Ukulele Strikes a New Chord

In the beginning there was the guitar, and the guitar ruled. There was Eric Clapton playing his hymn to “Layla,” there was Jimi Hendrix celebrating the national anthem on his Stratocaster, George Harrison gently weeping on six strings.

In the middle of all that came Tiny Tim, strumming what could have been described only as a musical mutant: four sweet little strings and a diminutive body you clutched to your chest like a baby. It had a C chord you could play with one index finger and you tuned it by singing a ditty on open strings: “My Dog Has Fleas.”

The ukulele captured the national imagination--for about as long as it took Tiny Tim to tiptoe through the tulips in 1968. By the 1970s, the little ukulele was once again set aside in favor of its more muscular six-stringed sibling. It was put away in garages, sold at flea markets, relegated to tiki torch hotel lounges in Hawaii and classics such as “Princess Poo-Poo-Ly Has Plenty Papaya (And She Loves to Give It Away).”

In testament to the enduring power of the ridiculous over the transcendent, the ukulele--not as melodious as a banjo, not as elegant as a mandolin, an instrument upon which power chords sound like wind chimes--is making another comeback.

By the thousands, baby boomers described by music marketers as “lapsed guitarists” are admitting to themselves that they will never stretch their fingers into a guitar F chord again and are buying ukuleles instead. They’re going to workshops, spending $10,000 on rare collector models, buying uke CDs.

“The uke is coming out of the closet,” says Ian Whitcomb of Altadena, a ukulele musician, songwriter and musical historian. After years of relative anonymity, Whitcomb now plays gigs all over town and has written ukulele tracks for movies such as “Stanley’s Gig” and “The Cat’s Meow.” This summer, he was invited to the prestigious Oregon Festival of Music.

UkuleleWorld.com, based in Texas, gets as many as 15,000 hits a month from places as far away as Namibia, Peru and Macedonia. In Japan, Hawaiian uke stars sell out concerts and home-grown celebrities such as Yuji Igarashi and Kazuyuki Sekiguchi attract standing-room-only crowds.

In the U.S., a Ukulele Hall of Fame Museum is in the planning stages on the East Coast (a site has not yet been identified). Ukulele workshops are scheduled this month in Illinois, Missouri and New Jersey; and in Santa Monica, McCabe’s Guitar Shop recently sold out its annual UKEtopia concert, attracting the biggest turnout ever for an evening of ukulele gospel and roots music, titled “O Strummer, Where Art Thou?” Southern California’s first ukulele festival is scheduled for Oct. 19 at Tracy High School in Cerritos and the Artesia Community Center.

Nowhere, though, has the ukulele become so much a cultural institution as in Hawaii. After long years of exile in tourist hotels with the old guys in flowered shirts, the ukulele in the last few years has become hip, the instrument a new generation of Hawaiians has adapted as a modern rock art form and a statement of Hawaiian pride.

Young Hawaiians are flocking to the hyper-uke sound of 25-year-old Jake Shimabukuro of Oahu, whose intense, whirlwind strumming has been compared to Hendrix’s. (He even does an electric version of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” following it with Niccolo Paganini’s “Caprice No. 24,” a classical violin piece.)

In Hawaii, the resurgence took off in a big way in 1991, when Troy Fernandez of the Ka’au Crater Boys stunned young audiences by playing an electrified uke like a lead guitar: hot and fast. Around the same time, a 700-pound ukulele songster named Israel Kamakawiwo’ole became wildly popular in Hawaii--and developed a large cult following on the mainland as well--after his gentle single “Over the Rainbow” hit the charts and served as background music in EToys commercials. (The song was later featured in the NBC show “ER.”) “Iz,” as he is known, claimed he was “a Hawaiian man with a heart 10 times bigger than his body,” and when he died in 1997, 20,000 people came to his memorial in the state Capitol rotunda.

Musicians used the ukulele to sing about the growing ethnic consciousness of native Hawaiians, in songs such as “Maui Hawaiian Sup’pa Man.” At the same time, a new generation in Hawaii and on the mainland began to rediscover old standards such as the famous “Aloha Oe,” with words penned by Hawaii’s last monarch, Queen Liliuokalani.

“Part of what’s going on is the renaissance of Hawaiian music from back in the ‘50s,” says Mike Young, a Unitarian minister in Honolulu whose son plays a $400 Kamaka ukulele. “On any given day now, for no reason in particular, roughly half the kids at school here will have ukes in their hand, playing them at recess.”

It was in Hawaii that the instrument came into its own in the late 19th century, when Portuguese settlers traveled to Honolulu, their small, stringed braguinhas in hand. The locals listened in rapture to the Portuguese folk songs, and several Portuguese entrepreneurs opened shops to begin crafting what the Hawaiians came to call the ukulele.

The phenomenon spread to the mainland in 1915, when ukulele performances at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition’s Hawaiian Pavilion in San Francisco touched off a frenzy of ukulele-buying. Millions more were sold during the 1950s, when radio and television personality Arthur Godfrey played his on the air, and it was firmly ensconced in the national cultural fabric when Webley Edwards hosted his weekly radio broadcast, “Hawaii Calls,” from the courtyard of the Moana Hotel.

“This is a call from Hawaii,” Edwards would announce, as an assistant ran with a microphone down to the water to catch the sound of the Waikiki surf. “And here we meet again beneath the mighty Moana Banyan, beside the sea, the great panorama of bee-you-tee-ful Waikiki Beach before us.” Then came the sound of slack key guitars, and the ukulele.

