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Farmer, activist, educator and top slack-key guitarist George Kahumoku has extraordinary talents and energy. Sentinel Photo by Bill Lovejoy

Sentinel Entertainment writer

If Thomas Jefferson were around today, he would certainly be pleased that his notion of the ideal American Agrarian Everyman is alive and well.

It would have shocked him, however, that such a man — educated, refined and intellectually curious, yet grounded in practical earthbound labors — could be a Hawaiian.

The idea that distant, inaccessible Hawaii would be an equal to Virginia and Massachusetts in the American republic was, in Jefferson’s time, as preposterous as an American flag planted on the surface of the moon.

Yet, George Kahumoku Jr., a Hawaiian to the very pit of his soul, would have been a welcome guest at old Tom Jefferson’s table.

Now in his 50s, Kahumoku has led a life that would exhaust six lesser men.

Known internationally for his talents on the Hawaiian slack-key guitar, he could have settled into a comfortable life as a musician. But music wasn’t enough to hold the man’s attentions.

Kahumoku is also a farmer, an educator, a writer, a sculptor, a chef and a community activist.

"I went broke on everything but music," laughs Kahumoku at his Pasatiempo home. "A lot of guys are the opposite. They have a regular job to make money, and they make music on the side.

"I was making nice money in music, and it was always the other stuff that was sucking it all away."

Kahumoku’s extra-musical interests are apparent in the nature of his appearance Saturday at the Mello Center in Watsonville. The event is a benefit concert for the Watsonville Farmer’s Market, in which George’s son, Keoki Kahumoku, will also perform.

If he so pleased, he could sweep into the Mello with all the pomp of a celebrated, Grammy-nominated musician with an album that reached No. 7 on Billboard’s World Music charts. Or he could walk among the farmers as one of them.

Before a rapt crowd at a recent gig at Henfling’s Tavern in Ben Lomond, Kahumoku chats between songs and admits to something shocking: "I never drank coffee."

Here’s a man who grew up in the Kona region of the big island of Hawaii, seedbed for one of the world’s finest coffee. He even grew the stuff. But his mother’s family was Mormon, to whom coffee is a vice. Thus, young George never developed a taste for it. All he knew was the hateful task of picking coffee beans.

Coffee, macadamias, flowers, avocados, gourmet vegetables, alfalfa, ginger root, cucumbers, herbs — Kahumoku grew it all commercially. At one point, he was providing the famous resort hotels on the Big Island’s west side with all their fresh herbs.

But his farming career began with hogs.

At the time, Kahumoku was making a nice six-figure income playing music every day at the Mauna Kea beach hotel. Playing guitar for a good living in one of the world’s most picturesque places, what kind of man fantasizes about pig farming?

"Well, I had this idea I couldn’t shake," he explains. "I wanted to have a sustainable agricultural farm.

"I could have played music and socked away all that money. But I felt there was a need to help farmers."

So Kahumoku raised hogs, not for pork, but for manure to sell to other organic farmers. He started a 4-H chapter with kids from South Kona, but found quickly there was a shortage of pigs in Hawaii. So he imported pig semen from the mainland, becoming the only pig entrepreneur in the state of Hawaii.

Though George’s may be the only name on a list of hog farmers who’ve performed for the Queen of England, such an endeavor is in keeping with his roots in South Kona.

His family lived on fishing and farming. They maintained three residences: one in the highlands where they grew taro; another in the midland range where sweet potatoes flourished; and one on the beach, the center of the family’s fishing activities.

It was an idyllic setting for a kid, but not without its reminders of larger forces in the outside world.

Kahumoku keeps a picture of his father, George Sr., that carries an air of mystical American tragedy. George Sr. ran a junk recycling business and worked for the islands’ fish-and-wildlife department in those pre-statehood days.

He was also a contract worker with the U.S. government and was sent to the Bikini atoll to help install a secret government project.

In the photo, George Sr. is standing shirtless with sunglasses on. Behind him is a giant mushroom cloud. A few years later, he developed a leaky heart valve and died.

Still Kahumoku speaks of those days with a sense of magic. "We used to lie down in the road trying to stop cars," he says in wonderment that he could have ever done such a thing.

"We’d go pick mangos or avocados or papayas and try to sell them to the tourists. If we got one car a day to stop, we were lucky."

Music was an everyday language with the Kahumoku clan. George’s roots with music goes back generations. His parents, grandparents and great-grandparents all played guitar or ukulele in the ki ho’alu (slack-key) style.

George Jr. picked it up naturally and was performing for audiences by the age of 12. "It was the first thing I heard in the morning and the last thing at night," he recalls.

