of Hawaii as a U.S. territory in 1900 stimulated Americans' interest in Hawaiian music and customs. In 1912, a Broadway musical show called Bird of Paradise premiered; it featured Hawaiian music and elaborate costumes. The show became quite successful and, to ride this wave of success, it toured the U.S. and Europe, eventually spawning the 1932 film Bird of Paradise. Joseph Kekuku was a member of the show's original cast and toured with the show for eight years. In 1918, The Washington Herald stated, "So great is the popularity of Hawaiian music in this country that 'The Bird of Paradise' will go on record as having created the greatest musical fad this country has ever known". In 1915, a world's fair called the Panama–Pacific International Exposition was held in San Francisco to celebrate the opening of the Panama Canal and over a nine-month period introduced the Hawaiian style of guitar playing to millions of visitors. In 1916, recordings of indigenous Hawaiian instruments outsold every other genre of music in the U.S. Radio broadcasts played a role in fueling the popularity of Hawaiian music. Hawaii Calls was a program originating in Hawaii and broadcast to the U.S. mainland west coast. It featured the steel guitar, ukulele, and Hawaiian songs sung in English. Subsequently, the program was heard worldwide on over 750 stations. Sol Hoopii began broadcasting live from KHJ radio in Los Angeles in 1923. By the 1920s, Hawaiian music instruction for children was becoming common in the U.S. One of the steel guitar's foremost virtuosos, Buddy Emmons, studied at the Hawaiian Conservatory of Music in South Bend, Indiana, at age 11. The acceptance of the sound of the steel guitar, then referred to as "Hawaiian guitars" or "lap steels", spurred instrument makers to produce them in quantity and create innovations in the design to accommodate this style of playing. In the early twentieth century, steel guitar playing branched off into two streams: lap-style, performed on an instrument specifically designed or modified to be played on the performer's lap; and bottleneck-style, performed on a traditional Spanish guitar held flat against the body. The bottleneck-style became associated with blues and rock music, and the horizontal style became associated with several musical genres, including Hawaiian music, country music, Western swing, honky-tonk, bluegrass and gospel. Use in musical genres Blues music Solo African-American blues artists popularized the bottleneck-style (slide guitar) near the beginning of