A few years ago a neighbor was giving away ginger rhizomes. She had dug so many out of her garden that it looked as if a dump truck had unloaded them on her driveway.
I didn't end up planting that many in the garden because our dirt was hard as a rock. So I potted some in big old plastic pots with potting mix and put *those* on top of the dirt underneath our kitchen window. I keep meaning to plant them for real at some point...and then I don't.
In the meantime the ginger seems to like it where it is.
And this week our first yellow ginger flowered. It smells amazing. As the song goes:
My yellow ginger lei
Reveals her scent through the day
Enchanting moments with you
Make me love you.
Kuʻu lei ‘awapuhi melemele
I puīa me ke ʻala onaona
Hoʻohihi ka manaʻo iā ʻoe
E kuʻu lei ʻawapuhi
Quick Quiz!
I'm going to take a guess that this song was written by Johnny Noble, because he often used the metaphor of a fragrant flower to describe his beloved (he was blind).
Wrong!
I looked it up, and My Yellow Ginger Lei is by a guy I don't know, John Ka'onohiokala Keawehawaii.
Johnny Almeida and John Keawehawaii perform it on this recording.
Listening to the original, I kinda get why artists like Led Kaapana make a medley out of it with other songs. It's super repetitive. And maybe that's a reason that it's popular with non-professional hula dancers -- the verse in Hawaiian and English is the same, which means that the dance is easy to remember.
Another random thought: on this particular recording they don't credit the female vocalists. Bummah, but a quick search of Discogs shows that JKK's group, The KeaweHawaiis, credits Linda De La Cruz as one of the vocalists. They were lucky to have her.
A favorite version of a song we used to do in the big ukulele band.
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