Sonny Chillingworth got this song from a truck driver. A bottle of whiskey was involved. For decades everybody thought it was a Portuguese folk song, until a historian asked a Portuguese friend to translate it. The friend listened and said "That's gobbledygook!"
It all began with a guy named George Vancouver. They guy they named a city after. George gave a gift of cattle to the king of Hawaii. And that was Kamehameha The First. George told the king to put a taboo on the herd, let it grow. Well, that was ok with the islanders. They didn't know what cattle were. Thought they were like big dogs or something.
So it went like that until Kamehameha The Third took over and by that time the Hawaiian people had about all the cows they could stand. They were griping about cows tearing up gardens and endangering the children. So the king called his advisers and asked them "What are we going to do? Nobody here knows how to make these animals obey." One of his court said "Hey King! I just came from San Diego and they got a lot of guys there who know all about taking care of cows. That's all they do." So the king went to San Diego to look for these guys.
Now you gotta know that if you go to San Diego, in 1832, looking for someone to manage cows, you're going to get taken to a rodeo. If you've never seen a rodeo, well, it's VERY impressive. The king hired everybody. Took about a hundred and fifty people back to Hawaii with him.
Now you gotta know that if you go to San Diego, in 1832, and hire cowboys, you're going to get a bunch of Mexicans, and some of them are going to play guitars. Well, that was quite an eye opener to the islanders because they had never heard music before. The Hawaiian traditions were all based on a singer, with drums and maybe a flute for accompaniment. So when a cowboy sat down by his campfire and pulled out a guitar and played music, all alone, no singer, well that just blew them away. Some of them started learning to play this new thing, and woodworkers started trying to make them.
But there were two problems: The cowboys only taught the Hawaiians one way to tune the strings, and the Hawaiians thought the strings sounded too tense. They wanted to relax them. So they did. They developed 62 different ways to tune a guitar, all of them below the standard tuning. They called their style kiho alu which means slack key.
History has not been kind to the Hawaiian islanders. Some were taken into slavery, they lost their religion, they lost their land, they almost lost their language. They decided they would not give up their music. The music went underground. People refused to play in the presence of strangers. That went on until 1972 when the remaining musicians realized their numbers were too small to maintain their tradition and they just had to take in foreign students to keep the style alive.
And that is how a fully developed style of music a hundred and fifty years old was revealed to the world.
Hmmm, maybe that could be argued? Typically a musical refrain shows itself over a fixed interval....I wouldn't say it's as simple as calling it a refrain because a word or phrase gets repeated a few times within a song.
Not Sure 