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Spirit of Aloha | Features | November/December 2005

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How I Learned to Play the Ukulele

By John King
The little twanger has a voice and, yes, indeed, it sings
Let me tell you a secret. The ukulele is Portuguese. Its true. A trio of
Portuguese woodworkers from the island of Madeira, who emigrated to
Hawaii in 1879, began making the little four-string guitars in Honolulu in the
1880s. But they didnt call them ukuleles back then; instead, they used the
instruments Portuguese name: machete (pronounced mah-SHET). The
machete had been popular with Madeirans for hundreds of years; in fact, it
was their national instrument. One American, a senator named Dix, who
spent a winter season at Madeira in the 1840s, reported that in the right
Kolomona, the
hands a machete could produce very pretty music, especially when
Hawaiian Troubadour, accompanied by a guitar or cello, but by itself, it was thin and meager. It is
was painted by Hubert an invention of the island, he wrote, and one of which the island has no
great cause to be proud. It is not probable that the machete will ever
Vos in 1898
emigrate from Madeira.

Friends of Aloha

Ladies and gentlemen, please give it up for Sen. John Dix, visionary.
Actually, the little twanger went anywhere the Madeira islanders did, which
was just about everywhere: Capetown, Honolulu, the Antilles, Asia, North
and South America. In the 1850s, an Oxford clergyman and author named
Charles Lutwidge Dodgson snapped the first-ever pictures of the tiny, toylike
instrument. The subjects of that shoot were three young sistersAlice,
Lorina and Edith Liddelleach dressed in Madeiran lace and holding a
machete. Dodgson, who is remembered today by his pen name, Lewis
Carroll, was especially fond of 6-year-old Alice. You remember Alice, too,
dont you? In Wonderland?
Brushes with greatness aside, it wasnt until the Madeirans and their
guitarettes arrived at the fertile islands of Hawaii that the popularity of the
little instrument really took root and grew. And grew. First, it was subjected to
a complete makeover: constructed of native Hawaiian koa wood instead of
the traditional til (sesame plant) and pine, given a revamped tuning, a
different repertoire and a new name. Secondly, troupes of Hawaiian

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performers with ukuleles fanned out across America, performing at worlds

fairs, chautauquas and vaudevilles, making names for themselves and
generating a lot of interest in Hawaii, Hawaiian music and culture. Thirdly,
when the 17 million visitors who attended the Panama-Pacific International
Exposition in San Francisco in 1915 went crazy for Hawaiian music and the
ukulele, the event sparked a nationwide mania for the instrument that didnt
subside until the Great Depression.

Anthony Zablan was

one of the Hawaiian
musicians

About that makeover: Woodworkers did a brisk business in Madeira, making

furniture, cabinets and curios, as well as stringed instruments. They knew
their stuff, and why notmadeira means wood in Portuguesebut there
was one kind of wood they didnt have: koa. Acacia koa Gray, sometimes
called Hawaiian mahogany, had been revered for centuries by Native
Hawaiians, who used it for their canoes and calabashes. Prized for its deep
red color, curly grain and capacity to take a high polish, it wasisarguably
the most beautiful wood in the world, and grows only in Hawaii. Garbed in
Hawaiian koa, the little machete took on a whole new luster. Today, a 1930svintage Martin 5K ukulele (K for koa)the holy grail of ukedomwill set
you back about $10K, if you can find one for sale.

