Tiny Bubbles

"Tiny Bubbles" was never meant for Don Ho. Leon Pober wrote it for Lawrence Welk, the bandleader famous for his champagne music, and Welk turned it down. It reached Ho only because a session was going badly: producer Sonny Burke asked for the song after Ho could not make "Born Free" work. Welk, for his part, later performed it several times on his television show once it had become a hit. By then Ho had come a long way from his mother's bar. Born in Honolulu's Kakaʻako neighbourhood and raised in Kāneʻohe, he left the Air Force in 1959 to help run the family club, Honey's, and began singing there for locals and Marines from the nearby base. He moved Honey's to Waikīkī in 1963, then played Duke Kahanamoku's club, where record company officials noticed him. Released in the fall of 1966, "Tiny Bubbles" charted on both the pop and easy listening charts and kept the album of the same name in the Billboard top 200 for almost a year, just as cheap air travel was turning the new state into a growing tourist destination. It became his signature song, covered about 34 times by 1968, and he sang it night after night for vacationers. Some in Hawaii criticised him as too commercial, and he reportedly once quipped after a performance that he hated the song. Yet for many visitors in that era, the sound of Hawaii was a light, swaying tune first written for someone else.