Bill Ali‘iloa Lincoln

Bill Ali‘iloa Lincoln
In 1947 Bill Lincoln ran the largest and most influential hula studio in Hawaiʻi, employing such teachers as Ida Wong, Barbara Johnson, and Alice Keawekāne Garner.


It wasn’t until I went to school for the first time that I began to speak English. The same was true for the Japanese, Chinese, Korean, and Portuguese students who attended the country school called Pohakuloa. The Hawaiian students would talk to each other in Hawaiian and the other students would converse with each other in their mother tongue. One group would be able to talk to the other group in broken English and today it is called pidgin English or as a Hawaiian would say namu-pa‘i-ʻai. The teachers told us to forget our languages and just speak the English language. This seemed impossible at that time but today it is the spoken language.

My father was a rancher and foreman on one of the ranches in Kohala and that’s where my whole family was born. I was the last of four boys so I had a better chance to further my education. I went on to finish high school and that’s where I became interested in music. In those days it seemed like music was the only acceptable outlet for the Hawaiian culture.

I began to listen to records by people like Sol Ho‘opi‘i, Sam Ku, George Kainapau, and Madame Alapa‘i. And a man named James Asia started to put on Hawaiian tableaus in Kohala that I thought were terrific. He started to give me singing parts in his tableaus and that’s when I first got interested in the hula.

When I graduated from high school in 1931 I had decided to become a teacher. When I turned twenty I came to Honolulu but I didn’t have the money to get a degree so I started playing music' with Sam Alama and Johnny Almeida for five dollars a night. I met a man named Clarence Kinney who also produced Hawaiian tableaus and I began to appear regularly in his shows as the “Prince” opposite a lovely girl named Dorothy Dudoit.

I was living in Waikīkī back then and some friends told me to open up a hula studio. I was working at Fort Shafter so I quit and took their advice since there was only the Betty Lei Studio in Waikīkī.

I never studied under any teacher formally. I just watched and learned. As an entertainer I became associated with some of the foremost hula teachers of my time. In the course of my musical career, I learned informally under Papa Bray, Manuel Silva, ‘Iolani Luahine, Sally Wood Nālua‘i, Lokalia Montgomery, Henry Pa, Alice Keawekāne Garner, Katie Kapaona, Emily Zuttermeister, and Mary Kawena Pūku‘i. Eventually I opened a hula studio and hired teachers to conduct hula classes. After awhile they would go off on their own and I began to step in and take over some of the teaching duties. When I taught I tried to combine the motions of Mā‘iki Aiu, Rose Joshua, and Alice Keawekāne Garner into one style.

In my day there were things you could do and you couldn’t do. The style was to dance very sedately with very little flair. Only five or ten dancers would dance at a time and they would be accompanied by drumming that did not overpower the dancers. But who of us can prove that this was the style of dance of our ancestors? Creativity and change has always been a part of kahiko. In Kohala we were never allowed to use shell, plastic, or store- bought leis but when I came to Honolulu in 1931 found that’s all anybody used.

The dancing of today is very physical and that’s because of the influence of television and other Polynesian dances. But there is nothing that has been kept in books or in the Archives that proves kahiko was danced a certain way. All we have are pictures of dancers in poses.

I think the most important thing was that I knew my Hawaiian and I am grateful to my ‘ohana for that. Some people get lost because they don’t know the language. But it’s hard for the young people to learn Hawaiian because it’s a foreign language today. From birth you live and speak one language and it’s hard to take on another.