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Hello, Hawaii, How Are You?

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Wikipedia article


'Hello, Hawaii, How Are You?' is a song written in 1915, by Jean Schwartz, Bert Kalmar and Edgar Leslie.

The song was inspired by the American Telephone and Telegraph Company's recent successful radio (then commonly called "wireless") telephone transmission from the U.S. Navy's station, NAA in Arlington, Virginia, to Hawaii.[https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uiug.30112111039530;view=1up;seq=488 "Wireless Telephone from Washington Across the Continent and to Hawaii"], 'Telegraph and Telephone Age', October 16, 1915, pages 474-476. This technology was still experimental, and the song underscores the caller's desperation to talk to his or her sweetheart in Hawaii, from his or her home in New York City.

The song was recorded in 1915 by Billy Murray, backed with an instrumental version by Pietro Deiro on Side B; and later that year by Broadway star Nora Bayes.

This was Murray's version of the chorus. It was easily adaptable for a woman to sing with just a couple of word changes:

Captain Jinks, one night on Broadway, all alone,

Read the news about the wireless telephone.

Pretty soon his thoughts began to stray,

over seven thousand miles away.

He went through a whole month's pay just to phone and say:

:Hello, Hawaii, how are you?

:Let me talk to Honolulu Lou

:To ask her this

:Give me a kiss

:Give me a kiss

:By wireless

:Please state

:I can't wait

:To hear her reply

:For I had to pawn

:Ev'ry little thing I own

:To talk from New York

:Through the wireless telephone

:Oh, Hello, Hawaii, how are you?

:Good-bye!

In Murray's version, at least, "Hawaii" is pronounced in a slangy way, as "Hah-WAH-yah", playing on the "How are you?" line.

References




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