Home is Here on PBS Hawaiʻi is sponsored by Hawaiʻi Leadership Forum, The Olson Trust, and Pasha Hawaiʻi.

Kalaʻi Miller: Aloha and welcome to Home is Here.

I’m Kalaʻi Miller.

His music has been called country, blues, and Americana.

But for Oʻahu-born musician Kapali Long, those sounds are simply part of a tradition that goes back generations—to his Hawaiian forefathers.

Kapali Long: The creator of Bojack drew my pineapple and put the Hawaiian Islands on for me.

The strap was a was a heavy one, because, like, my grandma's favorite flowers were peonies.

And then I went straight to the palace when I was home, and I went straight to the gates, and then took a photo of the crest on the gates.

And then the Hawaiian, you know, Kingdom flag.

And then my grandfather's grandfather was the first sheriff of Hawaiʻi Island during (Get out of town dude) Kapali Long: When they, were when, and then they had to, he quit the department when they started hunting the Hawaiians up in the hills.

All of it’s mana.

All of it’s my family.

All the rings are from family.

Everything is from family—my grandpa’s ring, my grandma’s ring.

Takes a lot of mana to get up on stage, that’s why.

(Singing) I got my first speeding ticket when I was sixteen.

I didn’t know there was a due date on that thing.

The cops came a-knocking.

My pops ain’t proud.

If you you’ve been where I’ve been, then you know what I’m talking about.

They call me Leadfoot.

Popped for 89 in a 55.

My daddy was a sheriff, he taught me how to drive.

I got away with a little smoking then a little drive.

They call me Leadfoot.

Popped for 89 in a 50… five.

Kapali Long: My name is Kapali Long.

I am born and raised from Honolulu, Hawaiʻi, but I live full time in Nashville, and I am a songwriter, touring guitar player, steel guitar player, and artist.

My music is country, bluegrass and blues, by way of Hawaiʻi and by way of Hawaiian music.

That's how I explain it to people.

(Singing) And so she says that she loves me.

And yet we go through these routines.

And everyday I say I try.

But lord knows that that’s a lie.

Kapali Long: It’s actually the funniest thing.

People go, what, what are you doing here?

What is, what is a Hawaiian doing here in country music?

And I have to, I go straight into having to educate them that Jimmy Rogers, the king of country music, to them, the father of country music, had four native Hawaiian steel players.

And we’ve been here since the beginning.

And then they want to talk about, maybe the first iteration of the Opry in the band that they had.

Well, that's the same layout as old Hawaiian music and proper Hawaiian music.

So, to me, we have influenced not just country, but bluegrass, you know.

So, I tend to go in, you know, in a beautiful way, you know, ruffle some feathers, but tell the truth.

What really inspired me to accept the moniker of being a country artist, was realizing that all of the sound that made a popular, a pop song on country radio, country, was truly steel guitar or black African banjo.

And so, for me, it made me realize it was really those two to today that make it country music.

And for me, I came up playing a lot of blues.

I played a lot of slide guitar growing up.

I also grew up playing a lot of Gabby Pahinui.

My grandma’s brother was Buddy Fo of the Invitations.

So, I grew up with Uncle Buddy, you know, sitting on porches and jamming.

And I just remember being little thinking I wanted to do that, which was music, in general.

(Buddy Fo singing) Waimanalo country, ‘Nalo country, Waimanalo country Kapali Long: I was about nine years old.

My brother, Brad, had a broken guitar with one string, and I remember learning, I think, 11 songs on that one string.

And I remember my mom was like, ho, we need to get him a guitar.

So, I got a Yamaha guitar from Costco, and I still have that guitar today, and that guitar went with me around the world.

I mean, essentially, when I was before I was even 14, and so it's always been that.

I mean, I grew up playing at Coffee Talk and Sacred Grounds in Hawaiʻi Kai, doing like, three hour shows.

You know, when I was like 14, just like singing in the corner.

So, it was always that.

I was always catching the bus with a big guitar case, no matter how small I was just walking around.

