Extended History of the Ukulele

Home , Lyle Ritz, May Singhi Breen, Open G tuning, Roy Sakuma

Two Hot Spots

The Atlantic Ocean began to widen some 20 million years ago as the Earth distributed its lands globally. Southwest of the Rock of Gibraltar, off the coast of Morocco, a hot spot grew on the ocean’s ﬂoor where the Earth’s hot liquid center began to ooze through a thin spot in its skin. The ooze grew and coagulated ever larger until some seven million years ago, a series of islands appeared Madeira Island bubbled and hardened above the surface of the sea.

Meanwhile, the Paciﬁc Ocean was shrinking as the Americas drifted westward. Hot spots emerged near the center of that ocean, too, and seven million years or so ago a series of islands began to bubble to the surface of the water, an action that continues to build Hawaiian Islands islands today.

Millions of years later humans found these island groups — Madeira in the Atlantic and Hawaii in the Pacific — and centuries after that their finding of one another would spawn the ukulele. Embracing that history is the first step to Love Uke.

Two Peoples, Two Melting Pots

Some historians believe that Phoenicians, Romans and North Africans must have stumbled onto Madeira Island some 2000 years ago. Others have suggested that Scandinavians approached it even earlier. Maps from the 1300s seem to show the islands. And there’s a legend of two lovers who were stranded and died there. But no humans were living on the islands in 1418 when João Gonçalves Zarco, a sea-faring explorer working for Portuguese Prince Henry the Navigator, found refuge from a storm at a small island he named Porto Santo, “Holy Port”. He didn’t see the larger neighboring island thru the mist. Two years later he revisited, saw the other island and named it “Madeira”, Portuguese for “wooden” because it was covered by a forest of trees.

Earlier, in the 8th century, Moors migrated to or invaded what is now Spain and Portugal. The upper reaches of Portugal had already been peopled by Lusitani, Iberians and Celts. The Moors brought their musical instruments with them, later to be called lutes, and others, some of which most likely had re-entrant tunings. (Lusitani are said to have manufactured a braguinha as early as 139 BC. It did not have re-entrant tuning.) The Moors would rule and ﬁght Christians in Portugal and Spain for 600 years. Meanwhile, on the the other side of the planet, in the Paciﬁc Ocean, Polynesians probably from the Society Islands near New Zealand and Australia, migrated by boat to the Hawaiian Islands. (They would be undisturbed by Europeans until British explorer Captain James Cook came upon the islands in 1778. He would die there the following year after naming them the Sandwich Islands after an English noble and got himself into a pickle with the natives.)

The Christians in Portugal defeated the Moors by 1249, but immediately had to fend off the attempts of Spain to take over the country; Spain was turned back for good in 1385, and Portugal has maintained its borders ever since. The ensuing peace allowed Portugal to take to the sea and the great exploration of the oceans began, and with it, the modern rediscovery of Madeira Island, and hence the Americas.

The first to become Madeirans were Celts from Braga, a village in northern Portugal. When they arrived they set fire to clear some of the island of the heavy woods to make space for food crops —grapes and sugar cane. The fire raged for seven years, at times driving many settlers into the sea for safety; but the fire left the soil rich in phosphate, good for vines.

The imported Malmsey grape thrived and the resultant Madeira wine eventually became the wine of choice for hundreds of years around the world, including the Americas once they were “discovered”. (It has been asserted that the American founding fathers celebrated with Madeira wine when they issued the Declaration of Independence in 1776. Unlike America, Portugal abolished, without war, slavery in 1775.) Like all Celts, the people of Braga were celebratory people and they brought their musical instrument with them — the braguinha, sometimes called the machete de Braga. This would become one of the primary instruments in a Madeiran folk music ensemble. The rajão would be invented and join the braguinha, in more ways than one.

By 1425 the world’s ﬁrst sugar cane plantation had been established in Madeira. Sugar would play a role in the economies of both Madeira and Hawaii and would facilitate the creation of the ukulele.

In 1478 Christopher Columbus visited the Madeiran Islands to buy sugar and married the daughter of the first governor of Santo Porto. He found flotsam of various plants of foreign origin on the beach of Porto Santo, a find that helped inculcate the theory that there were other lands or islands even further west from Madeira which led ultimately to his voyage to the Americas.

Nearly 300 years later British Captain James Cook visited Madeira on his first voyage of discovery, had an altercation with a local and returned later to plant a tulip tree near the beach to make amends. (The tree lived until 1963.) On his third voyage of discovery, Cook led the first crew of Europeans to set eyes on the Hawaiian Islands, landing there January 1778. He returned the next year after an unsuccessful hunt for the non-existent “Northwest Passage” across the North American continent. He died on Valentine’s Day 1779 at Kealakekua Bay on the island of Hawaii, slain by natives. The first of the Portuguese who came to Hawaii were sailors who came aboard the Eleanora in 1790, 11 years after Cook’s demise.

By 1805 after King Kamehameha unified the Hawaiian islands, a sandalwood trade was established — Hawaii’s first foray into international commerce. It faded away, along with the sandalwood itself, 30 years later. In 1819 Kamehameha’s successor Liholiho ended the kapu system of religion and temples and the following year Protestant missionaries from New England rushed in to fill the void and pave the way for less adventerous businessmen. By 1835 a single sugar plantation had been started, and numerous churches built. In 1844, the Hawaiian government began a 12-year program called The Great Mahele, in which the Hawaiian lands were re- distributed. At first foreigners were not allowed to own land, but that changed in 1850. The sugar industry expanded, and when the Civil War came to the United States, Hawaii sugar exports accelerated, but went into decline at the war’s end. But in 1876, King David Kalakua, who had been elected with the support of the sugar barons, was able to get a trade agreement with the US that eliminated a tariff against sugar. And the need for laborers in Hawaii grew right along with the sugar production.

