When Morton Stevens completed the theme song for Leonard Freeman’s new police drama Hawaii Five-0 in 1968, he knew that he had a winner on his hands.
Freeman had specified that it should be a mix of Polynesian, classic, jazz and pop sounds with “no ukeleles or steel guitars or falsetto singers or overused bongos.”
Initially Stevens had intended to use music that he had previously written for an unsold CBS pilot, but his wife Annie objected to his plans.
Miffed, “he started smacking the piano around. He was so angry — and that’s why it has that sock-o in there,” Mrs. Stevens told Honolulu Star-Advertiser reporter Mike Gordon.
And that’s how the ageless and most recognized television tune was born.
Two-time Emmy winner Stevens said shortly before his death in 1991, “”You know how you know you’ve written something right? I knew it was right.”
“I created something that can transcend a generation. Maybe not the ages, but a generation.”
Brian Tyler, who is collaborating with Keith Power to score the new Five-0 series, was intent on doing the original justice when he re-recorded the theme song in June for the 2010 show reboot.
“You have to do the theme with a true vintage, cool vibe. Move too far away from the original, you’re losing why it’s so iconic,” the film score veteran explains in a CBS video.
“This piece is actually quite hard to play. You give it to just a regular band and it will fall apart quick.”
Ollie Mitchell, one of the trumpet players who participated on the original 1968 recording, would agree with him. “It was challenging. It’s easy to run out of breath in those last four bars. You had to make sure you took an extra-deep breath to get through the ending.”
“It’s a little bit rock, it’s a little bit score, it’s a little bit surf. You combine all those things and it’s a classic,” says Tyler, who recorded the theme song in three lengths: 1:45, 1:00 and 0:30. The 30-second version is what we can expect to hear with the main title sequence when Hawaii Five-0 premieres on CBS on September 20th!
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- “Morton Stevens Revisited, Composer of Hawaii Five-o Helped Define ’60s, ’70s TV Scoring”
I love that they aren’t messing with it. The promos we’ve seen so far and the music that accompanies them just rocks!
Thank you Mizz for this fascinating story of the award winning composer of the iconic theme song for Hawaii Five-0. I’m always humming the H50 tune, loving it more each time.