It was always, it was always guitar.

I always came home to guitar.

So now I’m, now, I'm living my nine-year-old dream.

And then years later I was in a lot of rock bands and then I was always listening to singer-songwriter in the 2000s everything was labeled singer-songwriter, and everything I was listening to was country.

And I didn't know that.

So, I also didn't see another Hawaiian in country music.

So, for me, I didn't know that I was allowed to be in it.

And to be honest, when I was growing up, people used to tease me for oh, how come your music sounds country?

Well, it sounds Hawaiian to me.

(Singing) Why did you do me like your mom did your daddy?

The apple don’t fall far from the tree.

So, the day after I found out, got on a plane with no doubts, and I went off to pack all my things.

So don’t say that you love me, when you did what you did.

Kapali Long: I moved away the day after I turned 18.

I moved to Los Angeles.

I lived there for over 10 years.

I was playing in a bunch of rock bands.

So, I was touring around, booking my own shows, sleeping in my car, driving around from like 18 to 22.

I was touring back and forth between California and doing shows in Texas, I played six South by Southwest festivals, and in 2015 somebody that works with Robert Earl Keen, who was one of my favorite songwriters growing up, one of his friends, got a hold of me.

We got connected.

And I opened for Robert Earl Keen on the Fourth of July in 2015.

And when I opened for Robert in 2015, it was like, you play Americana, you play country.

And even the steel and dobro player, I turned around and looked at them and I was like, ho!

And they were like, yeah, we play Hawaiian instruments.

They knew.

You know, they knew then.

Doing all that touring and blues and realizing that my songwriting was at the forefront, that my songwriting was country music.

But it was country because it was the stories in my life and what I lived.

Well, isn’t that what Hawaiian music is?

You know, our history and the lives that our ancestors lived?

(Singing) All she ever did was break my heart, cuz I knew from the beginning, should’ve ran right from the start.

You can just… Kapali Long: Then my Grammy got sick.

She was fighting cancer for five years.

I got asked to play the Whiskey Jam, which is a big showcase in Nashville.

I played it three times.

On the third time, Grammy got put back into the hospital for cancer.

She was at Queens.

She stopped eating.

They still had covid protocols, so she would eat with me.

So, they made the exception for me to stay with her.

So, I stayed with her for 12 days at Queens, and on the third day, I started writing a song called, “One More Night,” which was about Grammy.

Me getting to have one more night with my grandma.

Despite how hard or bad the day may be, if somebody you love is still alive, you can't pick the kind of day.

You just get to be with them, you know.

(Singing) I feel you in the wind.

And I see you in the trees.

And when I was a baby, you used to rock me on your knee.

When I sit on y’all’s porch, when the sun rises, I swear I can feel you beyond the horizon.

But when I wake up my heart re- breaks with all the years that I could’ve stayed.

And I know I could make it alright, with just one… Kapali Long: On the, I think on the fifth day I applied to play Nikki Lane's Stage at Stagecoach.

It was like an up-and-coming country, and I was like, oh, this is a long shot.

It's Stagecoach, probably the biggest country music festival, maybe in the world.

(Sinigng) Remember when I was five, I scraped my knee, she picked me up, poured her loving on me.

I wish we had more time, one more night.

Kapali Long: And I, when my Grammy passed, it was in October ’22.

I ended up flying back to the Continental States in January, and then I think a week or two in I got the email that I got picked to play Nikki’s Stage at Stagecoach.

And it changed my life.

I was technically the first Native Hawaiian to ever be billed.

And then Nikki and her now husband, Wade, became champions of me.

I mean, Nikki has brought me to play guitar for her.

On the days when I though I wasn’t worth it, they were there for me.

And Nikki, in the middle of like, touring with Stapleton, will reach out and check in.

You know, it’s like uh, so, I really wouldn’t be here without people like that, showing me that I was worth it.

That’s how I’m in Nashville full-time.

I moved to Nashville with people who loved me, and you know, friends that supported me.