The ukuleles famous my-dog-has-fleas tuning was actually borrowed from

another Madeiran instrument, a five-string guitar called the rajao
(pronounced rah-ZHOW). The original machete tuning is open-G; when and
why it was changed to my-dog-has-fleas is one of those little mysteries that
always leads to more questions than answers. In the early 1890s, a fellow
named Holstein, who headed up the music department of the Hawaiian News
Co., published a pamphlet entitled Chords of the Taro-patch Guitar, which is
what Honoluluans called the rajao in those days. Holstein, an astute
businessman, also included directions for tuning the ukulele-guitar; you
Kamakas pineapple tune it, he said, the same as you tune the top four strings of the taro-patch.
ukulele patent from Whether this reflected the practice of the day, or whether Holstein effected a
whole new trend in tuning, is impossible to say. Its the old riddle of the
1928. The name was a
chicken and the egg. Even the origins of the mnemonic my-dog-has-fleas is
pun on the Dole
lost to us. They do tell a humorous story about it in Honolulu, though. A keiki
trademark for Ukulele walks into the Kamaka ukulele factory on South Street and tells Sam
Brand Pineapple.
Kamaka, I want to buy a flea string for my ukulele. When Sam suggests
the kid means a C string, the little keiki replies, No, I dont! When my kumu
[teacher] tunes my ukulele, she sings My-dog-has-fleas and its the flea string that broke!
Recently, a controversy arose involving players who tuned their G stringsthats the my stringdown
an octave, so-called low-G tuning. The traditionalists, usingyou guessed ithigh-G tuning, bemoaned
the modernists destroying the one thing that made the ukulele unique, all for the sake of a few extra
notes. In the interest of full disclosure, I have to tell you, Im a high-G man, but I dont feel the least bit
threatened by those players whove succumbed to the Dark Side. Understandably, not everyone feels
the way I do. One of my high-G colleagues told me about a recurring dream he has where he drives
legions of low-G players over the PaliKamehameha stylethereby uniting the Islands under one
tuning, forever and ever. One other wrinkle: Even though I tune to high-G, I do it starting from the other
end of the jingle, fleas-has-dog-my. I wonder what Jonathan Swift would have made of that?

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Hawaiian music at the turn of the 20th century, the period when the ukulele was just becoming popular,
was often described as weirdnot outer-space weird, but exoticand sensuous, because it was used
to accompany the hula-hula dance. When missionaries began teaching the Hawaiians how to sing
hymnsthe ancients didnt have familiar conventions like melody and harmonythe natives took the
square-sounding tunes and rhythms, set them to Hawaiian poetry and created a new type of musical
expression: nahe nahe, or sweet Hawaiian music. The soft, vowel-rich Hawaiian language, with its
unusual accents, combined with the simple harmonies of Christian hymnody, produced a beautiful,
compelling music of almost universal appeal. And this weird and sensuous music was made by men
and women who sang while thrumming out an accompaniment on their ukulele.
But how did the machete end up with a name like ukulele? In Hawaiian, ukulele literally means the
louseukuthat jumpslelein honor of that other European import, Ctenocephalides Felis, the cat
flea. This is one of those little mysteries where there is one question and a lot of possible answers. On a
multiple-choice test (I didnt tell you thered be a quiz?), the options might look something like this:
A. The performers fingers flew so fast, they looked like jumping fleas.
B. King Kalakauas vice chamberlain was small and nimble like a flea, so he acquired the nickname
Ukulele. He was also a gifted musician and played the machete so finely that the instrument became
eponymous.
C. Ukulele has another, poetic meaning: the gift that came from afar.
D. Some Hawaiians likened the machete to the ukeke, an indigenous string instrument. They called it
the ukeke-lele, or dancing ukeke, which was shortened to uk-lele, and then changed to ukulele.
E. None of the above.
At the time, no one thought it was very important how the ukulele got its name; at least, if anyone knew,
they werent telling. It wasnt until the instrument achieved worldwide acclaim that people started
wondering. The result was that all of these explanations, and a few others besides, were trotted out
years after the fact. So take your best shot. Poll the audience. Call a friend. Final answer? Your guess is
as good as mine.
Did you know the ukulele has a head, neck and body, and a slew of other anthropomorphic features,
including a voice? Accomplished players are said to make their instruments sing. There are soprano
ukes, concert ukes, tenor and baritone ukes, each bigger than the last; one Chicago company even
marketed a bass uke in the 1930s. The tenor seems to be the most popular choice for players in Hawaii
today, but when Jack London visited Honolulu in 1907, ukuleles came in only one size, the soprano.
London likened the ukulele to a young guitar; he even managed to work it into a few of his short stories
and novels. Curiously, the only difference between a soprano and a tenor (or a concert) ukulele is the
size of the instrument. The tuning and rangewhether high-G or low-Gare the same for all three.
Imagine the havoc it would create at the opera if tenors were just taller, wider, deeper versions of
sopranos.
In the early 1920s, after it had enjoyed a great vogue spanning the better part of a decadeand a world
warthe ukulele began to garner a number of detractors. Since it had been advertised as an instrument

