How I Learned to Play the ‘Ukulele
March 6th, 2008(Without Really Trying)
by John King
et me tell you a secret. The ‘ukulele is Portuguese. It’s true. A trio of Portuguese woodworkers from the island of Madeira, who emigrated to Hawai‘i in 1879, began making the little four-string guitars in Honolulu in the 1880s. But they didn’t call them ‘ukuleles back then; instead, they used the instrument’s 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 hands a machete could produce very pretty music, especially when accompanied by a guitar or cello, but by itself, it was thin and meager. “It is 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 emigrate from Madeira.”
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 photo shoot were three young sisters—Alice, Lorina and Edith Liddell—each dressed in Madeiran lace and holding a machete. Dodgson, who is remembered today by his pen name, Lewis Carroll, was especially fond of six-year-old Alice. You remember Alice, too, don’t you? In Wonderland?
Brushes with greatness aside, it wasn’t until the Madeirans and their guitarettes arrived at the fertile islands of Hawai‘i 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 and pine, given a revamped tuning, a different repertoire and a new name. Secondly, troupes of Hawaiian performers with ‘ukuleles fanned out across America, performing at world’s fairs, chautauquas and vaudevilles, making names for themselves and generating a lot of interest in Hawai‘i, Hawaiian music and culture. Thirdly, when the seventeen 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 didn’t subside until the Great Depression.
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 not—madeira means wood in Portuguese—but there was one kind of wood they didn’t 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 was—is—arguably the most beautiful wood in the world, and grows only in Hawai‘i. Garbed in Hawaiian koa, the little machete took on a whole new luster. Today, a 1930s-vintage Martin 5K ukulele (K for koa)—the “holy grail” of ukedom—will set you back about $10K, if you can find one for sale.
The ‘ukulele’s 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 tune it, he said, the same as you tune the top four strings of the taro-patch. Whether this reflected the practice of the day, or whether Holstein effected a whole new trend in tuning, is impossible to say. It’s the old riddle of the chicken and the egg. Even the origins of the mnemonic my-dog-has-fleas is lost to us. They do tell a humorous story about it in Honolulu, though. A keiki [child] walks into the Kamaka ‘ukulele factory on South Street and tells Sam 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 don’t! When my kumu [teacher] tunes my ‘ukulele, she sings ‘My-dog-has-fleas’ and it’s the flea string that broke!”
Recently a controversy arose involving players who tuned their G strings—that’s the “my” string—down an octave, so-called low-G tuning. The traditionalists, using—you guessed it—high-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, I’m a high-G man, but I don’t feel the least bit threatened by those players who’ve 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 Pali—Kamehameha style—thereby 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?
awaiian music at the turn of the 20th Century, the period when the ‘ukulele started to become popular, was often described as weird—not outer-space weird, but exotic—and sensuous, because it was used to accompany the “hula-hula” dance. When missionaries began teaching the Hawaiians how to sing hymns—the ancients didn’t have familiar conventions like melody and harmony—the 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 louse—‘uku—that jumps—lele—in 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 didn’t tell you there’d be a quiz?), the options might look something like this:
A. The performer’s fingers flew so fast, they looked like jumping fleas.
B. King Kalakaua’s 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 ‘ukê-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 weren’t telling. It wasn’t 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 Hawai‘i 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 range—whether high-G or low-G—are the same for all three. Imagine the havoc it would create at the opera if tenors were just taller, wider, deeper versions of sopranos.
n the early 1920s, after it had enjoyed a great vogue spanning the better part of a decade—and a world war—the ‘ukulele began to garner a number of detractors. Since it had been advertised as an instrument anyone could learn to play, nearly everyone tried. Those stricken with crummy-uke-player syndrome (CUPS—each 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.
I’ll stand for the fiddle,
though hoping the lid’ll
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, there’s one duffer
Who’ll 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, ‘ukulele—and ‘ukulele players—irritated 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:
Hawaiians 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 his idle 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 Englishmen come to mind. The first, Rupert Brooke, sailed to Hawai‘i 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 night’s brown savagery.
