Lena Machado (October 16, 1903 – January 23, 1974)[1] was a Native Hawaiian singer, composer, and ukulele player, known as "Hawaii's Songbird".

She performed regularly on KGU, where Royal Hawaiian Band conductor Mekia Kealakaʻi heard her and hired her as a featured soloist in 1925.

Nevertheless, Lena learned to play the ukulele and won first prize singing "Let Me Call You Sweetheart" in a contest her birth family entered her into.

In later years, she reflected on Julia K. Chilton and Lizzie Alohikea being her role models when she watched them sing for incoming passengers at the piers.

[4][5] Historian George Kanahele described how Lena sang with the "Hawaiian style reminiscent of Nani Alapai, Juliana Walanika, and Helen Desha Beamer.

"[6][7] The story of her discovery by KGU radio manager Marion A. Mulroney hearing her singing in a mango tree is often told as having happened at the YWCA in Honolulu, which had not been built at the time.

The troupe performed regularly on KGU, entertained at military installations in Hawaii, and by 1927 had already toured the mainland United States.

[9] She was hired by George Paele Mossman as a Hawaiian dance and singing instructor at his newly opened Bell Tone Studio of Music.

[10] Lena was being referred to in the news media as "The Song – Bird of Hawaii", and was working with the Johnny Noble orchestra.

[3] When the 1927 maiden voyage of the SS Malolo reached Oahu's shores, the island greeted the ship with a welcoming pageant composed of 300 Hawaiian entertainers and royal descendants.

[17] In a series of events that stretched from February through March 1935, Lena was pulled into a political dispute between the city auditor Edwin P. Murray and Mayor George F. Wright.

[19] After being dismissed from the Royal Hawaiian Band, she began performing in San Francisco,[20] bringing her troupe to the Golden Gate International Exposition.

[3] Her return to Honolulu in February 1941 ended a four-year absence from the islands, with a concert at the Civic Auditorium sponsored by the Hawaiian Lei Sellers Association.

[31] While entertaining on the mainland in March 1956, a fall in a friend's home sidelined her in a wheelchair for months with a broken hip and ribs.

Although predicted to be in rehabilitation for more than a year, she was performing again by October, "At first I crawled, then I held the walls, next I used a cane, and now I walk, drive and do a little dancing.

Driving to their new home on Kauai in 1965, she and her husband survived a car accident, but Lena was permanently blinded in one eye, and additional injuries left her physically challenged.

She once again joined the Royal Hawaiian Band in 1971, under director Kenneth K. Kawashima, for a Veterans Day concert at Kapiolani Park.

[33] In 1973, she broke her hip, and her medical care and rehabilitation were so extensive and costly that vocalist Genoa Keawe hosted a benefit concert in Honolulu.