Kui Lee

Kuiokalani Lee (July 31, 1932 – December 3, 1966) was a singer-songwriter, and the 1960s golden boy artist of Hawaii. Lee achieved international fame when Don Ho began performing and recording his compositions, with Ho promoting Lee as the songwriter for a new generation of Hawaiian music.

Lee was born in Shanghai, China. His entertainer parents Billy and Ethel Lee were of Scottish, Hawaiian and Chinese ancestry. Ethel died in 1936. Kui's widowed father took him back to Hawaii when he was five years old and enrolled him in Kamehameha Schools and later Roosevelt High School.

Lee worked as a knife dancer and choreographer in the Hawaiian Room of New York's Lexington Hotel.

There he met and married singer-hula dancer Rose Frances Naone Leinani, known to everyone as Nani. Nani returned to Hawaii with Kui and performed with him, as well as with Don Ho at Honey's. She also performed with Sterling Mossman, Tommy Sands, Sons of Hawaii and Zulu. Kui and Nani would have four children together - Wailana, Mahealani, Maile and Kimo

By 1961, he was working at Club Jetty in Nawiliwili, Kauai. He later went to work at Honey's in Kaneohe, owned by Emily "Honey" Ho, mother of Don. The connection would launch a symbiotic relationship between Don and Kui that transcended Kui's early death. Recording Kui's songs made Don a star, and it was from Don's on-stage patter that most people learned of Kui Lee. Onstage, Don gave Kui full credit for creating island music for a new generation.

Kui Lee only achieved fame for his own musical compositions toward the very end of his life. The Extraordinary Kui Lee was the only album released during his lifetime. Famous songs on that album included "I'll Remember You" (brought into even greater fame by Don Ho, Elvis Presley and Makaha Sons of Ni'ihau) and "Days of my Youth", now both well-known standards in Hawai'i.

"A Man Called Hawaii"-The Legend Of Kui Lee 45 Side one performed by Lani Kai, on Palm Records. A 30-second clip may be heard from the Hawaiian Music Collection, held by the University of Hawaii's Hawaiian Music Collection.

Kui Lee had been battling lymph gland cancer when he died at the Guadalajara Hospital in Tijuana on December 3, 1966, at the age of 34. His ashes were scattered off Waikiki. In 1973, Elvis Presley gave the Aloha From Hawaii concert with $75,000 proceeds going to the Kui Lee Cancer Fund, which had been created shortly before the concert by Hawaii veteran newspaper columnist Eddie Sherman who funded the cancer research going on at the University of Hawaii.

Kui's widow Nani Lee Meadows also died of cancer, on April 12, 2008.

• The Extraordinary Kui Lee (2005) CD 719 (Sony)