"Tiny Bubbles" by Don Ho

Chances are good that if you are a Gen Xer or older you have heard of Don Ho. For those of you who haven't, he was a singer and musician of Native Hawaiian, Chinese, Portuguese, Dutch, and German. He had some success in the Sixties. His second album, Tiny Bubbles, reached no. 15 on the Billboard 200 and it remained on the chart for nearly a year. He also appeared on several television shows from the Sixties to the Nineties, including Hawaiian Eye, Batman, I Dream of Jeannie, The Brady Bunch, McCloud, Sanford and Son, Charlie's Angels, The Fall Guy, and Life Goes On. He had his own daytime variety show on ABC, The Don Ho Show, from 19776 to 1977. Don Ho was sometimes accused of performing music that was too commercialized and of pandering too much to tourists to Hawaii, but there can be no doubt that he helped popularize traditional Hawaiian music and made people more aware of Hawaii in general.

Don Ho's signature song and his biggest hit was "Tiny Bubbles." The song had originally been written by Leon Pober for Lawrence Welk, whose particular brand of easy listening music was called "champagne music." Lawerence Welk turned the song down, although he would later perform it after Don Ho had a hit with the song. It was Don Ho's producer, Sonny Burke, who chose the song for Don Ho. The song proved to be a modest success going to no. 15 on the Billboard Hot 100 and no. 14 on the Billboard Easy Listening chart. According to his Hollywood Reporter obituary from 2007, Don Ho often joked to his audiences that he hated the song. He performed it regularly nonetheless.