Brother Noland

Brother Noland is an American musician and author, known chiefly as a performer of Hawaiian music and slack-key guitar.

Noland was raised in a musical family; his mother and brother were hula dancers, and he began playing music in clubs while still a teenager in the 1960s.[1]

Noland is known as the "Father of Jawaiian music",[1] and one of his best-known songs in this idiom is "Coconut Girl", which appeared on the soundtrack to the film Pineapple Express.[1] Other songs which received airplay in Hawaii include "Pua Lane", "Are You Native?",[2] and "Backfire".[3] In 2014, the Hawaii State House of Representatives of the Twenty-Seventh Legislature passed H.R. 205 that recognized Brother Noland for a lifetime achievements and his impact on island music.[4] As of 2017, he was touring and recording with a ten-piece band, the Brother Noland Conjugacion.[2] His most recent album, His Songs His Stories His Style, arrived in 2017.[5][6] In 2019, he was honored by the Hawai'i Academy of Recording Arts for the Lifetime Achievement Awards.[7]

Noland is also a published author and philanthropist. In 1999, he published Lessons of Aloha, a collection of inspirational short stories.[8] He runs a series of nature and subsistence-advocacy camps, principally on Molokai, and in 2013 published The Hawaiian Survival Handbook, a guide to living off the land in Hawaiʻi.[9]