It’s difficult to imagine the kind of 180-degree turn a lifestyle can take than what George experienced after high school. He went from a serene and pastoral life in Hawaii to the maelstrom of social upheaval that was Berkeley in the 1960s.

Kahumoku came to the mainland to study sculpture at the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland. He worked primarily in bronze during the time (one of his pieces hangs in the office of Hawaii Governor Benjamin Cayetano).

He was in Berkeley for the riots and the protests. He campaigned for Ron Dellums for Congress. He became an arts commissioner for the city of Berkeley and even played a few gigs at the East Bay club Freight & Salvage.

It was also in Berkeley where George Kahumoku had a dream.

In his dream, George was back in Kona. There was a school on the beach, a school run by Hawaiians, teaching real-world skills and the Hawaiian language. Kahumoku grew up in schools taught by haoles (whites), who banned the speaking of Hawaiian and the observance of Hawaiian customs.

"In my dreams, I could see the junked cars in the bushes," he says. "I could smell the salt air. I could see the racks of fish drying in the sun."

Inspired, he went back to Hawaii in 1973. Later, after he’d already launched his successful music career, Kahumoku got a call from a group of Hawaiians interested in starting an alternative school. Interested, he went to visit the site.

"All these community people were there with all this energy and great ideas. And then I saw it, the junk cars in the bushes, the racks of fish. This was my dream, literally."

Kahumoku wrote up grants for the school, the curriculum of which was based in fishing, hunting and surfing. It also taught hula and Hawaiian language.

Today, such an idea seems obvious. But in those days, most Hawaiians were oriented toward Western assimilation, embracing an American lifestyle at the expense of Hawaiian tradition.

George became a teacher and principal, both in the Kona region and in Maui, where he has made his home for the past several years. He’s living in Santa Cruz for the moment as a part of post-graduate program to help at-risk kids.

At the same time he was leaning toward teaching as a vocation, his skills as a guitarist and singer were taking him places he had not anticipated.

After returning to Hawaii from college, George reunited with his younger brother Moses. The two boys had not been reared together. George grew up in Hawaii; Moses in the Puget Sound area. Both were accomplished musicians, however, and soon they were playing the resorts as the Kahumoku Brothers.

Having grown adept from playing three to six hours a day at the resorts, the brothers built a reputation and were soon touring the world: New York, Singapore, Japan. They played for corporate big-shots, celebrities, movie stars. Actor Henry Winkler was especially fond of the brothers and continued to hire them over a span of 15 years.

Moses and George worked well together. George was steeped in Hawaiian, while Moses had been dabbling in nearly everything else: flamenco, Chicano music, Afro-Cuban.

Kahumoku has experienced a second wave of acclaim as a solo artist. George Winston’s Dancing Cat label, a Santa Cruz-based business that specialized in slack-key artists, helped Kahumoku gain a foothold in the world-music specialty market.

He has recorded solo and with his son Keoki, including the acclaimed "Drenched by Music" and last year’s "Hawaiian Love Songs," which solidified his reputation as a purveyor of old-school, traditional ki ho’alu. His reputation also led to him to write an autobiography titled "A Hawaiian Life" (Kealia Press), in which he details his battle with cancer in his 20s.

Kahumoku still owns a home in Maui as well as 30 acres on the island of Molokai he hopes to farm one day. He’s been in Santa Cruz for more than a year now and admits that he’s here partly due to the Sept. 11 tragedies, which put a hurt on Hawaiian tourism. "I had to go out and pound the pavement just to make a living again," he says.

Still it’s hard to say Kahumoku is suffering because of his temporary exile. He’s collaborating and performing with Bob Brozman, the Santa Cruz guitarist and musicologist. He’s also delighting in discovering Hawaiian restaurants — Kahumoku is a big-time foodie, having until recently hosted a cooking show in Hawaii.

"I am a modern American," writes Kahumoku in his autobiography, "who has flown high over the ocean at nearly the speed of sound, and I am an ancient Hawaiian, who travels slowly and low in the sea."

Rather poetic for a pig farmer.

The Creatives is an occasional feature, profiling Santa Cruz County’s artists and visionaries. To alert us of a creative individual with a compelling story to tell, drop us a line at: The Creatives, 207 Church St., Santa Cruz, CA 95060, or by e-mail to wbaine@santa-cruz.com.

If you go

WHAT: George Kahumoku Jr., with special guests Keoki Kahumoku and Herb Ohta Jr. in a benefit concert for the Watsonville Certified Farmers Market.

WHEN: 8 p.m. Saturday.

WHERE: The Henry J. Mello Center for the Performing Arts, 250 E. Beach St., Watsonville.

TICKETS: $25 reserved seating; $20 nonreserved.

DETAILS: 763-4047.

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