Felix Mendelssohn’s Hawaiian Serenaders

Felix Mendelssohn’s Hawaiian Serenaders (also Felix Mendelssohn And His Hawaiian Serenaders), was a popular Hawaiian music band started by Felix Bartholdy Mendelssohn (19 September 1911 – 4 February 1952), is best known for making Hawaiian music popular in England and throughout Europe during the late 1930s and throughout the 1940s.

Mendelssohn was born in Brondesbury Park, London. He claimed ancestry with the classical composer Felix Mendelssohn, but genealogy does not support this claim, though both Mendelssohns were of Jewish ancestry.

He worked for a while in his father's office in the before joining the Navy at the age of seventeen. On leaving the Navy he became an actor and managed various clubs in London (even opening his own Club Felix) and soon became the promotional manager for several band leaders including Mantovani, Sydney Lipton, Joe Loss, Lew Stone, and Carroll Gibbons. Despite a stammer and, by his own admission, "limited musical ability," he put together his own dance orchestra that played on Radio Luxembourg and BBC. It was in these performances that he would have them occasionally play a Hawaiian song, inspired by a visit to the South Sea Islands.

Realizing a long-standing ambition to form a Hawaiian band, in 1938 Mendelssohn took over a band led by Canadian steel guitarist, Roland Peachy and renamed it "Felix Mendelssohn's Hawaiian Serenaders." While dressed in a white suit and always wearing a Polynesian garland of flowers around his neck, he merelly stood by while the actual talent performed. In 1942 the Serenaders appeared in a variety show called the Yankee Clipper including a troupe of Hula Dancers from around the world which he called his "South Sea Lovelies" and for which he would make up a story about each dancer and would involve audience members in the show as well. At its peak, the troupe numbered about fifty people.

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