And dark scents whisper; and dim waves creep to me,
Gleam like a woman’s 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 loved—or did not love—and one
Whose perplexed heart did evil, foolishly,
A long while since, and by some other sea.
I’ve 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, Lowry’s 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
He lived, nightly, and drank, daily
And died playing the ukelele.
ome people may tell you the ‘ukulele is easy to play, but don’t you believe them. Like most instruments, it’s easy to play badly and hard to play well. I’ve learned a lot about the uke—and myself—since 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 pineapple—so-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, ook) 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 learned—or at least been introduced to—some important concepts: Don’t believe everything everyone tells you; be honest with yourself; talent is relative—those who learn quicker than you do are talented, and those who don’t, aren’t; anytime someone tells you something is easy to learn, it’s probably because they want to sell you lessons. At least I wasn’t 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 thirty 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 mother’s 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 wasn’t possible. I had learned to play the guitar. Classical, no less. I was even teaching guitar at an expensive liberal arts college. If I couldn’t 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 Mom’s old Kamaka was good for nothing more than hanging on the wall—or turning into fancy koa-wood kindling. But then I decided to try one more thing. In my classical studies I’d 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. Bach—some years before Capt. James Cook stumbled upon the island he called Owyhee—guitarists 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 harp—or little, pealing bells—where notes over-rang one another. I taught myself an appropriate Bach tune using the campanela technique and applied it to my mother’s pineapple. It was a revelation. The instrument had a voice and when I played, it sang to me. Since then, I’ve recorded a few ‘ukulele CDs, published a couple of collections of uke pieces and played around the country at various music festivals. I don’t 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 discovery—an epiphany, really—was a big relief. Those things you hear when you’re a kid, like “slow and steady wins the race” and “good things come to those who wait” and “talent is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration” have been revealed to me in my life in unexpected ways, involving ‘ukuleles. And tuning does make a difference: you can’t play campanela style with a uke tuned to low G.
I’ve given a few workshops in the past year and it’s 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 playing, but they do express their appreciation for how beautiful it sounds. The truth is it’s 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, you’ll never know. At the ‘Ukulele Guild of Hawai‘i 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. “It’s easy.”
This essay was originally published in the November-December 2005 issue of Aloha Spirit: The Magazine of Aloha Airlines.
© 2005 by John King
he imprimatur of royalty has always been coveted by musical instrument makers and other artisans, if only to further their reputations (and sales) among the trend-setting, well-bred, well-heeled hangers-on within the imperial circle. A case in point is Antonio Stradivari who was commissioned by the de’ Medici family, two Spanish kings and other, lesser nobles. The orders poured in, so much so Stradivari nixed outright gifting an entire quintet—as in two fiddles, a viola, a tenore, and a ’cello—to Philip V of Spain when that monarch visited Cremona in 1706. It would have set a bad precedent; Stradivari’s son Paolo disposed of that particular set of instruments after his father’s death in 1737.
And what did it matter if their majesties and their court were just dilettantes, mere dabblers? Did Gottfried Silbermann really concern himself with whether Frederick the Great (as renowned for his musical soirees at San-Souci as for his generaling on the Austrian frontier) could coax a sforzando, pianissimo, or legato out of the old organ-maker’s new-fangled pianoforte? It was enough that the instrument was there and waiting for Carl Phillip Emmanuel Bach to tickle the ivories, or on the rare occasion when CPE’s old man, Johann Sebastian showed up in Berlin to improvise canons and fugues for Frederick and his guests. The upshot was, due to the royal association, Silbermann & Co. sold a lot of pianos.
t’s a fact that the uke—going by the name ukulele—made its earliest recorded appearance in Hawai‘i during a San-Souci-esque interlude with royalty aboard a British yacht in Honolulu Harbor. A threesome of young women kicked off the second half of the evening’s entertainment with an “ukulele trio.” A heretofore unpublished photograph of these three graces (two-out-of-three, at least—one of them is unidentified but may be the enigmatic “Miss Widemann,” daughter of a prominent Honoluluan) surfaced at the Hawai‘i State Archives during my research in 2001. Arrayed on the lawn at Ainahau, the Waikiki estate of Archibald Cleghorn and his wife, Princess Likelike, are Cleghorn’s daughters, Annie (holding an ‘ukulele), and her half-sister, Ka‘iulani, or more properly, Princess Victoria Ka‘iulani, the niece of King Kalakaua.