A Marriage of Peoples In 1849 thousands of seekers joined the California gold rush, across both land and sea. But Dr. Wilhelm Hillebrand of Paderhorn, Germany didn’t need gold, he needed fresh air. Infected with tuberculosis and ﬁnancially secure, he set out to ﬁnd his breath. He tried the climates of Australia and the Philippines and attempted his medical practice there. But his practice failed and he remained ill.

In December 1850 he arrived in Honolulu, Hawaii. Apparently the climate was good to him and he stayed in Hawaii for 21 years. In that time he was befriended by Queen Emma, the wife of King Kamahameha IV. Like the Queen, Hildebrand was an avid amateur botanist and between the two of them they brought to Hawaii a wide variety of plants from the Asian mainland, including the plumeria used in weaving leis, the traditional ﬂoral wreaths Hawaiians wear and present to visitors.

In 1848 thousands of Hawaiians had died of inﬂuenza and in 1850 the island of Oahu lost half its population to smallpox. (Faster ships had made it possible for the smallpox virus to survive the trip from San Francisco to Honolulu.) Kamehameha and Emma raised funds for a hospital and Hillebrand became its ﬁrst director and doctor. Queens Hospital is still one of the largest in the South Seas.

He returned to his homeland in 1871 and was dissatisﬁed with the new German Reich, so he left for Madeira Island, which had become by then the major stopping off point for ﬁrewood, food and water before crossing the Atlantic. There he published a book “Flora of the Hawaiian Islands”. He also became aware of the dismal agricultural condition in Madeira due to a recent drought. He knew, too, of the need for laborers on the sugar plantations in Hawaii, and Madeirans had experience growing sugar, so he wrote his friends and eventually hired the bark Priscilla which brought 120 Madeirans to work in Hawaii in September 1878. Although there were traditional Madeiran musical instruments on board the ship, apparently no one on the boat knew how to play them. The Priscilla Madeirans joined the nearly 1100 Portuguese who were already in Hawaii, perhaps 900 from Madeira. These were primarily sailors who came by way of Timor, Batavia and Macao.

The following year Hillebrand hired another ship, the Ravenscrag, and that bark brought woodworkers Manuel Nunes, Augusto Dias and Jose Espirito Santo and 350 other Madeirans to Hawaii. This time there were musicians on board— Joao Luiz Correa and Joao Fernandes. João Gomes da Silva was a passenger on the Ravenscrag who had a braguinha, but he didn’t know how to play it. He loaned it to Fernandes who is said to have disembarked the Ravenscrag while energetically playing it — venting after four months at sea. No doubt, Nunes and his cohorts noticed the gleeful approval of Fernandes’ performance by the Hawaiians. Fernandez later played braguinha for King David Kalakaua, Queen Emma, Queen Lili’uokalani and for a three-day luau in Waimanalo.

A Marriage of Instruments Nunes, Dias and Santos believed they would be serving the needs of their fellow countrymen when they arrived. Although the rajão was being played in the taro ﬁelds and had earned the nickname “taro- patch ﬁddle”, there was not much repair work for them to do.

Manuel Nunes’ older brother Octaviano João Nunes was a viola and rabeca maker who specialized in rajãos, so Manuel had a good idea how to make instruments. Manuel Nunes hadn’t come to Hawaii to make instruments or to teach Hawaiians how to play Madeiran music; nor was he a musician, per se. (Although according to his granddaughter Flora Fox he “played the ukulele beautifully” — but he had to invent it ﬁrst!)

According to ethnomusicologist Gisa Jaehnichen, Nunes observed the musical interests of the Hawaiians and realized the need for an easy-to-play instrument to accompany short structured songs. The complicated sound of a typical Madeiran ensemble that included , rajão, braguinha and viola d’aram didn’t ﬁt the musical styles of Hawaiian players. (In a Madeiran folk ensemble, the viola was the bass of sorts, the rajão carried the rhythm and often melody, while the braguinha was an “add-on” instrument that peppered the high end of the overall sound.)

Nunes worked with Dias and Santos to develop a plan — they would build a mini-rajão. It could be played rhythmically and as a solo instgrument. They took the GCEA strings from the rajão and put them on the body of a braguinha. The tuning was re- entrant: the G string was an octave higher than one would normally expect it to be, giving the L to R: Modern rajão, modern tuning the sound of the mnemonic braguinha, Nunes ukulele from c. 1900 “My Dog Has Fleas”. The new instrument could be played using the same ﬁngering geometry for making chords on the guitar, but without the bass. Like the rajão, it could be used for both melody and rhythm, ensemble or solo. (The rajão was tuned DGCEA, with the D and G strings both being re-entrant. On the new four-string instrument, tuned GCEA, only the G was re-entrant.)

To market and promote their new instrument, they took it to King David Kalakaua who was an accomplished musician. (The Mexican cowboys, paniolos, had brought the guitar to Hawaii earlier, as did Spanish sailors via the Phillipines.) Kalakaua could immediately play it and loved it and it soon became not only the favorite musical instrument of the islands but because Hawaii was becoming a “place to go” for tourists, the ukulele became one of the ﬁrst conscious souvenirs of any place.

