How the guitar became ‘part of the whānau’ for Māori

Guitars arrived in New Zealand with settlers, yet they have become a part of Māori culture. How?

Think of any kind of Māori gathering, and a guitar will probably feature at some point. Cousins sitting round the back of a marae strumming on a summer’s afternoon, or belting harmonies in a tin garage on a Saturday night. If there’s kapa haka rōpū stepping and swaying, it’s likely to the jink-a-jink of a heavy strum. “There’s nothing better than just sitting among a group of people and everyone just belting at the top of their lungs,” says multi-award winning musician Troy Kingi. There aren’t many whānau who don’t have a guitar in a corner or cupboard. There’s often a formative moment where some relative places your fingers in a C, F or G.

But how did that come to be the case? How did the wooden, six-string acoustic – an instrument from somewhere else – become so central to our social and cultural fabric?

“I was learning how to play guitar at about five,” says Maarire Brunning-Kouka, aka MĀ, who recently won best alternative artist at the Aotearoa Music Awards. “My koro played guitar all the time, it was a constant sound we heard in the house. It was just part of the furniture.”

My dad used to go to kapa haka on weekends, gathering in a draughty warehouse on the edge of an army camp, the strums would reverberate through the rat-infested rafters.

There are memories of the constant presence of an uncle with a gat. The shift in gear a party takes when one is magicked from somewhere. It wasn’t until I was older that I realised the guitar wasn’t Māori at all.

“It’s buzzy, eh. We’ve been able to adapt it into our culture so naturally that it is one of the most important pieces of taonga that we have,” says Brunning-Kouka.

Award winning musician Troy Kingi says the guitar has “just been that familiar instrument that’s always been there. No one’s questioned it”. “You might have an adopted cousin or something. You don’t question it – they just become a part of the whānau. The guitar’s kind of like that,” Kingi says.

The guitar is the most popular instrument in the world, used by country crooners, gothic rockers, and Spanish tocars alike. Its origins can be traced to the plucked instruments of ancient times. Around the 10th century, round-back, oval-shaped ouds were found across the Arab world. By 1200, European writers were referencing instruments called gitere, gittern, or guitarra latina. However, it’s Spain that’s credited with the plump instrument we know today.

Easy to carry and cheap to make, it’s long been the instrument of the people. “The guitar is no more than a cowbell,” the Spanish inquisitor Sebastián de Covarrubias complained in 1611, “so easy to play… there is not a stable lad who is not a musician.”

Composer and researcher Te Ahukaramū Charles Royal suggests the everyman nature of the guitar might be one of the reasons for its popularity with Māori. “It’s pretty easy to start playing the guitar. It doesn’t take much,” Royal says.

There is no definitive record of when the guitar first arrived in New Zealand, though it was likely very early after the first Pākehā arrivals. There are accounts of the instrument’s presence at early whalers’ stations, bush camps and goldfields. But exactly when and how guitars first crossed into the Māori world is unknown, and everyone I spoke to has their own whakaaro.

Māori instruments, or taonga pūoro, were traditionally designed and played to reflect the rhythms of nature. But there’s also a long tradition of the kind of waiata we now associate with guitar jams: short songs with jovial singing, often improvised, designed to entertain.

In the late-19th century, a group from Madeira – an atoll off the north east coast of Africa – arrived in Hawai’i with a small instrument they called a machete. Their fingers jumped across the strings, reminding kānaka Maoli of grandmothers picking fleas from children’s hair: Jumping fleas, or ‘ukulele.

The instrument took off – its breezy pitch, portability and ease lent itself to Hawaiian music – and from there it leapt to other Pacific islands. Polynesian groups were soon touring the world, spawning the Hawaiian craze of the 1920s. Many of these bands came to Aotearoa, where they met Māori concert parties. These parties were immensely popular, including one led by Makereti Papakura that toured Australia and Britain to critical acclaim. There was also Princess Te Puia’s Te Pou o Mangatāwhiri, which fused the contemporary with the traditional as they filled town halls fundraising to build Tūrangawaewae marae. These bands combined the ukulele with the banjo, mandolin and acoustic guitar, which was yet to achieve its monopoly.

“I do think it has a lot to do with the Māori Battalion,” says Brunning-Kouka. “When our men went overseas and spent a lot of time with the locals there, they spent a lot of their down time playing music with the locals and with each other.”

