The name Samhakdo — "Three Crane Islands" — carries a sorrowful legend. As the story goes, a young woman (in some versions, three young women) died of lovesickness for a man she couldn't have, and her spirit wandered as a crane until it was struck down by an arrow, giving rise to the three small islands where it fell. Some versions of the legend feature one woman, others three, but every version shares the same core: grief and death written into the island's origin story.
What made this name famous nationwide, though, was a song. In 1935, a then-unknown singer from Mokpo named Yi Nan-yeong recorded "Mokpo's Tears" ("Mokpo-ui Nunmul"), a song that wove real Mokpo place names — Samhakdo, Mt. Yudalsan, Noijeokbong — directly into its lyrics. It remains, to this day, the song most associated with the city. But Yi Nan-yeong's story doesn't end there, and this part is far less well known: her two daughters with her husband Kim Hae-song (Kim Suk-ja and Kim Ae-ja) and a niece — Kim Min-ja, daughter of Yi's brother, the composer Yi Bong-ryong — formed a vocal trio called the Kim Sisters, and in 1959 they debuted in America on the stage of the Thunderbird Hotel in Las Vegas, later moving to a resident engagement at the Stardust Hotel where they performed for years. They're often described as the first Korean — and Asian — girl group to break into the American market. In 1967, when Korea's per-capita income stood at just $142, the Kim Sisters were reportedly earning $15,000 a week at the Stardust and paid $500,000 in taxes that year alone — among the highest taxpayers in Las Vegas at the time. They performed in the US for roughly 15 years before retiring around 1975. When people talk about K-pop's American breakthrough, the conversation usually starts somewhere in the 2000s — but the template for it, it turns out, was already written half a century earlier, by the daughters of a trot singer from Mokpo.