The world knows James Kapihenui Palea as Kulu­waimaka — one of the greatest Hawaiian chanters in recorded history. His repertoire included chants about the goddess Pele and her younger sister Hiiaka, genealogical chants, chants commemorating historic events and the accomplishments of the alii, and prayer chants.

On recordings made in the early 1930s when he was almost 100 years old, he recites chants of up to 1,700 lines without pause or prompting.

The recordings, made for Bishop Museum while he was living at George Mossman’s Lalani Village cultural center in Waikiki, are a priceless rec­ord of Hawaiian oral history, culture and language as it was spoken in the Kau district of Hawaii island in the 1840s and ’50s.

That’s the scholarly view of Kuluwaimaka. His granddaughter, Julia Oliveira, remembers him as "a loving man (and) a spiritual man. He always talked about loving people, praying for them, asking God’s blessing on them and asking one another forgiveness." Born in 1929, Oliveira was the family’s youngest grandchild.

"My grandfather witnessed my birth, and being that I was the last of the grandchildren, I was always with him," she said. "As I grew my mother sent me with him wherever he went. When he went to Lalani Hawaiian Village in Waikiki to live there … now and then I would sleep overnight with him. When he would go to Bishop Museum, they would take me along with him, and being a little girl I just rode around and listened to what he’d say. My older sister could speak to him in fluent Hawaiian, but the one who was with Grandpa all the time was me."

Oliveira was with her grandfather when he decided he was ready to die.

"He wasn’t sick; it was time for him to go and be with the Lord. He told my mother to bring his grandchildren to him ’cause it’s time for him to go to his Father’s house, so my mother took me, my sister and my three brothers. We went to the Village. George Mossman and (Hawaiian language scholar) Theodore (Kelsey) and (noted anthropologist Kenneth) Emory witnessed my grandfather giving us a blessing and telling us that it’s time for him to go. … He also told my sister and I that we were going to live to be 100.

"I’m 83, my sister just made 86, so that goes to show that what Grandpa had told us may come true."

Moments after delivering his blessing, Kuluwaimaka lay back and died.

So ended the remarkable life of a pre-eminent Hawaiian chanter — one of the 11 individuals the Hawaiian Music Hall of Fame will honor Tuesday during "Lei of Stars 2012," a dinner and show in the Monarch Room of the Royal Hawaiian Hotel. The other inductees are Joseph Ilalaole, Benny Kalama, Alice Namakelua, Sam Li‘a and Akoni Mika, all being honored posthumously, and the five members of Olomana: Jerry Santos, Haunani Apoliona, Willy Paikuli, Wally Suenaga and the late Robert Beaumont.

Santos, Apoliona and Suenaga are scheduled to perform at the event. Eddie Kamae, Alan Akaka & the Islanders, Ron Loo and kumu hula Michael Pili Pang will also provide entertainment.

By all criteria Kuluwaimaka is well deserving of the honor. Some would say he is overdue. Born into a family of poets and orators, he started chanting at an early age. At 19 he left Kau and became a chanter at the court of Kamehameha IV.

"You don’t get into the court as an orator or a chanter unless you’re at a certain level," his great-grandson, Cy Bridges, said. "(By 19) he was already considered to be one of the masters … so he lived his life in the court from then all the way to the end of the monarchy."

Kuluwaimaka’s duties took him to Japan with King David Kalakaua. He composed chants for the construction of Iolani Palace and for countless other occasions.

The overthrow of the Hawaiian kingdom in 1893 also threw Kuluwaimaka and other court chanters out of work. Some of them died penniless on the streets of Hono­lulu. Kuluwaimaka supported himself and his family as a laborer on a territorial road crew.

Bridges said his great-grandfather continued to chant.

"One of my great-aunts said when there were funerals and things like that and he’d start to oli — it’s nighttime and it’s dark, and you’d hear this shrilly voice — they’d all get chicken skin and run to their grandparents or parents and hang on to them because it was so spooky."

Another relative told Bridges she’d seen a corpse respond to Kuluwaimaka’s voice, although he was unable to bring the person’s spirit back to the body.

Bridges became interested in family history at a young age and actively sought out information.

"I was a very inquisitive kid. I was very niele (curious). When my cousins, my sister, my brother, were out playing, I would play with them, but I would come back and sit next to Grandma and ask her all kind of questions. When people came over to the house, I wanted to know who these people were.

"Once in a while they’d say something (I hadn’t heard before)," he says, such as the time a kupuna told him that Kuluwaimaka and his brothers had also been masters of lua (traditional Hawaiian combat techniques).

"She said, ‘He was a short man, but you don’t fool around with him. He’d fly you across the room.’"

ANOTHER story was about the time a buggy stopped in the yard outside the family home in Hauula. Kuluwaimaka was working in the garden behind the house, and when someone in the buggy asked for "Kapihenui," one of the kids was sent to get him.

"He was holding his digging stick, his oo, (and) when he came around the corner and he saw the buggy, he just dropped his digging stick and he started to oli. Everybody wondered what’s the matter with him. Then they realized that Liliu (Queen Liliu­oka­lani) had come down to Hauula to visit him. They said she came down a couple of times."

Kuluwaimaka later moved to Peterson Lane in Kapalama. He spent the final years of his life living in a thatched house in Mossman’s village. It was there that he was discovered by Emory, who immediately recognized the cultural value of his vast repertoire and persuaded Bishop Museum to underwrite the cost of recording it. Kelsey recorded and transcribed 125 chants that remain in the museum’s reference collection.

Researchers have sometimes been confounded by the fact that although Kuluwaimaka used Palea as his surname in accordance with Western custom, his father followed an older Hawaiian tradition of using a single name — Palea. A reference to "Palea" could refer to either of them, or possibly to a younger brother, known as Paleali‘ili‘i, who was also a chanter. And, like many 19th-century Hawaiians, he was also given a Western name and so became James Kapihenui Palea.

His "professional" name — Kuluwaimaka — was given to him when he was already a young man.

"There are some conflicting stories about who actually gave him the name," Bridges says. "Some say it was Princess Kinau, the mother of Kamehameha IV and V. Another (possibility) was Kinoiki — I don’t know which Kinoiki — and then another (possibility) was (Queen) Kapiolani. … All of the people that really know are no longer around, but there are quite fascinating stories relating to him."