You don’t have to dig far to find images of the battalion carrying rifles and a gat. In his book on the Māori battalion, Wira Gardiner wrote that its concert parties were “famous”. At one held around a bonfire in the Italian city of Taranto – ahead of the brutal battle for Monte Cassino – a distinct jing-a-jik carries through the crackly recording. “It was a bit of a whakapiki wairua situation,” Brunning-Kouka says. “It was a way to make them human again.”

The Howard Morrison Quartet – with crisp suits, slicked hair, and guitars strapped across chests – was arguably the biggest of the Māori showbands that took the country by storm during the post-war period. Its lead guitarist was Gerry Merito, who Dalvanius Prime called the most influential New Zealand guitarist of all.

This was a time of Elvis and Chuck Berry, technology and rebellion. These isolated islands weren’t immune to the tidal wave of rock’n’roll that crashed ashore as thousands of Māori were forced into the cities for work.

In 1947, a khaki corrugated iron building on the edge of Victoria Park was repurposed as the Auckland Māori Community Centre. It held waiata groups and dances for a new generation of rangatahi. Its weekend concerts became legendary, fronted by bands who mimicked songs from abroad and added their own distinctive flair – often a heavy acoustic guitar.

The Māori Hi-Five, the Quin Tikis or the Māori Volcanics (fronted by Prince Tui Teka and Billy T James) would play to hundreds, backed by a heavy jink-a-jink. Guitar sales rose by 300% between 1956 and 1963, leading commentators to label “the guitar as much a feature of the modern Maori musical scene as the koauau was of the old”.

There were characters like Johnny Cooper – the Māori Cowboy – who would quip: “Play it in Māori, boy”. Toko Pompey, considered New Zealand’s Sammy Davis Jr, would say: “We could only play like Māoris… we had our own style.”

In rural areas, composers like Tuini Ngāwai and Ngoi Pewhairangi were contemporising waiata Māori. Ngāwai, who wrote “500-odd” songs in her lifetime, composed action songs for shearing gangs. Apirana Ngata called her a “genius”. Many of her waiata, like ‘Hoki Mai E Tama Mā’ and ‘E Te Hokowhitu-a-Tū’ are still bread and butter staples, bound together by the guitar’s rhythmic strum. “Some of our people cannot speak Māori and they only speak it when they’re learning action songs,” she said in a 1960 interview. “They enjoy their singing.”

Through these showbands and action songs, a distinctive use of the guitar was taking shape. The Māori strum, as it’s come to be known, defines the music played at parties, in kapa haka and on mainstream hits like Crowded House’s ‘Don’t Dream Its Over’ and OMC’s ‘How Bizarre’. Historian Michael Brown, in a doctoral thesis, described it as one of the most “distinctive sound[s] associated with New Zealand”.

It’s pretty simple – three or four chords, with a light upwards strum paired with a heavy down on the second and fourth beat. “It is a bit of Spanish-Italian strumming mixed with a Māori heavyweight hand,” Brunning-Kouka says. It combines bass and treble, but also takes up the role of percussion, Kingi says, helping to hold the beat.

“It keeps our rhythm, it gives our note. With the strum and the chika-chika you can kind of do the two-in-one kind of thing,” says Kingi.

Royal attributes the instrument’s popularity to its ability to foster community: “In our hands, the guitar is an instrument of community.” “What we Māori needed from the guitar was support for nurturing whanaungatanga, identity and cohesion. It’s an easy instrument to play and to support our waiata singing.”

Music always evolves, and Māori artists today sound very different to those from the showband era. Even the rōpū that grace the stage at Te Matatini – performing what’s seen as traditional kapa haka – sound wildly different to the groups of 50 years ago.

Brunning-Kouka’s music layers synths, beats, keys, soul, rap and myriad other influences. But strip it all back, and the six-string acoustic that sits in her Hataitai flat is as influential as ever. “My thing [is] if I can’t play any of my songs on guitar, I don’t think they’re good enough,” she says.

Kingi has spent nearly a decade making 10 albums in 10 genres and shares the same philosophy. “It’s always been me and my guitar,” he says. “All the songs you hear from me are usually me sitting in a room with a guitar.”

“The final song might end up without any guitar in it, but it will always start with a guitar.”