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anyone could learn to play, nearly everyone tried. Those stricken with crummy-uke-player syndrome
(CUPSeach letter is pronounced) were chronically unaware of their affliction; obliviousness was
symptomatic. And so they played on. And on.
CUPS made some wax poetic, including this anonymous piece, which appeared in a newspaper in 1917:

Lines to a Ukalale
(You call it you-kal-laylie when you call
it anything fit to print.)
I need no nerve tonic when
neighbors harmonic
Hold concerts all hours of the night.
Ill stand for the fiddle,
though hoping the lidll
Be clamped down before morning light.
When some blithe soprano
drowns out the py-ano
I smile at her stepladder yelp.
I know how to suffer, but,
say, theres one duffer
Wholl find me much rougher
the whelp!
He tortures me daily
With his ukalale,
That weird ukalale
Oh, help!
Make no mistake, despite their popular appeal, ukuleleand ukulele playersirritated a lot of people.
When the last of the original Portuguese uke makers died in Honolulu in 1922, newspapers across the
U.S. mainland scurried to print this story:

Hawaiian Not Guilty

The death in Honolulu of Manuel
Nunes discloses information that leads to
the complete vindication
of the Hawaiians of the charge of
inventing the ukulele. Nunes was the originator of this instrument. In hisidle
hours he fashioned a guitar-like contraption from a cigar
box and a few strings. Others developed and improved upon the thing, which has
been pestering civilization ever since. It is hard to suspect a serious
minded islander of indulging in that sort of mischief.
Some real literary heavyweights were inspired to put pen to paper while under the spell of the uke. Two

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Englishmen come to mind. The first, Rupert Brooke, sailed to Hawaii in 1913; his ode to the ukulele is
nothing less than a sonnet:

Waikiki
Warm perfumes like a breath
from vine and tree
Drift down the darkness.
Plangent, hidden from eyes,
Somewhere an eukaleli thrills and cries
And stabs with pain the nights
brown savagery.
And dark scents whisper; and
dim waves creep to me,
Gleam like a womans hair,
stretch out, and rise;
And new stars burn into
the ancient skies,
Over the murmurous soft Hawaiian sea.
And I recall, lose, grasp, forget again,
And still remember, a tale I have
heard, or known
An empty tale, of idleness and pain,
Of two that lovedor did
not loveand one
Whose perplexed heart
did evil, foolishly,
A long while since, and by
some other sea.
Ive been told with absolute authority that the last bit is about Adam and Eve and their fall from grace. I
believe it. And if there were eukalelis in the Garden of Eden, it truly must have been Paradise.
You probably noticed that Brooke did an even worse job of spelling ukulele than our first, anonymous
poet did: eukaleli, ukalele. Writer Malcolm Lowry spelled it u-k-e-l-e-l-e, which is actually in the dictionary
as an alternative to u-k-u-l-e-l-e. As a young man, Lowrys ambition had been to be a professional
ukulele player, but, tragically, he was one of those people beset with CUPS. Before his death in 1957,
he wrote:

Epitaph
Malcolm Lowry
Late of the Bowery
His prose was flowery
And often glowery

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He lived, nightly, and drank, daily

