Aloha ʻOe

The story

"Aloha ʻOe" ("Farewell to Thee") was written about 1878 by Liliʻuokalani, then a princess of the Hawaiian Kingdom. The accounts of its origin differ in detail, but all agree that it was inspired by a farewell embrace given by Colonel James Harbottle Boyd at the end of a horseback trip that the princess and her party made in 1877 or 1878 to the Boyd ranch at Maunawili, on the windward side of Oʻahu. The embrace was given either to her sister, Princess Likelike Cleghorn, or to a young woman at the ranch. On the ride back to Honolulu the princess began to hum a tune; Charles Wilson remarked that it sounded like "The Lone Rock by the Sea", and the others took up the humming when the party rested in an orange grove on the Honolulu side of the Pali. The song was finished later at Washington Place.

The Hawaiʻi State Archives holds Liliʻuokalani's handwritten manuscript, dated 1878, with the score, the Hawaiian words and her own English translation. A note in her hand, apparently added later, records that it was composed at Maunawili in 1878 and that the Royal Hawaiian Band played it in San Francisco in August 1883, where it became very popular. Parts of the melody resemble "The Rock Beside the Sea", published by Charles Crozat Converse in 1857 and itself drawn from the Croatian and Serbian folk song "Sedi Mara na kamen studencu", and the chorus of George Frederick Root's "There's Music in the Air" (1854).

The first known recording was issued by Berliner Gramophone in 1898; Columbia recorded Nani Alapai and Henry N. Clark singing it as a duet in 1911, and the 1913 recording by the Hawaiian Quintette, with Walter Kolomoku on steel guitar, was chosen for the National Recording Registry of the Library of Congress in 2025. It became her best-known song and a common cultural symbol of Hawaii, recorded by Bing Crosby (1936), Elvis Presley for the film Blue Hawaii (1961), Don Ho (1970) and Johnny Cash, among many others. The orchestra played it at the closing ceremony of the 1932 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles as the flame went out. In October 1997 the Chinese president Jiang Zemin, arriving in Hawaii on a state visit, played it on a Hawaiian lap steel guitar at a dinner with Governor Ben Cayetano, recalling that he had often played it as a student in the 1940s. Since 1926 the University of Tennessee has held a farewell ceremony for graduating seniors under the same name.

What it says

A song of parting between loved ones, born of a farewell embrace. Its mood is tender and wistful.

The words