Coconut Bras and Little Grass Shacks
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Lee says the problem arose when she was away last year, teaching for a semester at Denison University. Her program had grown and it was time to expand the faculty anyway, so she recommended Mike Hammerman, who’d been a student of hers for six or seven years, to take over the beginning ukulele class. (Another student took over hula, which she says has worked out well.) She assumed Hammerman would follow her curriculum but says she gradually became aware that the “majority of the songs he’s teaching represent misperceptions of who we are as a people.” Lee sees this as a sign that the teacher needs more training himself, and says the quickest way to rectify the situation would’ve been to let her step in and teach the class alongside him. She says she addressed her concerns to Old Town administrator Ari Frede, who informed her via e-mail that he’d spoken with Hammerman and “decided that what he’s delivering is just fine.” But Lee questions whether either is in a position to speak as an authority on the subject. “I don’t think the world really needs another instructor out there teaching songs like ‘Little Grass Shack,’” she says. “They’re so similar to Tin Pan Alley.” (The song does appear, along with 45 others, on Lee’s approved list for the course, but she claims it’s not one she’s ever emphasized.) As it is, she adds, the Hawaii most people know was packaged in Hollywood with a sound track by Elvis Presley. “I’d like for people to stop coming up to me saying, ‘OK, where are the coconut bras?’ That’s not our culture.”
Frede says Hammerman was “responding to student requests, as most teachers do,” in an attempt to keep them engaged while playing to his own strengths. (Hammerman declined to comment.) “All of our classes depend heavily on a teacher-driven curriculum,” Frede says, and Hammerman was interested in playing a “catalog of music that he referred to as hapa haole”–nontraditional music that evokes Hawaii. The reason Hammerman was allowed to deviate from Lee’s curriculum, he says, is that the school believes in self-expression and allows its teachers to develop their course work as they go. “What he came up with is an interesting new class. I don’t think it was mean-spirited or imperialistic or insolent or even naive. We’ve had to look broadly at what folk music really is. Not everyone is in agreement, but we’ve got a Beatles ensemble here. If there’s room for the Beatles, there’s room for this.”