Nunes, Dias and Santos each opened a music repair shop and manufactured ukuleles from Hawaiian koa wood. Nunes continued making instruments into the 20th Century and his son Leonardo opened his own factory in California. (Descendants of the three woodworkers today have animated discussions about the “true” inventor of the ukulele, but it seems likely that the three friends collaborated. The effect of their friendship was apparent later when others — Kamaka, Makini, Koaloha, et al — began making ukuleles and partied together.) What’s In a Name? There are several versions of when and how the ukulele got its name. Some say the sight of Fernandes playing it as he came down the gangplank reminded the Hawaiians of someone scratching at fleas. One literal translation of ukulele is “jumping flea”. Others say British soldier Edward Purvis who was Chamberlain to King Kalaukaua played it so energetically that he was the inspiration for the name, and that he, rather than the instrument was the first recipient of the name. Others surmise that the name is a pun based on the union of ukeke and mele or lele. The first is a traditional Hawaiian instrument — its only traditional string instrument — that is plucked like a Jew’s harp. The second is the Hawaiian word for “song”. The third can mean “dancing”.

Queen Lili’uokalani wrote that it came from the union of uku and lele, meaning “the gift that came here”. Leslie Nunes, a great-grandson of Manuel, gave some acknowledgement to this meaning when he titled his book on the history of the ukulele Ukulele, the Gift of the Portuguese.

May Singhi Breen wrote that “...It was so small, in comparison to the guitars the natives were used to playing that, when they first played it, their fingers and hands sort of ‘skipped off’ the small keyboard. That’s why it is call ukulele, meaning ‘jumping flea’”.

Another version attributes the origin to a remark made at a house party at Judge W. L. Wilcox’s home in Kahili, where Gabriel Davian was playing an ukulele he had made himself. When asked what the instrument was called he joked that “judging by the way you scratch at it, it must be called ‘ukulele’ (jumping ﬂea).” The name may have come from all of these. Pick your favorite. And play on it. In Hawaii ukulele is pronounced “oo-koo-lay-lay”, but on the mainland it is usually pronounced “you-koo-ley-lee”. In England it is spelled “ukelele”. Often the instrument is simply called “uke”, but some Hawaiians say that that term is slightly derogatory and they don’t use it. (This author does use “uke” as a term of endearment.)

The ukulele for a little while had been referred to by its inventor(s) as a mini-rajão. In some European histories of the ukulele, the instrument is described as a cavaquinho, which is a similar instrument form Portugal’s mainland, and is tuned differently.

As the ukulele grew in popularity, the rajão faded away. Some players later wanted more volume, so Nunes doubled the strings and appropriated the rajão’s pre-ukulele nickname for the new instrument, “taro patch”.

Aloha ‘Oe

One of the first songs, and arguably the most important, associated with the ukulele was Queen Lili’uokalani’s Aloha ‘Oe. She wrote the first version of the tune at Maunawili Ranch in Oahu in 1878, the year before the arrival of the Ravenscrag with the luthiers who built the first ukulele. Originally based on lovers saying a fond farewell, it became the de facto anthem of Hawaii after the United States forced Queen Lil to abdicate her throne, imprisoned her and usurped the islands.

Comparisons of the melody to familiar hymns of the day are legion, and include Charles C. Converse’s The Rock Beside the Sea and George Root’s There’s Music in the Air. The published 1884 version of the chorus deviated from Lili‘uokalani’s manuscript in He Buke Mele Hawaii, presumably to avoid a direct Aloha Oe Performed in paraphrase of the Root tune. Today Funchal, Madeira, 1998 it is not only a beautiful love song, This was the opening song but a haunting lament and a very by the Reunion Band, four Madeirans and three sophisticated political statement. Americans participating in the Father and Son The Bishop Museum has the Reunion: The Braguinha Meets the original manuscript in the Queen’s Ukulele, September 1998. handwriting, visible here. John Young’s transcription of the original is here. A live version recorded in Madeira as part of the project Father and Son Reunion: The Braguinha Meets the Ukulele can be heard by selecting the icon on this page.

TheBy the Infant end ofUkulele the 19th century the ukulele began to travel abroad, just as King Kalakaua had done. It ﬁrst appeared on the mainland at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, and the next year in San Francisco’s Mid-Winter Festival. It showed up later at fairs in Buffalo, Atlanta, New York and Los Angeles. Although these appearances helped associate the ukulele with Hawaii, they did not popularize it.

Richard Walton Tully of Nevada City CA, one of the California Gold Rush towns that sprung up in the Sierra Nevada Mountains after Capt. John Sutter’s man John Marshall found gold in the American River at a sawmill in Coloma, wrote Bird of Paradise, a play that appeared in New York in 1912. Tully had travelled to Hawaii to do research for his play and had learned to sing Hawaiian tunes and to play the ukulele.

The play caused a great stir in New York on many levels. There was a lawsuit over its authorship. Some say the play ended the Victorian Era in New York. The Kamaka family of ukulele makers sent its mother to teach the cast how to dance the hula. Laurette Taylor starred and her mother, incensed that Taylor was showing bare ankle said, “I didn’t raise my daughter to be a harlot!” New York would never be the same, and when movies learned to talk Bird of Paradise became a ﬁlm hit. Among the dozen or so songs in the play was, of course, Aloha Oe.