David Kalakaua has long been credited with the revival of Hawaiian culture after decades of stultifying missionary influence. He set the fashion for all to follow, introducing and popularizing the hula ku‘i, a muted, genteel dance imbued with Victorian restraint and Hawaiian grace to the accompaniment of guitars, taropatches and ukuleles. The king was also a man, and a man with king-sized appetites—Robert Louis Stevenson watched him down five bottles of champagne one afternoon—after which the mo‘i was “quite presentable, although perceptibly more dignified, at the end.”
Kalakaua was known to haunt the guitar shop of Dias—it was at 11 King Street, ‘ewa of ‘Iolani Palace—and because Dias had no English and the king had no Portuguese, Dias’ teenaged daughter, Christina, would facilitate conversations between the two. So, it’s not surprising that the only surviving ukuleles with a truly royal Hawaiian provenance were both made by the artful Madeiran (Ka‘iulani’s Dias uke is in a private collection in Honolulu; another Dias, given as a gift by Kalakaua, has wound up in the Bernice P. Bishop Museum). Late in her long life, Christina Dias Gilliland remarked that Kalakaua even allowed her father to brand his instruments with the royal seal. Sadly, no such instruments are known to have survived.
In 1916, another of Dias’ countrymen, Manuel Nunes, advertised the patronage of the “Royal Hawaiian Family” fully twenty-five years after Kalakaua’s death and twenty-three years after the overthrow of Queen Liliuokalani! That such a royal endorsement could still be seen as beneficial nearly a quarter-century after the abolition of the monarchy was a testament to the continued high regard accorded the ali‘i in the Islands. Nunes wasn’t alone: in 1916 & 1917 the short-lived Hawaiian Ukulele Co. advertised themselves—albeit generically—as “makers of the Celebrated Royal Ukuleles.” These latter testimonials are second-hand at best; marketing, pure and simple.
evertheless, the ‘ukulele has a proud tradition of association with royalty not only in Hawai‘i but also in its former home, Madeira (in its former guise, the machete), and in England. Octavianno João Nunes, the Funchalese violeiro, reportedly presented an exquisite machete to the Empress of Brazil when she visited Madeira in the 19th century. Far more famously, Edward, Prince of Wales—no stranger to Hawai‘i, having visited Waikiki on a 210-day ‘round-the-world goodwill trip in 1920—was known to have played the ‘ukulele when he became enamored with American jazz in the mid-1920s. He even lent his title (or was it misappropriated?) to a high-end Harmony uke presented him by Johnny Marvin in 1928:
In February 1928, Marvin signed for a ten-week engagement at the Kit Kat Club in London. Around the same time he signed an agreement with the Harmony Company of Chicago, which would market a ukulele and ukulele banjo bearing Marvin’s name. On May 5, 1928, Marvin sailed for England on the Leviathan. As a publicity stunt the Harmony Company made a special gold-engraved ukulele to be presented to the Prince of Wales, with his coat-of-arms and seal embossed on it. Marvin also took along 10,000 miniature ukuleles made by Harmony for throwaways during his London stay. Johnny Marvin opened his London engagement at the Kit Kat Club on May 14; on June 16, Billboard credited [him] with ‘having brought the Prince of Wales twice in one evening to the Kit Kat Club to hear his warbling and uke playing.’