And I’ve been sponsored by Gibson Guitars since 2016 and they’re based there.

So, Gibson has, I wouldn’t be here today if it wasn’t for Gibson Guitars.

There have been months and years where I had nothing, and they were there for me.

So, it’s been a long journey of a lot of people that believed in what I do in country, Americana, blues and how it’s all by way of my culture, and our culture, Hawaiian culture, and music.

(Singing) Wish I could sit in the kitchen with you one more time.

Coffee shops just to stand in line with you.

Relive all the bad times, just for one more.

Remember when I was five, I scraped my knee, she picked me up, poured her loving on me.

I wish we had more time.

One more night.

Kapali Long: Thank you so much for coming up.

For all the, for all the people that aren’t my family in here, if my grandma’s song hits you, please come and hang out with me.

Please tell me who it is that you miss.

If you’ve been affected by cancer or you miss somebody and the songs hit you, please come and talk to me.

I want to hear who they were.

I want to know who they are.

If you got a picture, I’d love to see it because then every time I sing that song, I see all of your ʻohanas in my head when I sing it.

So, it’s very important.

Please come and talk to me.

(Singing) Wish I could sit in the kitchen with you one more time.

DMV just to stand in line with you.

I’d relive all the bad times.

Remember when I was five, I scraped my knee, she picked me up, poured her loving on me.

I wish we had more time.

If I could, I’d go back in time just to be by her bedside and oh, I wish we had more time, one more night.

Kalaʻi Miller: Teshima Restaurant is a beloved eatery in Kealakekua on the Big Island.

Rooted in a family business dating back to 1929, the restaurant has served generations of residents and visitors alike.

Its welcoming atmosphere and commitment to quality food reflect founder Mary “Grandma” Teshima, whose family continues to carry-on her legacy.

Donna Lee K. Burnham: Well, I know that people come from far and wide for our tempura, and the sauce is excellent.

Our favorite dish is the number three, and it's a good seller.

And that's one with the sashimi, and the tempura, and the sukiyaki, and the rice, and the miso soup, tsukemono, sunomono.

Noelani Greene: I don't believe Grandma Teshima had a favorite dish, but she always would eat miso soup and rice, and have green tea.

Donna Lee K. Burnham: Our omelet fried rice, especially the Portugues sausage.

The local people love that.

That’s another favorite.

Trudy Teshima-Gramlich: I like the chicken teriyaki, curry stew, and the miso butterfish.

Donna Lee K. Burnham: Oh, that's my favorite, miso butterfish.

Actually.

I love our food here.

I know I'm part of the family, but I do love it.

Noelani Greene: My name is Noelani Greene, and I'm the general manager at Teshima’s Restaurant.

Donna Lee K. Burnham: My name is Donna Lee K. Burnham, and I'm a fourth-generation member of this family.

I've worked here for over 50 years.

Trudy Teshima-Gramlich: And I'm Trudy Teshima-Gramlich.

I'm a fourth generation also, and we do everything at the restaurant.

We wash dishes, or I’m a waitress, and I love it because we get to meet people from all over the world, and we're just trying to keep the restaurant going for my grandmother.

Donna Lee K. Burnham: My grandma Mary Teshima, when she got married, she lived with her in-laws down Nāpōʻopoʻo Road, and it was a coffee farm.

She was wasn't too happy, you know, working the coffee land, so she had asked her father that she wanted to be in business like how they were.

And so, he helped her build a building in this same exact location in the late 20s.

Noelani Greene: So, Teshima’s started in 1929 and it started as a general store.

Donna Lee K. Burnham: Part of it was a barber shop.

It had gone through different transformations, and then also a bar, and her sister-in-law, Elsie, ran the bar.

It was called Elsie's Bar.

Trudy Teshima-Gramlich: During the war, the soldiers came and taught her how to do hamburgers, and so then she opened up that saimin stand, and in the 50s, that's when she opened up this restaurant at the same site.

Noelani Greene: Grandma Teshima, I believe, was way ahead of her time, being a woman, having her own business, working so hard.