The Ukulele Blossoms The next big push for the ukulele came from the same city where Kalakaua had taken his last breath as he neared the end of a world Performers from Hawaii at the tour, the first by any 1915 Pan Pacific magistrate — San Exposition in Francisco. With the dual purpose of celebrating the city’s rebirth from the devastating 1906 earthquake and fire and the opening of the Panama Canal, San Francisco hosted the 1915 Pan Pacific Exposition. The Territory of Hawaii went all out and its pavilion was one of the most popular exhibits at the fair. Beautiful scantily-clad brown-toned people danced the hula and bands performed energetically with ukuleles. Two of Manuel Nunes’ granddaughters were among the Hawaiian residents who came to teach ukulele at the Exposition. Flora Fox was one of them; this author interviewed her on her 102 birthday in Santa Rosa, California.

The timing was perfect for the ukulele. The Hawaiian ragtime tune, On the Beach at Waikiki became a huge hit and the songsters of Tin Pan Alley took notice. Almost immediately “Hawaiian”music — hapa haole music, really — sold sheet music in the millions. The phrase means “half non- Hawaiian”, although in order to make a living many Hawaiians wrote similar tunes in addition to traditional Hawaiian music.

The size of sheet music was shrinking; the phonograph record was burgeoning; radio and talking movies were growing. And in the thick of it all was the ukulele. Accessible and cheap, many very well constructed, and a good player could play just about anything on it — rhythm, harmony, melody — and percussion.

The Pan Paciﬁc Exposition set off a craze that lasted 20 years. From 1915 to 1935 the ukulele was the most popular instrument in the American home — until the big band sounds helped drown it out. Tin Pan Alley songs tended to be written on pianos by folks like Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, Joe Young, George Gershwin, et al, but they were played on ukuleles by the masses in parlors, dorms, rowboats, under the moon, parties, weddings and foxholes in wartime.

Players, songs, playing styles, manufacturers, method books, even types of ukuleles proliferated. Guitar companies made them. In 1907 the revered Martin Guitar Company tried making them, but they didn’t play well. They built them like guitars and they sounded dead. Nunes showed Martin what was wrong and they started making them again in 1915. In 1920 they made them of native Hawaiian wood and they took off. Today Martin ukuleles from the 1920’s can be as expensive as a restored antique Bentley. Gibson, Gretsch, Harmony, Regal, Dobro, National, Washburn and many other national guitar builders built ukuleles. Numerous other makers made only ukuleles or spin-offs of the ukulele.

In Hawaii many ukulele manufacturers besides Nunes, Santos and Dias arose — Kamaka, Makini, Kumalae, Aloha. Some mainland manufacturers falsely put “Made in Hawaii” in their instruments, but a law was passed that made that kapu, forbidden. Tiki King in Felton, California maintains a database of more than 600 brands of ukuleles. You can visit that here. The ukulele history of the Martin Guitar Company is here. Here’s a list of famous ukulele players.

Two years after the Pan Pacific Exposition, the United States Congress passed legislation that led in 1920 to Prohibition, and the “speakeasy” ukulele era. Ukulele virtuoso and historian Fred Fallin of Chicago today lectures on that era of gangsters, flappers, raccoon coats, rising hemlines and rolled down socks, washboard hairstyles, jazz, talking movies, the Edison phonograph and live radio. ukuleles had gone to war in doughboys’ knapsacks, and even though Prohibition took effect as World War I ended, the Roaring Twenties would party — with ukuleles and illegal libations — until the economic collapse of 1929. Prohibition ended in 1933 and right behind it the ukulele’s popularity began to wane as the Big Band era rushed in to fill the newly legal drinking clubs with bigger sounds.

Early Players Wendell Hall, “the pineapple picador” or “red-haired music maker”, made it big with the ukulele in the 1920s and ‘30s. The Ludwig Company produced the Wendall Hall Professional banjo-ukes in 1932-3. (This author has owned one since 1974.) Six years before Ukelele Ike’s 1929 Singing in the Rain was a hit, Hall sold over two million copies of his song It Ain’t Gonna’ Rain No Mo. He hosted several national music radio programs, including the Gillette Community Sing. He wrote ukulele instruction books and performed on taro patch, banjo-uke and tiple, variants of the ukulele, and helped design his own uke, the Red Head. More on Wendall Hall here.

May Singhi Breen received a ukulele for Christmas and before long she had formed The Syncopators with several other women. She met songwriter Peter DeRose in 1923 and left the group for him. They married in 1929. By then she had convinced music publishers to add ukulele arrangements to sheet music. It’s hard to ﬁnd sheet music from the ‘20s that do not have Breen’s arrangements. To brighten the sound of the ukulele she popularized the stiffer ADF#B tuning (D6). The P’Mico company was so taken with her they created a May Singhi Breen autographed banjo-uke. Later Breen took on the American Federation of Musicians union to force it accept the ukulele as a true musical instrument. She recorded the ﬁrst audio ukulele lesson and produced method books and edited one by Wendall Hall. She and DeRose hosted a radio show “Sweethearts of the Air” from 1923 to 1939. Breen was known as the Ukulele Lady and was instrumental in teaching others to play as soloists and in groups which she herself formed. Her instructional books emphasized the solo capabilities of the ukulele with her slogan "Uke can play the melody". The ukulele Hall of Fame Museum page on her is here, and a YouTube offering of an instruction recording she did with female singer Vaughn DeLeath in the 1920s is here.