By the end of the ‘50s, the ukulele had pretty much gone underground again. A few hard-core fans still played records by Cliff “Ukulele Ike” Edwards (better known for “When You Wish Upon a Star,” better loved for his uke) and George Formby, but it wouldn’t be until the end of the next decade that Tiny Tim would bring the ukulele to “Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In” and the “Tonight” show.

Even today, Shimabukuro can get away with playing a ukulele plugged into a Marshall amplifier. But for most of the world, the ukulele is meant for whimsical Tin Pan Alley tunes and moonlit Hawaiian beaches with palms whispering in the trade winds.

It is one of the few accompanying instruments in the world that cries out for awful lyrics: songs such as “Yaaka Hula Hickey Dula” and “If You Like a Ukulele Lady, Ukulele Lady Like-a You.”

Jim Beloff’s Flea Market Music in Studio City has published ukulele arrangements for everything from ‘60s hits to gospel. But his first love was always the old Hawaiian sheet music from the ‘40s (written, of course, not for Hawaiians but for the mainland haoles who frequented their hotels)--the ones with the cover art of a beautiful woman sitting under a palm tree with a luminous moon rising over Diamond Head.

What amazed him, he said, was how easily the old tunes could be adapted to the four strings of the ukulele. It was like they were made to be played on the uke. Beloff, who moved to Southern California in the early 1990s to run Billboard magazine, published a songbook of ukulele arrangements for such classics as “Singin’ in the Rain” and “Five Foot Two.” It took off, and Beloff quit his job in 1998 to devote his life to ukuleles. Now, he markets 12 ukulele songbooks, several CDs and the fluke, the beginner’s instrument he helped design.

Four years ago, George Harrison showed up at his house with a friend, another ukulele enthusiast. “He comes in and grabs a ukulele and just starts singing: ‘I’m leaning on a lamppost at the corner of a street, in case a certain little lady comes by,’ ” Beloff recalls. “Then he starts singing ‘All My Loving.’ And we’re singing ‘All My Loving’ in my living room with George Harrison on a uke! It was just too cool.”

Yet the secret of the uke’s charm, says Geoffrey Rezak, who recently formed the Ukulele Society of Connecticut, is that you don’t have to be a George Harrison to play it.

“I knew I wasn’t very musical. I didn’t have any talent, and I wasn’t going to take any lessons from anybody. But they say you have four strings and four fingers, and sure enough, I started playing. I play ‘America,’ ‘Five Foot Two’--I’m playing songs that actually make me cry sometimes. But the notes are so high on a ukulele that it’s hard to be sad.”

The instrument “has a pleasing plangency,” says Whitcomb, who has the distinction of having beaten Tiny Tim to the punch in the 1960s when his “Where Did Robinson Crusoe Go With Friday on Saturday Night” became a hit (on the West Coast, anyway).

“There’s a kind of sadness to it, a sad, romantic sound, but also when it’s plucked it has a liveliness to it,” Whitcomb said. “All I know is, whenever you strum a uke, people’s faces all light up with smiles.”

This summer, the ukulele went back to its roots, Waikiki Beach, where a crowd of thousands filled Kapiolani Park for the 26th annual Ukulele Festival. It was organized by one of the world’s leading ukulele producers, Roy Sakuma, formerly a groundskeeper for the city of Honolulu. The festival featured performers from Hawaii, the mainland, Canada and Japan, along with 800 schoolchildren from all over Hawaii as young as 5.

Enthusiasts from as far as California and Georgia toted their ukuleles over for the week, propping them up next to picnic baskets. Beloff was there. So was Herb Ohta of Honolulu, considered the greatest living ukulele player, and Lyle Ritz, one of L.A.’s best-known studio guitarists during the 1950s and ‘60s, who moved to Oahu a few years ago to play jazz-inspired ukulele full time.

As the stars wound down their performances, Beloff called on those in the audience to pick up their ukuleles and join in.

“OK, let’s have a mass tuneup,” Beloff said, plucking the top string loudly. “There’s your top G string. My. C: Dog. Has, E string. Fleas.” The crowd hits “fleas” with a flourish and settles in with a sense of anticipation to “Under the Boardwalk.” Someone holds up big chord charts under the stage: C! G-7! C!

“We’re here in the center of the ukulele universe,” Beloff said happily. “So what else could matter?”

Up on the stage, the Langley Ukulele Ensemble from the small town of Langley, Canada, rocks into “Proud Mary.” School administrator Peter Luongo has nurtured a ukulele-in-the-schools program there for 21 years; now, the ensemble of current and former students has a catalog of CDs and tours internationally.

“We set a strategic plan, to say we were going to double the number of kids studying ukulele. It’s tripled,” Luongo said.

From “Rolling on a River,” they go soft--time for that old big-moon standby, “The Hawaiian Wedding Song.” Luongo takes the crowd back, back to what it must’ve been like, listening in the Monarch Room at the Royal Hawaiian, under the crystal chandeliers and pink brocade, with the surf of bee-you-tee-ful Waikiki Beach lapping outside.

I will love you longer than forever, promise me that you will leave me never.

In the front row, Richard Sparks, a retiree from Spokane, Wash., reaches over and takes the hand of his wife, Laura, just as he did 47 years ago on their wedding day. The ukuleles titter like birds.