Kui Lee

Diagnoses

Personal

Vocation

Family

American singer-songwriter, and the 1960s golden boy artist of Hawaii. Lee achieved international fame when Don Ho began performing and recording his compositions, with Ho promoting Lee as the songwriter for a new generation of Hawaiian music. Kui Lee only achieved fame for his musical compositions toward the very end of his life. The Extraordinary Kui Lee was the only album released during his lifetime. Famous songs on that album included "I'll Remember You" (brought into even greater fame by Don Ho, Elvis Presley and Makaha Sons of Ni'ihau), "Days of my Youth" and "Ain't No Big Thing." All three became standards in Hawai'i. His entertainer parents Billy and Ethel Lee were of Scottish, Hawaiian and Chinese ancestry. He married singer-hula dancer Rose Frances Naone Leinani, known to everyone as Nani, and they would have four children together. Kui Lee had been battling lymph gland cancer when he died at the Guadalajara Hospital in Tijuana on 3 December 1966, aged 34. In 1973, Elvis Presley gave the Aloha From Hawaii concert which raised $75,000 for the Kui Lee Cancer Fund, which had been created shortly before the concert by Hawaii veteran newspaper columnist Eddie Sherman, to fund the cancer research going on at the University of Hawaii. Link to Wikipedia biography