Bobby “Uke” Henshaw was a uke player associated with patriotic songs of WWI. When the war ended he introduced the ukulele to England and toured Europe. He may well have been the person responsible for turning on the British ukulele master George Formby. Called “The Human Ukulele” by the press, he circled the globe three times in his career and surely helped to spread the ukulele’s favor worldwide. Henshaw also licensed a line of namesake ukuleles, baritones and guitars. More on Henshaw here.

Another player who had an impact during WWI was Bill Tapia who played ukulele at the age of twelve for soldiers in Honolulu. He taught several celebrities to play, including Betty Grable, Jimmy Durante and Buster Crabbe. Later he moved to the mainland US and played guitar in big bands. In the early 21st century his ukulele career ﬂourished anew and he became an icon of the “third” ukulele wave of popularity. He died in 2011, just shy of his 104th birthday.

Roy Smeck shares a history congruent with Henshaw’s. The Harmony Company put out a line of ukuleles, the Vita-Uke, with Smeck’s signature. Like Henshaw he was a virtuoso on numerous stringed instruments — guitar, manolin, Hawaiian steel guitar, banjo, ukes. He lent his name to a ukulele string manufacturer and was one of the ﬁrst musicians to perform in a sound movie. More on Smeck here.

As the nation prepared for Prohibition, Cliff Edwards performed a tune, Ja- Da on the ukulele in a Chicago nightclub on the vaudeville circuit. It became a hit. A nightclub owner who could’t remember his name called him Ukelele Ike (he spelled it with the British spelling). He is said to be the most inﬂuential performer in the 1920s in popularizing the ukulele. He insisted on playing Martins. Fred Fallin of Chicago has one of his Martins, complete with cigarette burn on the peg head. In 1928 he had a major hit with I Can’t Give You Anything But Love. The following year Singing in the Rain was a huge hit. He recorded his jazzy versions of many popular tunes of the 20s. In 1940 his friend Walt Disney gave him the voice part of Jimminy Cricket in the movie Pinocchio. Bing crosby said he learned his own crooning technique from Cliff Edwards. More on Ukulele Ike here.

While the Pan Paciﬁc Exposition was

George underway in San Francisco, on the other Formby side of the Atlantic Ocean an 11-year-old boy was playing the part of a stable boy in an English movie. His father, a successful actor had just died, and George Booth, being the oldest of seven children had to go to work. By 1920 he was working in British minstrel shows. He wasn’t very good. He met a woman in 1923 who would become his wife who would direct his career; by then he had taken his father’s stage name — George Formby — and taken up playing the ukulele he had bought from a fellow showman for 30 shillings. He would become wildly popular, make hundreds of recordings and dozens of movies. In the 1960s Herman’s Hermits would record his Leaning on a Lamp, which had been one of his earliest hits 40 plus years earlier. He had heard recordings of Cliff Edwards and other American players, but he developed his own Formby style of strumming, what he called the “split stroke”. His style was exactly that: his style, immediately recognizable upon ﬁrst hearing it. Beatles George Harrison, John Lennon and Paul McCartney have each cited Formby as a major inﬂuence in their music. Harrison, especially, was fond of the ukulele and in the 1980s joined the George Formby Society of enthusiasts. More on George Formby here. More on rock stars and ukulele later on. Early Songs Many songs joined Aloha Oe as ukulele “gotta haves” early on. There were show-off tunes: Stars and Stripes Forever, Under the Double Eagle, On the Beach at Waikiki, Hawaiian War Chant, Ain’t She Sweet, Five-Foot-Two, Ja-Da. The instrument begged to participate in novelty tunes: O’Brien Is Tryin’ To Learn To Talk Hawaiian to His Honolulu Lu, What Did Robinson Caruso Do With Friday on Saturday Night?, They’re Wearin’ ‘Em Higha’ in Hawaii and many, many more. In England, the songs George Formby sang were all novelties written by associates (his wife insisted Formby’s name be added as an author.) In the US, Tin Pan Alley churned out hit after hit.

And then came the sentimental, er, love songs. As the Victorian Era faded away and war, Prohibition and the Roaring Twenties emerged, the ukulele swelled in popularity. Sheet music showed ukulele tunings and chords (thanks in large part to May Singhi Breen). Manufacturers sprung up all over the country, in Hawaii and the mainland. The banjo- uke was invented for its distinctive sound and added volume. The good players “covered” the Tin Pan Alley tunes, and Hawaiian song makers emulated the success of the New Yorkers. Tin pan Ally composers wrote their songs on piano but the nation played them on ukuleles.

Movies, radio and the phonograph brought music into homes, but so did the ukulele. In time, however, professional media would almost completely displace self-made music, but for the time being the new media helped spur people to get a uke and play it in the moonlight. It was party time, despite the Prohibition, and soon, despite the Depression.

After October 29, 1929, the ukulele and song makers went into action: Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?, Pocketful of Dreams, I Can’t Give You Anything But Love, Wrap Your Troubles in Dreams, Over the Rainbow, On the Sunny Side of the Street, Pennies From Heaven, Stormy Weather, and many, many more. The International Workers of the World published a book of labor songs with ukulele chords.

Just as the ukulele had helped doughboys get through WWI, it helped Americans plow through the Great Depression. The re-entrant voice of the ukulele gave folks the power to say some pretty important things and still foster a happy feeling. Prohibition ended in 1933 and the nation’s love affair with the ukulele began to fade, but not necessarily in the movies. Also in 1933 Oliver Hardy played — and broke — a ukulele in Sons of the Desert. By 1935, however, thanks in part to the new media that brought produced music into the home and the big bands that ﬁlled the night clubs, the ukulele was on the wane.