Trudy Teshima-Gramlich: She was a Rotarian, and back when they had only men in the Rotary clubs and she belonged to the BPW, which is the Business Professional Women, and so many of those clubs are still meeting here.

Noelani Greene: She also did sewing for the soldiers next door that were stationed at the church at the Daifukuji Church next door, and that's how she became doing more things at the general store, and expanding and cooking.

Grandma Teshima is the matriarch of the family.

She has five children, and now we have about 120 of us.

Trudy Teshima-Gramlich: Grandma taught me that the customer was always right, whether they were right or wrong, and they were like friends coming into her living room, her kitchen, and that's how we were to treat them.

And she just loved everyone, and I guess they knew that, and so she wanted to instill in us the same feeling.

Noelani Greene: Our customer base is very mixed, very diverse, and it's a blessing for us because we don't have to depend just on our local customers.

We have tourists, people who come from all over the world to see the restaurant.

We've had many celebrities come here.

One thing that Grandma always did is she treated everybody like a celebrity here, so we couldn't be like fangirl over people.

Donna Lee K. Burnham: We have our locals that come in and support us, and we're just so grateful for that, and they've been coming to us for years and years, some of them have passed away, but you know, we have, I have great memories of some of them, and I think about them all the time.

Noelani Greene: Some of our employees have been here since they were 14 years old.

One of our head cooks has been here, he came from Mexico.

Grandma took him in and brought him here, and he's been here since.

Then I have classmates who've been here, we've been here for about 30 years working, so there's a lot of long-term workers.

Grandma Teshima worked until she was 105, when she passed away when she was 106, which was in 2013.

So, she worked until the last days, when she wanted.

She just said I was tired.

Being a fourth-generation manager is a little difficult for me, because I still have to be and think of the legacy that my grandma’s passing on.

Not just to my grandfather, who was her eldest son, and my mom, who’s the eldest grandchild.

And I'm the eldest great grandchild, so it's a lot of pressure.

Trudy Teshima-Gramlich: I am very proud of my daughter, Noelani, for taking on management at Teshima’s because it's hard work and she loves the restaurant just as much as other family members.

Noelani Greene: I continue to run this restaurant because of the legacy.

It's a passion for me, and I want to continue to pass it on to the next generations.

I think Grandma Teshima would be very proud of her legacy continuing.

Trudy Teshima-Gramlich: All I know is I would like to see it keep on going for Grandma because she loved people, she loved seeing everyone and taking care of everyone.

Donna Lee K. Burnham: Well, a lot of locals, they tell us, just in fact, yesterday someone said, “Do not close the restaurant because we all enjoy the food,” so it's nice to hear that.

So, we hope that we never do close, and keep on serving our customers good food.

Noelani Greene: There's no recipes that are secret here, it's just grandma's cooking, and my husband jokes, and this is funny, because he jokes that it's nothing special, but I think it's special because it's Grandma's cooking, and when anybody goes to Grandma's house, that's special to them.

Kalaʻi Miller: For Illikoi Goods creator Anthony Duong, old garments are more than just something to throw away.

He repurposes them into highly sought-after headwear and accessories.

But along his journey into sewing and craftsmanship, Anthony has found something else: a community—and unexpected connections along the way.

Anthony Duong: For years I’ve been collecting hats.

I just like, love wearing hats.

I hate doing my hair, and so every day I just throw a hat on.

And so that was something that I collected over the years.

And when I moved out here, I got rid of, you know, my whole collection, and just decided one day I just wanted to learn how to start making them.

I was scrolling through Instagram one day, and I saw a post from somebody who was like, transforming, like a rice bag, and then, like a jacket or something.

And that kind of caught my attention.

I just thought it was cool, like a little, cool little art project, and it was something that kind of inspired me to kind of learn the craft.

In the beginning, just learning, like what tools I needed, it was, it was quite a task, because I had no idea.

I had zero knowledge of sewing.

