Hawaiian Music Collection

In 2002, the library acquired the Hawaiian music collection of Dirk Vogel, who had been collecting Hawaiian music since the 1920s. The collection contains 6,000 78s, 2,650 LPs, 900 45s and thousands of other items.

Also in 2002, the library received a bequest of 2,533 Hawaiian music recordings from the estate of James Grant Cathro of Glasgow, Scotland, who died in 1999. Mr. Cathro collected the recordings, with special interest in steel guitar music, over the course of many years. This collection contains 2,056 phonodiscs (33-1/3, 45 and 78 RPM speeds); 236 cassettes and various other recordings.

The Vogel and Cathro collections serve as the foundation of the Hawaiian Music Collection, which today has approximately 20,000 total phonodiscs and 2000 recordings in other formats such as cassette tape and reel-to-reel tape. The University of Hawai'i at Manoa Library is in the process of digitizing the older formats in the collection to preserve the recordings before they are lost, the results of which are displayed on this website.

The information about the songs and artists is gleaned mainly from the record labels. The Hawaiian Music Collection is not responsible for any mis-attributions or inaccuracies.

To report a sound quality problem for a particular song - please contact us using the email in the sidebar and provide the URL of the page.

Artist & Performer Biographies
Hawaii Sheet Music Index
Hawaiian Songs: An Index of Published Songbooks
Photos related to the collection
Videos related to the collection

Access to full recordings of songs for non-affiliated UH patrons 
Due to our licensing agreements and copyright laws, we are not able to provide streaming access to the full recording of songs in the Hawaiian Music Collection for non-affiliated UH Mānoa patrons. If you are on Oʻahu, you can listen to the full recording of the song in-person on our unauthenticated computer in our Hawaiian and Pacific Collections reading room at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa's Hamilton Library.

Learn more about the Collection

Collection Items

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