Some 70 years since it was written by a man on his way to war, Kiwi classic Blue Smoke continues to drift into view, writes Shane Gilchrist.
Pixie Costello, nee Williams, the woman whose haunting voice helped carry a soldier's song to international fame, doesn't know what all the brouhaha is about.
"I thought all the fuss had died down ages ago," she said earlier this week from the Upper Hutt rest-home where she has lived for a year. In fact, Pixie would much rather talk about Dunedin, her home for six decades before she moved north.
However, although that connection is interesting, it was not the primary reason for the call. Anzac Day is looming and so is the release of a new version of Blue Smoke, a tune written by Ruru Karaitiana. A man on his way to war, Karaitiana penned the piece in 1940 while off the coast of Africa on the troopship Aquitania.
Pixie was looking forward to the outing, mainly because it involved music ("I think it is the balm of life"). Certainly, the excitement had little to do with reliving past glories. Of the success of Blue Smoke, she says: "It's a phenomenon, isn't it, but I still can't understand why."
According to New Zealand music historian Gordon Spittle, Blue Smoke was the first all-New Zealand hit record.
"The 78rpm disc was the first record wholly produced in New Zealand from composition to pressing, and provided a debut hit-seller for the New Zealand-owned TANZA (To Assist New Zealand Artists) record label... Blue Smoke topped New Zealand radio hit parades for six weeks, and sold more than 20,000 copies within a year."
The song also attracted strong overseas interest, according to Spittle. English duo Anne Ziegler and Webster Booth met Karaitiana and recorded a version.
In the United States, covers were released by Dean Martin, Al Morgan, Teddy Phillips and Leslie Howard. In 1951, New York music trade magazines described Blue Smoke as one of the major hits of the year, a "musical jackpot" with both jukebox and radio listeners.
New Zealand music writer and critic, Chris Bourke, whose book, Blue Smoke: the lost dawn of New Zealand popular music, 1918-1964, is to be published by Auckland University Press in October, says Karaitiana was living in Brighton, near Dunedin, when he took a phone call from crooner Martin asking if he had any more songs like Blue Smoke.
Yet there is a modesty among those most closely involved with the piece. Of the success of his song, Karaitiana was quoted in an Otago Daily Times article on April 5, 1952, as saying, "These things are simply a matter of luck.
"I owe a lot to a fellow soldier. We were on the troopship Aquitania in 1940 off the coast of Africa when a friend drew my attention to some passing smoke. He put the song in my lap. It was a natural."
Though Blue Smoke is the song for which he is best known, Karaitiana told the Otago Daily Times in 1952 that it was a "poor first effort". Pixie, likewise, prefers some of Karaitiana's other tunes, such as Windy City, and Let's Talk It Over.
Pixie recalls she wasn't that interested in singing with Karaitiana when he first asked her in Wellington in 1947. In fact, Karaitiana had initially approached her friend, Jude Chettleburgh, a secretary and model (and his future wife).
"It was funny. When he came to me, I told him to go and find someone else," Pixie laughs.
"Three times he came. I wasn't in the mood. Anyway, he finally said he couldn't find anyone to sing it. I said, 'is that right?'. Then I said 'OK'."
It took nine takes before the enduring version was recorded, in 1948.
"By the end of it I thought, `I'm going to give up if they don't hurry up'," Pixie said.
Her daughter Amelia describes the recording as a classic example of the DIY spirit.
"Apart from the writing of the song, there is a wider story here - the work that went into creating that recording studio."
The Wellington studio was purpose-built by recording engineer Stan Dallas, who hit on the idea of connecting the electric guitar direct to the recording equipment instead of using a microphone.
Jim Carter, who played the lap-steel guitar introduction to Blue Smoke, made his own five-watt amplifier, having gone to night school to learn radio technology.
With no soundproofing and the hum of a fridge next door forcing more than a few breaks, New Zealand's first commercial recording took nine days to capture.