And died playing the ukelele.
Some people may tell you the ukulele is easy to play, but dont you believe them. Like most instruments,
its easy to play badly and hard to play well. Ive learned a lot about the ukeand myselfsince I started
playing in 1960, while living in Ewa Beach. I was 6 years old. My mother played and one day I picked up
her Kamaka pineappleso-called because the body has an oval shape, like a pineapple, instead of a
figure eight. The first thing I recognized was that playing the uke (which we all pronounced colloquially,
yook) was not as easy as everyone had said it was. It was downright difficult. The second thing I noticed,
after fumbling around for half an hour, was that I had absolutely no talent. Now, what seems like an
inauspicious start was really a series of valuable life lessons. Although it took me a few years to realize
it, in that first half-hour I had learnedor at least been introduced tosome important concepts: Dont
believe everything everyone tells you; be honest with yourself; talent is relativethose who learn
quicker than you do are talented, and those who dont, arent; anytime someone tells you something is
easy to learn, its probably because they want to sell you lessons. At least I wasnt a candidate for
CUPS. I knew that I sucked.
Over the years I got a guitar, took a bunch of lessons and learned how to play. It was not that I wanted to
learn. I was just obsessed with the idea of playing. Because the guitar and the lessons had been an
investment made on my behalf, my parents forced me to practice 30 minutes every day. My musical
ability seemed to evolve at a geologic clip characterized by long periods of stasis punctuated with
sudden forward lurches. Through it all I would occasionally take up my mothers pineapple, strum it and
give myself a progress report. Invariably, the verdict was: I was a terrible uke player. After three decades
of this my brain rebelled. No way. It wasnt possible. I had learned to play the guitar. Classical, no less. I
was even teaching guitar at an expensive liberal arts college. If I couldnt play the uke, which is just a
small guitar, then it must be the instrument I was using, right? At the time, I was ready to concede Moms
old Kamaka was good for nothing more than hanging on the wallor turning into fancy koa-wood
kindling. But then I decided to try one more thing. In my classical studies Id learned that guitars had
once been tuned my-dog-has-fleas, like ukuleles. Of course, musicologists had a proper academic
name for it: re-entrant tuning.
In the time of J.S. Bachsome years before Capt. James Cook stumbled upon the island he called
Owyheeguitarists armed with re-entrantly tuned instruments had pioneered a style of playing they
called campanela, which means little bell sounds. The bottom line is, they played each note of a melody
on a different string, creating a sound like a harpor little, pealing bellswhere notes over-rang one
another. I taught myself an appropriate Bach tune using the campanela technique and applied it to my
mothers pineapple. It was a revelation. The instrument had a voice and when I played, it sang to me.
Since then, Ive recorded a few ukulele CDs, published a couple of collections of uke pieces and played
around the country at various music festivals. I dont think any of that is particularly significant; What is
important is that I never gave up on the ukulele, or myself. If I had, I never would have discovered my
aptitude for playing. That discoveryan epiphany, reallywas a big relief. Those things you hear when
youre a kid, like slow and steady wins the race and good things come to those who wait and talent
is 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration have been revealed to me in my life in unexpected
ways, involving ukuleles. And tuning does make a difference: you cant play campanela style with a uke
tuned to low G.
Ive given a few workshops in the past year and its great to see the numbers of people excited about
making music with their ukuleles. None of them seem too interested in learning the campanela style of

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playing, but they do express their appreciation for how beautiful it sounds. The truth is its a crazy way to
play the uke; ease of execution is all but sacrificed, subordinated to whatever it takes to get that
shimmering, harplike sound. It works for me, because when I play it that way, the ukulele sings. It may
not work for you, but unless you try, youll never know. At the Ukulele Guild of Hawaii Exhibition and
Conference in Waikiki last November, someone was interested in buying one of my collections of uke
music, but after attending my workshop she was worried it might be too difficult for her. No, no, you
should try it, I assured her. Its easy.

JOHN KING teaches guitar at Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, Fla. He is a member of the Ukulele
Guild of Hawaii and the board of directors of the Ukulele Hall of Fame Museum. His CDs of Bach and
the music of Hawaiis royal family have been featured on National Public Radio. King has authored
two collections of ukulele music, published by Mel Bay and Hal Leonard, and is co-authoring a
scholarly history of ukulele for the University of Hawaii Press.

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