During World War II some GIs took ukuleles to the battle ﬁelds (the author’s ﬁrst ukulele was a banjo-uke from the 1930s that had been to WWII and featured a drawing of a smiling airplane on the playing head). And others brought ukuleles home from the war after passing through Hawaii.

The ukulele didn’t go away but it took a back seat for a while, until a newer media came along: Television. The Ukulele’s First Re-entrance

Arthur Godfrey had made his mark as a radio personality in part by using the technique of imagining himself talking to a single individual when he was “on mic”. This feeling of intimacy was infectious and made him a star. (He continued his radio programming and I fondly recall listening to him through headphones on a crystal radio set on KNX in Los Angeles in the 1950s.)

Sometime in the late 1940s Godfrey had approached an instrument manufacturer — accounts vary, from Martin to Vega to Favilla, take your pick — to make a larger ukulele, the instrument we call a “baritone ukulele”. Sometimes tuned with a re-entrant D string like the original ukulele, it has the lowered tuning of the four high strings of the guitar, DGBE. In addition to his friendly demeanor, Godfrey became associated with the ukulele and lent his name to a series plastic ukuleles manufactured in the US in the 1950s.

The Italian luthier, inventor and classical guitarist (until an accident damaged his hand) Mario Maccaferri began making plastic ukuleles and banjo-ukes. Two of the most popular were the Arthur Godfrey TV Pal and the Islander Uke. Maccaferri also made the Mastro plastic banjo. Millions were sold in the 1950s. More on this phenomenon here.

Meanwhile, a former tuba player was working in a music store in Los Angeles. He had learned to play bass during the Korean War, but the sound of the ukuleles in the music store intrigued him. A record producer heard Lyle Ritz playing one day and by the end of the ‘50s Ritz had recorded two jazz ukulele albums. He became the bass player on the Wrecking Crew, the in-house rhythm section for Capitol Records. When Roy Sakuma of Honolulu took over production of the International Ukulele Festival in 1971, he went looking for Ritz, who had spent time in Hawaii during the Korean War and whose ukulele playing had impacted many Hawaiian players. Sakuma has said that Ritz had no idea he had a Hawaiian fan base. Today his fame is worldwide and you can learn more here.

In the early 50s in Greenwich Village, New York City, a ukulele player, Herbert Khaury, using the name Larry Love began a long career at a lesbian bar called the Page 3, singing unusual renditions of old songs. By the early 60s he had a cult following in the Village and changed his name to Tiny Tim. In 1968 Rowan and Martin brought him to their popular television comedy Laugh In, and later he brought his warbled version of Tip Toe Through to the Tulips to the Johnny Carson, Ed Sullivan and Jackie Gleason programs. (The Laugh In name was a spin-off of the be-ins and love-ins of the era, which were themselves spin-offs of the sit-ins of the civil rights movement of the previous decade. Laugh In was also a prime mover in the rehabilitation of Richard Nixon who had already given his “swan song” earlier. The “sock it to me” abuse he took on the program apparently made him palatable to the American voter and he went on to become the only President forced to resign.)

The year after Tiny Tim’s big hit, in Honolulu, Eddie Bush, a banker by day and ukulele performer by night recorded the album A Man and his ukulele. He, too, made it to Johnny Carson’s Tonight program, as well as Mike Douglas, Merv Grifﬁn, Ed Sullivan, Lawrence Welk and Johnny Cash. His goal was different than Tim’s. "I want to show that (the ukulele) can be used as a featured instrument, not only as background or as a novelty,” he said. Bush stretched the limits of the instrument. Especially notable is his version of Holiday for Strings, a tune selected for the 1998 compilation Legends of the ukulele, assembled by Jim Beloff. Bush passed in 2002 of a heart attack at age 67.

Unlike Bush, and although he was an excellent player and song historian, Tiny Tim chose to present the ukulele as something of a novelty prop, along the lines of Jack Benny’s violin or Bob Hope’s golf club. Unfortunately, by the time he elected to play seriously, few were paying attention. He suffered a heart attack just as he arrived in front of the microphone on stage at the Ukulele Hall of Fame Museum Expo in 1996, and a second fatal attack on stage in Minneapolis while singing Tip Toe Through the Tulips. His use of the ukulele in the 1960s was nearly unique to the era, and his death marks, roughly, the beginning of the second re- entrance of the ukulele’s popularity, the one we are in now (2012).

The popular children’s program Sesame Street, used the ukulele as an object of derision during the era, too. In 1970 Ernie consoles the Cookie Monster whose ukulele has broken, but who then eats it when it’s repaired.

Outside of the purview of mainstream media during this period, however, things happen that will “save” the ukulele for future generations and lead to its present popularity.

Unlike Tiny Tim and the Sesame Street jokesters, educators in Hawaii and Canada were taking the ukulele very, very seriously. Determination and Germination

Roy Sakuma of Honolulu had taken ukulele lessons from Herb Otha who encouraged him to become a performer. Sakuma elected to become a teacher instead and by 1971 had created the International ukulele Festival in Kapiolani Park, Honolulu, the longest running ukulele festival and the largest of its kind. Each festival features hundreds of ukulele students performing, usually 800 or so in recent years. Sakuma and his wife, Kathy, pepper the bill with ukulele groups from all over the world as well as solo performers, duos and other combos. Sakuma has developed methodology for teaching the ukulele and has kept the instrument vibrant and alive in Hawaiian culture. Long before the present ukulele craze, Sakuma was quietly but ardently marrying students, manufacturers, schools, clubs and performers together. Herb Otha and Lyle Ritz are ﬁxtures of the festival, but the impact of more than 40 years of dedication to teaching youngsters to play the ukulele cannot be overstated.