Sophie Tucker, another American veteran of the London Kit-Kat Club remembered performing for Edward at a private party in 1925. “During the evening I was sent for to sing for the prince,” she wrote. “I sang all the songs [he] called for. He loved playing the ukulele. He got me to teach him my song, ‘Ukulele Lady.’” The prince was a quick study. A few months later, Edward was jamming with a tribe of bushmen at a rail siding in the South African veld:
he Royal Hawaiian Hotel opened February 1, 1927, “reviving memories” of the old hotel of the same name. The old Royal was located, appropriately enough, on Hotel St. near ‘Iolani Palace in downtown Honolulu, while the Waikiki site “was an ancient gathering place of Hawaiian royalty, a legendary watering place fed by several springs.” The opening-day festivities, presided over by Princess Kawananakoa, included a concert by the Royal Hawaiian Band, a ten-dollar-a-plate dinner and ball, and an historic pageant (“colorful and semi-barbaric”) reenacting the arrival of Kamehameha the Great on Oahu. The staff of 300 included “60 people in the kitchen, 95 waiters, 40 room boys, 20 bellboys, 10 elevator operators, five telephone operators, two doormen, two pages and eight Chinese lobby boys, dressed in “Cathayan costumes,” who mostly chop-chopped for missee’s trunks.” The hotel was equipped with “38,624 dishes, 28,284 glasses, 20,292 knives, forks and spoons, 22,573 towels, 30,988 sheets, blankets and bedspreads, 25 cages of canary birds” and one ‘ukulele shop, the Paul Summers Studios.
Paul Summers was a retailer first and foremost, a teacher (he offered a course of six ‘ukulele lessons for $10 dollars) and performer (he was the original guitarist for Harry Owens’ Royal Hawaiians) second, but not a uke maker. Nevertheless, instruments with the Summers label turn up regularly, including “The Waikiki” brand and “Moana” (Summers had a studio at the Moana, too— both hotels were owned by the Territorial Hotel Company). One of Summers’ known suppliers was Sam Chang who, according to his daughter Clarice Chang, would make a batch of ukuleles in the basement of his house then pedal a bike down to Waikiki to deliver them. There were clearly other makers in Hawaii supplying Summers with ukes—too many survive to have been the work of one man. But I have never seen a Summers’ ‘ukulele with the Royal Hawaiian brand; or a Royal Hawaiian ‘ukulele with a connection to the hotel, besides the name “Royal Hawaiian” which has been used for products from soup to nuts. So, if Summers didn’t make them, and the RHH didn’t sell them, who did?
raw up a list of known ukulele makers active in Honolulu in the late 1920s and 30s and it’s surprisingly short. Times were tough: the real estate bust in Florida, and the stock market crash and ensuing depression cut heavily into the tourism business in Hawai‘i. The ‘ukulele, which had been extremely popular for a decade, was eclipsed by the new medium of radio and improved electronic recording. Competition from the Mainland was intense, all but crowding out Island makers from the continental market. Sales plummeted. In 1933, Sam Kamaka estimated he was selling fifteen ukuleles a month, down from three to four hundred a month in better times. To make ends meet Kamaka ran a taxi stand from his 1814 S. King St. factory, dealt in flowers and leis, and started a bird-of-paradise nursery in Halekou.
Other luthiers to survive the Crash and make it into the 30s intact (besides the two Sams—Chang & Kamaka) were the Aloha Ukulele Manufacturing Company, Jonah Kumalae, G.P. Mossman, and C.Q. Yee Hop & Company. Aloha was incorporated in late 1917 and dissolved in 1935; most of the shareholders were of Chinese descent but for one notable exception: Ernest Ka‘ai, who owned five percent of the company. Aloha was run by Chu Gem—a businessman rather than a craftsman; the creative genius was Tai Chong Goo who worked under the pseudonym Akai. Tai’s ukuleles are among the most beautiful and well crafted instruments of the period. Often branded with the Honolulu Advertising Club trademark (TABU) and a cursive “Akai,” the Aloha/Akai ‘ukulele might have a highly flamed koa body, a fanciful, asymmetrical headstock and top-notch inlay work or be a plain, well-proportioned beauty with lovely round curves. Strictly a wholesale business in their early years, Aloha eventually opened a retail shop on the factory premises. When the company folded, Tai continued making ukuleles on his own under the name Akai Ukulele & Curio Company; he died in Honolulu in 1968 at the age of 88.
