this little ukulele

Douglas Wolk has been serving as eMusic’s alt/punk columnist for the last four years now, writing about everyone from Sufjan Stevens to Swans with remarkable insight and inventiveness. When Douglas proposed a column on ukulele music, we decided to take it one step further: Douglas is a uke player himself, so I asked him if he’d be willing to write about how his interest in the instrument developed, and to talk a little bit about his experiences at Portland’s four-day Uke Fest. The results, which include some choice YouTube embeds, do not disappoint.

I started playing ukulele as a fluke, and on a Fluke — a solidly built plastic ukulele that my wife bought me as a present a few years ago. In those days, I played bass more than anything else, as well as a little bit of guitar and the lightweight, plinky little instrument took a bit of getting used to. But I picked it up quickly — it’s not tuned like a guitar, but its strings have the same tonal relationship as the upper four strings of a guitar, give or take an octave.

Before I knew it, I was playing the uke all the time. I picked up a few ukulele songbooks. I started surfing the web for uke tablature. And then I started sliding into uke culture. It’s not as if there’s a huge ukulele renaissance going on right now; they’re still something of a fringe affair. But people who play them are really into them, and I have pretty much become a Uke Person.

So what’s so great about them? For one thing, they’re terrific instruments to accompany singing. They support a voice without getting in the way of it. They’re light and portable and not at all overpowering. They don’t have the rich tone that a guitar has, but they get the job done. They’re also very, very easy to play — in the standard GCEA “my-dog-has-fleas” tuning, pretty much any major or minor chord is a cinch. And it’s exceptionally easy to switch chords on them. That’s why they’re well-suited to Tin Pan Alley-type songs with tricky chord progressions; with a little practice, you can play “chord solos,” where every note of a melody is fleshed out by a different chord.

What I had in mind when I started playing uke, for the most part, was the sort of thing Stephin Merritt does. I first heard a bunch of the songs he wrote for the Magnetic Fields‘ 69 Love Songs when he played them at a tiny club, accompanied only by a uke, and most of his songs are very uke-friendly — which is to say that they can be played by somebody who just picked up the instrument a few weeks earlier. Merritt has also written a few songs that are in fact about ukuleles, like “This Little Ukulele” from the Eban And Charley soundtrack. Here he is singing and playing a resonator ukulele on “Smile, No One Cares How You Feel,” one of the songs he wrote for Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events, on an Atlanta TV station that doesn’t quite seem prepared for it. (The song starts about halfway through the clip.)

There are other indie-pop ukers these days, too: Zach Condon of Beirut has made the ukulele one of his chief instruments (the excellent site Uke Hunt has uke tabs for every released Beirut song to date), and the instrument turns up all over the Carmaig de Forest and Jens Lekman discographies. But Uke People, I quickly discovered, are generally much more into old-time songs. (You know how guitarists always start doodling “Stairway to Heaven”? With ukulele players, it’s “Five Foot Two, Eyes of Blue.”)

That’s because there was actually a uke boom in the ’20s, after the instrument came over to the U.S. mainland from Hawaii. The king of the first American ukulele craze was Cliff “Ukulele Ike” Edwards — you have most likely heard him as the voice of Jiminy Cricket, but he was also the person who popularized “Singin’ in the Rain” (also the title track of his solid greatest-hits collection on eMusic). Also worth tracking down: the supreme picker Roy Smeck. (Check out “Ukulele Bounce” on the not-quite-accurately-titled Roy Smeck Plays Hawaiian Guitar.)

The uke also became a familiar sight in England for a few decades, largely thanks to the music-hall entertainer George Formby, who was more or less the British equivalent of Bob Hope. eMusic has an enormous selection of Formby stuff, including the five-disc set England’s Famed Clown Prince of Song. It’s worth poking around his catalogue, especially for his best-known songs: “With My Little Stick of Blackpool Rock,” “He Does Look a Swank Does Frank on His Tank,” his signature tune “The Window Cleaner.” A little Formby goes a long way — his repertoire is basically variations on a double-entendre formula — but he remained a beloved figure in England long after his death (George Harrison, a uke player himself, was a huge fan), and he was an unbelievable player: he had a “split-stroke” technique that almost nobody else can even pull off. Here he is in 1934, singing one of his big early hits, “Why Don’t Women Like Me?”

Tomorrow: my adventures at Uke Camp.