In addition to the festival and educational programs, Sakuma produced numerous CDs of culturally signiﬁcant and musically stunning ukulele performances. While Tiny tim and Laugh In were trivializing the ukulele, in Hawaii the ground was bing prepared that would give birth to today’s young and phenomenal Hawaiian ukulele players.

In Canada, Halifax, Nova Scotia, school ofﬁcials responded to a small but vocal group of citizens who wanted better music instruction in the schools. In 1966 Chalmers Doane was hired to implement new programs. Among the things he did to better music education was to favor the ukulele as a primary teaching tool. “[If} the strings are developed successfully,” he argued, “the others fall into place.”

As an accomplished trombonist, violinist, bassist, pianist, clarinetist and ukulele player he was able to build award winning orchestras and musical groups in a short period of time. He caused an inexpensive ukulele to be made, a distinctive obtuse triangle shape with three small sound holes, an instrument still favored in Canadian groups. The success of his program in Halifax, fueled by his own passion for teaching spread across Canada with a goal that every child would get a quality musical education by sixth grade.

The highly respected Langley Ukulele Ensemble in British Columbia is a testament to Doane’s successful vision. Canadian ukulele wizard James Hill, a close friend, student, and musical partner of Doane’s owes no small part of his success to the programs built by Doane. Hill today carries on the same work and besides performing world wide, has developed ukulele workshops in schools across Canada and edits Ukulele, Yes!, an on-line resource for ukulele teachers, a project started years ago by Doane.

One reason the ukulele was chosen as a primary instrument for education rather than, say, the recorder or penny-whistle is that it readily lends itself to the study of harmony. One exercise prevalent in the system is “singing the strings”, in which students pick one string and sing whatever note is being played on that string when a chord is made. It is by far the easiest way to learn harmony — it’s all right there in the diminutive ukulele.

Three other notable aspects of Doane’s program are: changing from the hiring of instructors who play, to hiring performers who teach, redirecting the music budget from the high school years to the earliest grades, and emphasizing performance (performing music, Doane says, is how one gains literacy in music, akin to speaking, reading and writing in the study of English.)

Although there is a 21st Century ukulele craze happening worldwide, Canada has been hip to the ukulele for decades, thanks in large part to Doane. The Langley ensemble performs in Hawaii every year and is highly regarded worldwide, as is its most famous alumni, James Hill. In Liverpool, Nova Scotia, every two years is held an International Ukulele Ceilidh, an event that features local groups as well as popular players from the US, England and Japan.

In some ways the present ukulele wave of popularity is the rest of the world catching up to Hawaii and Canada.

The Ukulele’s Second Re-entrance

It started in the late 1970s with bulletin boards, then telnet and email, then email forums. The Internet let people communicate all over the world in new ways. In the mid-1990s, the World Wide Web emerged, at ﬁrst only for non-commercial uses. Enthusiasts of all kinds began to ﬁnd one another. ukulele players began to discover other ukulele players. Although I had been playing ukulele for more than 30 years I did not know other ukulele players until the mid-1990s when I met them on the Internet.

An email forum created by a student in a New England college was one of the earliest appearances o the ukulele in cyber space. The Ukulele Freedom Front, the Ukulele Hall of Fame Museum, Riot Ukes and Cool Hand Uke’s Lava Tube were among the ﬁrst ukulele websites, if not the ﬁrst. In the email forums and on a growing number of websites ukulele players traded stories, songs, playing tips, instrument reviews, repair tips, histories and recordings. An exciting time, it was, as ukulele players learned they weren’t alone. Collectors met players. Luthiers found players. Most forum members were established players. Newcomers to the ukulele were few.

But their numbers were growing.

Although there were uke groups scattered here and there — Roy Cone’s group in Salisbury Texas and the Vokuleles in Chico CA, for example — there was no widespread communication among groups of players, except perhaps those who had participated in Roy Sakuma’s Honolulu festival. In 1993 I became aware of a ukulele festival in Hayward CA, not by way of the Internet but in a travel magazine. I performed at the First Annual Northern California ukulele Festival, as it was called, and was surprised to see that most of the players weren’t playing ukuleles at all, but small six- string, baritone ukuleles (more properly called soprano guitars), and very few instruments had re-entrant tuning. But the players, most of whom were singing Hawaiian traditional songs, called them ukuleles. The instruments were not really ukuleles in my mind and I was inspired to write a tune about it.

The Ukulele Hall of Fame Museum was founded in Providence RI in 1996 by Paul Syphers, Sue Abbotson, David Wasser, Nuni Lyn-Walsh and Tom Walsh. It featured a huge collection of ukuleles and produced several festivals, inducted significant personalities from the ukulele world into a Hall of Fame, and published a periodical on ukulele lore. It still exists as a not-for-profit organization but has not been very active in the past few years. In 1997 Jim and Liz Beloff published an elegant, full-color book The Ukulele: A Visual History. His sister and brother-in-law followed up with the Fluke ukulele, an oddly-shaped plastic body ukulele that has become very popular among new players. Recently they have issued a smaller version, the Flea, and a banjo-ukulele version. The book was very instrumental in increasing the awareness of the ukulele. More than a dozen song books fill out their current catalog, available through Flea Market Music.

