Starting where the mountains left me, I end up where I began
Where I will go the wind only knows.
Good times around the bend.
Get in my car, goin' too far,
Never comin' back again.
Tired and worn, I woke up this mornin'
and found that I was confused.
Spun right around and found that I had lost
the things that I couldn't lose.
The beaches they sell to build their hotels, my fathers and I once knew.
Birds on the lawn, sunlight at dawn, singin' Waimanalo blues.
Down on the road, the mountains so old,
far on the country side.
Birds on the wing, forgetting a while
so I'm headed for the windward side.
In all of your dreams, sometimes it just seems,
that I'm just along for the ride.
Some they will cry, because they have pride,
For someone whose loved here died.
The beaches they sell to build their hotels, my fathers and I once knew.
Birds on the lawn, sunlight at dawn, singin' Waimanalo blues.
Slack-key guitar (from Hawaiian kī hōʻalu, which means "loosen the [tuning] key") is a fingerstyle genre of guitar music that originated in Hawaii. This style of guitar playing involves altering the standard tuning on a guitar from E-A-D-G-B-E, which has been used for centuries, so that strumming across the open strings will then sound a harmonious chord, typically an open major. This requires altering (usually loosening) or "slacking" certain strings, which is the origin of the term "slack key". The style typically features an alternating-bass pattern, played by the thumb on the lower two or three strings of the guitar, while the melody is played by the fingers on the three or four highest strings. There are as many as fifty tunings that have been used in this style of playing, and tunings were once guarded fiercely and passed down as family secrets. In the early 20th century, the steel guitar and the ukulele gained wide popularity in America, but the slack-key style remained a folk tradition of family entertainment for Hawaiians until about the 1960s and 1970s during the second Hawaiian renaissance.
