Only in Hawai'i could a teenage girl sit perched in a mango tree — her arms full of fruit and her voice full of song — and be discovered as a budding singing sensation. But that was where the entertainment world found the "Songbird of Hawai'i," a young Lena Machado, straddling a limb outside her auntie's home on Richards Street.
Machado, a pure Hawaiian, was born in 1903 in Pauoa Valley in Honolulu. She was the daughter of singers, a natural lyrical soprano who never had a voice lesson. "God gave me my voice," she once said.
Discovered in her auntie's tree in 1923 by a Honolulu radio manager, Machado became a star practically overnight. She joined the Royal Hawaiian Band and welcomed tourists on Boat Day with her singing, and bid them farewell with "Aloha 'Oe."
Machado, who performed in nightclubs from Hawai'i to New York, sang before the king and queen of Siam, President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Prince of Wales before he became King Edward VIII and, later, Duke of Windsor. She also sang for Bing Crosby and Babe Ruth.
Her beautiful voice earned her the songbird nickname as well as "Hawai'i's Nightingale."
But Machado's professional career ended in 1965 when she and her husband were seriously injured in a car crash on Kaua'i. She lost the use of her left eye, suffered a broken knee and her right hand was mangled.
Machado, who later performed at some private functions, was ill for many years and died in January 1974. She was 70.
