Among the earliest such bands to pop up in Seattle was The
Columbian Trio. Led by an authentic Hawaiian native, steel guitarist Joe Nawahi – the brother of famed musician "King" Bennie Nawahi (1899-1985) –
the ensemble also featured a Spanish-style guitarist (whose name is lost to the
mists of time), but who appears in photographs to also have been Hawaiian. Then
on ukulele, there was band-manager and music teacher, George M. MacKie, who
although apparently not a Hawaiian, was also not a rookie. As early as June of
1918 he was a member of the Queen’s Hawaiians group who performed at the
California Complete Small Homes Exposition in Los Angeles that very month.
But by 1920 MacKie (and his wife Florence) had settled in
Seattle where they got a home (3608 Palatine Avenue N), and he also rented a
downtown music studio (216 Epler Block Building, on 2nd Avenue, between Columbia and Marion Streets) where he
offered musical instruction on the ukulele and Hawaiian steel guitar. Indeed,
his business cards tried to allure new students with this invitation: “Learn to
play ‘the most Weirdly Beautiful Music of the Dreamiest Island ever Anchored in
any Ocean!’”
Meanwhile, MacKie helped form The Columbian Trio and they presumably
performed around the area. In 1922 the couple – and his mother Mary MacKie,
who’d moved in with them in 1921 – relocated several blocks over to a different
home (3648 Phinney Avenue), so they had seemingly intended to stay here awhile. But
that was not to be. Perhaps because the Epler Building was sold to the Bank of
California, whose intent was to raze it to build a new bank, the MacKies hit the road.
The Columbian Trio showed up next in Denver, Colorado,
where they scored a regular radio slot on KOA. But then they lost a member and
went to a local music teacher to inquire if there might be somebody else around
who could join them. That teacher pointed them towards one of her students, Don
Wilson (who would later gain some fame as Jack Benny’s announcer). As Wilson
would recall in a 1980 interview: “I joined them and we were busier than bird dogs. We
made a lot more money in radio, even in those days, with the extracurricular
things that we did, appearances of all kinds, including fill-ins at the Orpheum
Theatre. Whenever an act couldn’t appear, the trio would be engaged to play a
week here and a week there.”
The Columbian Trio also traveled the West Coast a bit, performing on stations including KFI
in Los Angeles, and KGO in Oakland. But somewhere along the way the band was
saddled with a corporate sponsor – the Piggly Wiggly self-service supermarket chain –
and they agreed to change their name to the somewhat less-than-dignified “Piggly
Wiggly Hawaiian Trio.” It remains unclear exactly where and how that regrettable shift took place. In Denver? Or perhaps it was back in Seattle where in 1921 Boulder,
Colorado’s William Louis Avery had arrived to open up a Piggly Wiggly franchise
store downtown (408 Occidental Avenue)? What is known is that by about 1923 the MacKies had
resettled in Los Angeles (at 121 S Flower Street), and George reformed his Queen's Hawaiians group with
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Lani McIntyre (Spanish guitar) – and Sol Ho’opi’i (steel guitar) who would soon go on the become the world's most famous Hawaiian musician.
One last meager clue uncovered about all this is that by 1925 Mary MacKie had acquired her own home in Seattle (1717 W 58th Street).