Pixie had an opportunity to move to Canada in the early '50s, at the height of Blue Smoke's success. However, having recently moved from Wellington to Dunedin, where she met her husband, she didn't take up the offer.
"No. Hubby didn't want to move," she recalls. "I never regretted it."
Instead, she remained in Dunedin, living in Northeast Valley then Caversham, and raising four children.
"There was music all the time. You never lose the music."
In 1951, Pixie joined Karaitiana for concerts at Dunedin's His Majesty's Theatre.
"Although the show lacked polish and quick tempo," wrote a Dunedin reviewer, "one thing it did have was variety."
According to Chris Bourke, Pixie went on to sing many of Karaitiana's songs, including the debut of his tribute to Dunedin, Saddle Hill, and It's Just Because, written in honour of the troops of K-Force departing for the Korean War.
"I liked all songs. I come from a musical family. We all hung around on a Sunday," Pixie says in reference to her upbringing at Mohaka, near Napier.
Born in 1928, she headed to Wellington in 1945, at the age of 16 ("I just wanted a change") before settling in Dunedin, after enjoying a brief stay with Karaitiana and wife Joan, who had married in Wellington in 1949, and moved to Brighton the same year.
Amelia (38) recalls a family home often filled with music.
"With an Irish father and Maori mother, there were always parties or people around the piano. Mum could play several instruments - she was self-taught. Mum sang all the time, was always humming in the home ... she has always got her CD player going."
It was Amelia's idea to re-record Blue Smoke. While driving her mum to a friend's house in the mid-'80s, she listened to her belt out an Ella Fitzgerald song.
"I hadn't heard her on her own, really giving it her all," Amelia explains.
"At that moment I thought 'ah'. It was one of those ideas, but being a student it was one of those 'oh, yeah - whatever' things.
"Then Dad fell ill and was put into a home in Dunedin ... he died three years ago. Dad had been in a home for several years and Mum would visit him every day. She was 78 when he died. She also had some health issues, so we had to make the tough-love call and bring her up to a home in Wellington."
Amelia's idea gained traction when she met singer Hirini by chance at a Wellington party.
Hirini's version was recorded in Nashville with musicians who have worked with Dolly Parton and Faith Hill and has the blessing of Karaitiana's whanau. Hirini plans to travel to New Orleans to record her own versions of a number of Karaitiana's songs, likely to be released on an album later this year.
Born on March 4, 1909, near Dannevirke, Rangi Ruru Wananga Karaitiana belonged to a family of Rangitane chiefs who were among the first Maori in Hawkes Bay to convert to Christianity. He was educated at St Joseph's Convent School, Dannevirke, leaving when he was 12 to work as a seasonal labourer and musician.
Karaitiana began performing at the age of six, when he played piano at Saturday night dances; a decade later, he was performing regularly with bands between Palmerston North and Wellington, playing the piano, trombone, ukulele or guitar.
During the war, Karaitiana served in the Middle East as a private with the 28th New Zealand (Maori) Battalion. He was wounded several times and eventually discharged as physically unfit. He led the battalion concert party, and was one of the few survivors of its 17-member choir.
He met Joan Chettleburgh (now Kennett) in Wellington in the late 1940s.
"I was living at a hostel," she recalled from her Palmerston North home.
"I had been 'man-powered' from Dunedin to a factory in Wellington, but I didn't work in the factory; I worked in the warehouse and was asked to model beautiful clothes for them - fashionable ladies' clothes.
"I was made to live in a little hostel in Oriental Bay run by the YWCA. They insisted we stay for one year in a hostel. Pixie Williams was also there. We were friends... Ruru was looking for a singer and he thought I was a singer and he started following us around. He got the wrong girl.
"That's how we met. We were friends for a couple of years before we married."
Amid the excitement of a hit record, the couple headed to Brighton, but returned to the North Island a few years later - against their inclination.