And so, I just made friends with a couple of the local aunties who work at the fabric stores here on the island.

And I'd pop in, buy fabric, ask a couple questions, and, you know, go home, try it out, and then if I messed up, I'd go back out and, you know, bring my project.

My knowledge, my confidence level was zero, you know, and my work just did not look presentable at all, or, you know, anywhere near, you know, what I wanted it to look like.

And so the first six months was a lot of trial and error, and just like building relationships and asking a lot of questions.

When I first stepped foot into a store to purchase a sewing machine was an old Filipino lady.

Her name is Lenore.

she definitely was the one who got the ball rolling.

She gifted me a machine that a customer had just like, given away at the shop, and, you know, she gave me scissors, thread, needles, and was just like, have at it.

She was like, you can work here, and you know, I’ll teach you how to sew.

Instead, I became friends with her, and kind of did my own thing at home.

My community here is made up of ninety percent people that I wouldn’t have come across if I wasn’t sewing.

It’s a lot of the older generation who make quilts and clothes that I would never cross paths with.

But because I do sew now, and I’m kind of like a younger male, you know, typically you wouldn’t see that in a fabric store.

And so, you know, a lot of the people that I look to as mentors and, you know, friends who are also small business owners here, I’ve met through sewing.

Being here in Hawaiʻi and kind of starting a business, it has a lot to do with community.

I like to water a lot of the relationships that I have here.

It’s such a small community if you’re helping one person, you know, it comes back three- or four-times fold.

It’s circular.

I’ll support other people and it comes back in return.

Any project that I get where I’m working a garment of a family member who’s passed away hits heavier.

I did this Home Depot apron for a family who had a family member who had passed away, actually on the job at Home Depot.

And, you know, it was cut up because they had to, you know, administer CPR.

And so by the time I got it, it was just like, all tore up I was able to turn that, you know, traumatic piece into kind of like an art piece to honor that family member, which you know, that family has in their home now.

I love it when people come here and actually pick up the hat, and I get to meet, you know, the person and see the reaction.

And I've had people cry, you know, like on my driveway, like, while I'm, like, handing over something.

And so, you know, those moments are very rewarding to me, I'm not just making a hat.

I'm making like a special piece that, you know, someone will have in their home forever.

The plan right now is to just keep doing this, you know, like now that I have my sewing studio at home, and I'm kind of my own boss.

I can't see myself doing anything else.

It's like such a fulfilling job that I have, and would love to just grow product wise, like, aside from making hats, I want to make bags and I want to make, you know, other stuff, other garments that I can utilize, old stuff to make new stuff.

Kalaʻi Miller: Mahalo for joining us.

If you want to continue to support our efforts to share stories from communities across our island home, please visit pbshawaii.org and click on the Donate Now button.

For Home is Here, I'm Kalaʻi Miller.

A hui hou.

Kapali Long: This was like my biggest dream when I met Alan.

I was like, I hope one day.

So, this is our preemptive practice for when we get to the Opry, right, bro?

You know, my dream is to do the Opry debut, be solo acoustic, and have Alan accompany me.

I think that that's long overdue for the Opry.

He's long overdue for the they don't, you know, they don't appreciate he's a legend.

Trudy Teshima-Gramlich: I left for ten years and I worked for Aloha Airlines on Oʻahu while my husband taught at the medical school.

So, while doing working for the airlines, I got to go all over the world.

And got to meet the cosmonauts at one function, and they said, where are you from?

And they said, a little town in Honalo, and there's a little restaurant there.

And they said, “How is Madame Teshima?” And so it's a really small world.

Anthony Duong: You got to find a garment or an item that you're obsessed about because for all the hours that I put in, I wouldn't have been able to push myself through that if if I didn't like hats at all.

It's that obsession that's going to push you through to learn, to fail many times, but to just, you know, overcome that and learn how to how to pull through.

Home is Here on PBS Hawaiʻi is sponsored by Hawaiʻi Leadership Forum, The Olson Trust, and Pasha Hawaiʻi.