics, economics, and more--all informed and reinvented through the lens of Indigenous studies--this is one of the most surprising and challenging cultural histories I’ve lately seen. Read here and learn that Kanaka Maoli people and the steel guitar are at the heart of it all."
--Rayna Green, Curator Emerita, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution
To order your copy through UNC Press, click here.
To order on Amazon, click here.
Please enjoy the accompanying Spotify playlist, below...