In 1998 three American ukulele players (Alfredo Canopin, Fred Fallin and Dan Scanlan) and a great grandson of Manuel Nunes (Leslie Nunes of Honolulu) returned the ukulele to Madeira island and taught folk musicians there how to play it. The project, “A Father and Son Reunion: The Braguinha Meets the Ukulele” was sponsored in part by the Madeira Island government and was produced by Madeiran João Mauricio Marques and Dan Scanlan. After 10 days of rehearsal the Father and Son Reunion Band, consisting of the three Americans and four Madeirans playing ukuleles, rajão and braguinhas performed two shows in Madeira and were featured on Madeira Island Day at the World Expo in Lisbon. The Expo concert was video cast live throughout Europe and sderved to further the ukulele’s prominence in that part of the world.

The present ukulele craze, this second “re-entrance” or, in other words, the third ukulele craze can be attributed (in my estimation) to:

• Music educators using the ukulele to teach music in Canada and Hawaii

• The rise of the Internet, enabling ukulele enthusiasts to ﬁnd one another

• The growth of ukulele groups and their festivals • The Father and Son Reunion: The Brauinha Meets the Ukulele, in which the ukulele was returned to Madeira and featured at the 1998 Lisbon World’s Fair.

• Israel Kamakawiwo’ole’s version of Somewhere Over the Rainbow/What a Wonderful World that has found its way onto ads, movies and radio and enjoys an immense popularity worldwide

• Jim Beloff’s book on the ukulele and the resulting rise of Flea Market Music website and ukulele community forum

• The emergence of YouTube and the popularity of the presentation of While My Guitar Gently Weeps by Jake Shimabukuro, and his adoption by Sony

• The Mighty Uke movie by Tony and Margie Coleman of Canada that features players and groups from many countries and has been shown worldwide to great acclaim

• The attention paid to ukulele performers by National Public Radio and much later by mainstream media

• The proliferation of ukulele manufacturers worldwide

One result of this new popularity is the sudden interest of successful guitar players in the ukulele. Although Beatle George Harrison always favored the ukulele and never shied away from saying so, numerous closet ukulele players have emerged now that it is “safe: to do so or have taken their skills to the instrument for the ﬁrst time. Members of rock bands from Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam to Greg Hawkes of The Cars are taking to the stage uke ﬁrst, some admitting that they’ve always liked the instrument! Younger people are taking to the instrument in droves. The fad is feeding on itself and it is no longer unusual to hear it in a movie, on the radio, in television ads, open mics, on stage or on street corners. Billionaire Warren Buffet and President Barack Obama play uke (to feel good, apparently, about the other things they do). Today beginning players and established performers share their gigs, insights and stories on Facebook and other social forums. As in the 1920s, today there are hundreds of ukulele manufacturers, large, small and custom only. At the time of this writing (May 2012) there are more than 12,000 ukuleles and related items up for auction on ebay.

On October 6, 2011 at Freedom Plaza in Washington DC activists gathered to protest the illegal US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. When the stage was quiet an impromptu jam started up among the protestors — two banjos, a ﬁddler, a harmonica player and three ukuleles. There wasn’t a guitar in sight! The ukulele had moved in as the instrument of choice for peace activists.

Community ukulele groups are forming everywhere and performing at retirement and convalescent homes, schools, fairs, festivals, weddings and funerals — wherever music is needed. Some groups just meet to drink and have fun. Numerous retirees from the Baby Boom era of WWII, former protestors of the Viet Nam era, today get their jollies with a ukulele group. Often the old timer groups are peppered with youngsters keen on bringing a different and more strident energy to the ukulele outlet. Yuppies pay big bucks to attend ukulele campouts.

There might be a downside to the present ukulele popularity. As an activist who has used the ukulele for 50 years to express his politics, loves, broken hearts, humor, sadness, family fondness and philosophical and historical insights I hope that this new love of uke by the masses is a better way to ﬁght for universal health, a clean and live-able planet, clean and accurate elections — and peace, and not a frivolous substitute for civil endeavors. I have elected, however, to live the remainder of my life as though this Third Great Ukulele Craze is destined to outshine those of 1915-1935 and the 1950s, be worldwide and jauntily bring peace, harmony and justice to this otherwise beleaguered planet.

Random Thoughts on the Ukulele The ukulele is truly a world instrument. Born of two Celtic parents who married in Honolulu Hawaii, it travelled the world with King David Kalakaua, the first of the world’s monarchs to circumnavigate the globe. He played the ukulele and most likely had it with him.

In 1915 the ukulele took the American music world by storm and college kids, vaudeville performers, movie stars and crooners chose it. Sheet music had ukulele chord diagrams. You could buy one for a few dollars. Doughboys took them to WWI and GIs to WWII in their knapsacks. It flared in popularity during the earliest days of television.

Utah Phillips once said “You can’t be mad at someone who’s playing a ukulele.” Others have said likewise, including this author: “I can get away with singing the most radical political stuff when I’m playing the uke.”

That’s the thing about the uke — it’s happy, it’s expressive, it’s easy to play. It helps you get your ya-yas out, your feelings, hopes, dreams, loves, regrets. It’s a world class tool. — Dan Scanlan