"We had our child [a son, Ruma] while we were down there. Because Ruru was from Dannevirke and of chieftain class within Maori, his mother insisted that this baby had to come back to the North Island and be brought up near her. So that's why we moved. He didn't want to move and neither did I. We loved Brighton. I think it was one of the happy times of his life."
The couple returned to Dunedin a few years later, staying with Joan's mother in Roslyn for a year before leaving again.
"We made very good friends down there," Mrs Kennett (84) said.
"Because we came down, Pixie did too. She came to stay with us in Dunedin and ended up staying ... I still call Dunedin home. I was down there a month ago. Four of my brothers and a sister still live in Dunedin."
Asked to explain the reason for Karaitiana's musical tribute to a local landmark, Saddle Hill, Mrs Kennett replies: "When Ruma was born [at Mosgiel in 1951], Maori custom was to bury the placenta, which was done on Saddle Hill. We could see the hill from our house."
The couple divorced in 1964, and Karaitiana died in Wellington on December 15, 1970. He is buried at Tahoraiti, Hawkes Bay. Their son Ruma now lives in Wellington with three children. "One of his daughters is quite a good singer," Mrs Kennett says.
Karaitiana wrote more than a dozen songs, including As Others Do, recorded by Netta Haddon, and Let's Talk It Over, Windy City, Ain't It A Shame and Sweetheart In Calico. In 1952, he became the first New Zealander to gain an Australasian Performing Right Association award (of 25).
Though that award also acknowledged the success of Let's Talk It Over, which sold more than 10,000 copies, it is Blue Smoke that wafts the strongest. Asked why the song continues to resonate, Gordon Spittle, an author of several books on New Zealand music history, points to the background of the tune.
"The story of the song - how it was written on a troopship - must provoke a lot of memories for those who sailed away to war. Whether it was a Great War song, I'm not sure. It seems to have been picked up after the war. I'd like to talk to soldiers about how it compared to other war songs, like A Long Way To Tipperary or Pack up Your Troubles ... but it was certainly a big-seller."
Blue Smoke has featured on a range of soundtracks to New Zealand films in recent years, including Ruby and Rata, Bread and Roses, and An Angel At My Table. Dean Martin and other foreign artists aside, it has also been covered by New Zealand singers, including Eddie Low and John Grenell.
As it turns out, Grenell sang it with his son, Redford, at a neighbour's wedding last weekend. Featuring on his 1991 album, Windstar-Aotearoa, Grenell says the track is one of the first he can remember, evoking memories of family singalongs at Kyeburn, in the Maniototo.
"My mother and her brothers used to sing it," Grenell reflects. "I've often sung it at shows over the years, especially for soldiers and around Anzac Day time."
One of Pixie's sons, Gerard Costello, says Blue Smoke pops up in conversation now and then.
The 48-year-old Territorial soldier, a Warrant Officer Class 2 (CSM) with the 40 South Battalion Group, who will be a parade marshal at the Dunedin Anzac Day service tomorrow, has spent plenty of time in RSA rooms where veterans inquire after his mum.
"A lot of the veterans still know who Mum is, and what she is about, especially from the RSA point of view anyway ... There are quite a number of old soldiers still around, too - and not just from World War 2. You have got other campaigns that were run as well.
"Me and Mum would go to the RSA together and she was more than happy to play guitar and sing. She is singing in the home she is in at the moment."
"It [Blue Smoke] has obviously stood the test of time. It has been sung by a number of people now. The more people who listen to it, the better. I think it is not a bad tune, actually."
Hirini, singer of the new version and thus someone dealing with a fair share of what might best be termed "burden of expectation", feels "a huge responsibility". Her challenge: to introduce Blue Smoke to a new generation while honouring the song's past.
"I have a grandfather who went to war. I have a beautiful photo of him marching down a street with about 100 other sailors with the crowd waving on.
"I played my version to him a couple of days ago. It had to be played really loud for him to hear. It was very emotional. He said it brought back a lot of memories."
