For his Miss Aloha Hula candidate, Punihei Anthony, Boyd chose a chant and mele combination for the kahiko (traditional) division that tells a story of love and loss related to the goddess Hi'iaka and her aikane (special friend), Hopoe. This led Boyd to consider another song of love and loss, and one that bears a connection to his own family history, "Aloha 'Oe."

"The two mele are related but unrelated," he said, and he liked the idea of linking the older chant, which ends in the phrase "aloha 'oe," with the queen's more modern song.

The song was written not, as many think, while Queen Lili'uokalani was being held during the overthrow of the Hawaiian kingdom, but after an 1878 visit to the Maunawili ranch of Edwin Boyd, the king's chamberlain (and Manu Boyd's ancestor). There, the queen observed a tender farewell between a man and a woman — stories vary as to who they were. She wrote the song, with its familiar refrain — "Until we meet again" — based on an old melody, and may possibly have transcribed it or revised it while imprisoned, leading to the popular belief that it is a sad song of farewell to the Hawaiian kingdom. It has come to be seen in that light, although the queen herself always declared it to be a love song.

"Aloha 'Oe" is rarely performed as a hula and has never been performed in competition at Merrie Monarch. Boyd was told in November that he would have to make another choice.

But judge Alicia Smith of Halau O Na Maolipua recalled that the song had been performed at the festival — when her daughter, Pi'ilani Smith, relinquished her Miss Aloha Hula title with the customary year-after solo, in 1990.

She remembered, too, that it was Boyd who encouraged her to use the song, and since it's connected to his family, she felt that it might be pono (fitting). "When you take something like that and put it into hula, you have to be very, very sure ... that you are the one to do it," she said. She not only choreographed the song but asked her sister, the late Loyal Garner, to sing it for the Merrie Monarch event. "We made magic," she recalls, and later won another competition using the song.

At a December Merrie Monarch meeting, Smith asked that the matter be reconsidered, pointing out that the song is the work of the last ruler in the "Merrie Monarch's" dynasty.