06/26/2026
That song and many others about Hawaiian Cultural History are some of my favorite...Hawaii's own, Braddah Iz, Never forgotten
He buried his mother. His father. His brother. Then he picked up a ukulele and recorded the most hopeful song the world had ever heard.
You already know it. The soft ukulele, the voice that sounds like it is smiling, "somewhere over the rainbow, way up high." Over a billion people have played it. Far fewer can tell you the name of the man who sang it, or that he has been gone 29 years today.
Israel Kaʻanoʻi Kamakawiwoʻole was born in 1959 and raised in Makaha, out on the Waiʻanae coast where the rent was cheap and the families were Hawaiian. His last name means "the fearless eye, the bold face." He picked up music at 11 alongside his older brother Skippy, and by their teens they had a band, the Makaha Sons of Niʻihau, and one stubborn idea: to sing Hawaiian, in Hawaiian, at a time when plenty of people had already decided the language and the music were finished.
Then Skippy's heart gave out. He was 28 years old. The same thing was already coming for his little brother, and IZ knew it.
IZ kept singing.
In 1988, a friend called a Honolulu studio at 3 in the morning and asked if IZ could come in to record something. The engineer, Milan Bertosa, said yes, if he could get there in 15 minutes. He set up a single microphone.
IZ sat down with a ukulele and went straight into "Somewhere Over the Rainbow," sliding into "What a Wonderful World." One take. No second try. It was over in a few minutes, and the tape sat in a drawer for years.
That tape became Facing Future, the best-selling Hawaiian album EVER made, and the first one to go platinum. One man. One ukulele. A song about a brighter world somewhere up above the chimney tops.
But IZ knew what was coming. He had already watched it take Skippy. His own heart and lungs were giving out, and there was no fixing it in time.
He was not afraid.
"I'm not scared for myself for dying," he said once with the tape rolling. "Because I believe all these places are temporary. This is just one shell. Because we Hawaiians live in both worlds."
On June 26, 1997, his body finally stopped. He was 38 years old. Twenty-nine years ago today.
He never saw what the song became. He died thinking it was a quiet little recording he made one night when he couldn't sleep.
They brought his koa wood casket to the State Capitol and let him lie in state. Only two people had ever been given that honor before him, and both of them ran the government. IZ was a singer from Makaha. The Hawaiian flag flew at half-mast, and around ten thousand people came to say goodbye.
The man who gave the world its most hopeful song never got to hear the world sing it back.
Two days later they took his ashes out to Makua Beach. As his family let him go into the water, truck drivers all along the Waiʻanae coast leaned on their horns. Every kid who grew up here knows that sound, the highway saying goodbye to one of its own.
And the song did not stay quiet. It became the LONGEST-running number one on any Billboard chart in history. Over a billion plays. It turns up in the movies, the commercials, the weddings, the funerals.
But mostly it lives in the living rooms. Somewhere tonight there is a Hawaiian family in Las Vegas or Seattle, a long way from the water, and someone cues up that ukulele intro, and the whole room goes still. That is IZ, doing the exact thing he promised he could do. Living in both worlds at once.
He sang about a place somewhere over the rainbow.
For every Hawaiian who ever had to leave, he became the way back.