George Paele Mossman got into the ‘ukulele business with Clarence Kinney in 1914; by 1918 they had split up. Mossman continued making ukuleles and in 1927 claimed to have perfected a uke which could be heard from half a mile away and yet still retain its clarity and tonal sweetness. He called it the Bell Tone and promptly trademarked the name with the U.S. Patent Office in Washington, D.C. Mossman ran large ads for Bell Tone ukes in the Honolulu Advertiser (they could be purchased at leading music stores and several hotels including the Royal Hawaiian and Moana); he projected annual sales of 10,000 instruments for 1928, an incredibly optimistic forecast. That same year Mossman founded Lalani Hawaiian Village at Waikiki and devoted himself to furthering deeper understanding of native Hawaiian culture including the hula and Hawaiian language; by 1933 he suspended the manufacture of ukuleles. Mossman died in 1955 at 63 years of age after completing drawings for a larger and more cosmopolitan Lalani Village on Kapiolani Blvd.
1926 and ’27 were years of frenetic pipedreams for ‘ukulele makers in Hawaii. Sales for the large Mainland manufacturers peaked in 1926 then dropped sharply in ’27—news that was slow in coming to the Islands. Everyone was thinking big. In addition to the activities of Kumalae and Mossman, Sam Kamaka applied for a trademark and a design patent for his pineapple ‘ukulele. That same year the Los Angeles Times reported on the formation of a cartel of Hawaiian ukulele makers (for which I have found no hard evidence) that may have been related to the San Francisco musical instrument distributor Jules M. Sahlein. Sahlein trademarked several brand names in 1926, including Y’KeKe (Waikiki) and Hula Lu, names that show up occasionally on Mossman ukuleles and, more frequently, on instruments of the Hawaiian Mahogany Company.
he Hawaiian Mahogany Co. (Hawaiian mahogany is a generic name for Acacia Koa, koa wood) was incorporated in late 1921 for the purpose of cutting, milling, buying and selling, and dealing in koa, ohia, hardwood and other lumber and to manufacture and deal in products of the same: furniture, flooring, curios and ukuleles. The principal owner was C.Q. Yee Hop & Co., Ltd. which owned cattle and large tracts of land on the Big Island of Hawai‘i. In their efforts to expand their beef operation, CQYH&Co established a sawmill in Kona to facilitate clearing the hardwood forests, thereby transforming the land into open range for grazing. Presto, the Hawaiian Mahogany Company is born; and nearly as quickly it dies. CQYH&Co. subsumed operation of the HMCo in the late 1920s while continuing the business of making curios and ukuleles under the name C.Q. Yee Hop & Company. CQYH&Co manufactured and sold ukuleles through 1947 after which telephone directory listings for the company’s ‘ukulele business cease.
“Echo” was the Hawaiian Mahogany Company’s most recognizable ‘ukulele brand, an instrument with a forked, flat brass twanger glued to the underside of the soundboard near the bridge. It didn’t really create an echo. HMCo Echo ukes frequently show up with the Y’KeKe decal of Jules M. Sahlein affixed to the peghead, an indication the instruments were exported and sold on the Mainland. As early as 1929, HMCo (then doing business as C.Q. Yee Hop & Co.) began marketing a new brand of ukuleles: The Royal Hawaiian. Were they ever sold in the lobby of the Pink Palace? Who knows. CQYH&Co. is still around today. Still in the food business. They don’t make and sell ukuleles, but who knows what the future might bring. C.Q. Yee Hop & Co. just might be keeping their options open.
n April 23, 1907—almost a year to the day following San Francisco’s great earthquake—Jack London and his wife, Charmian, sailed London’s yacht Snark through the Golden Gate bound for Hawaii on the first leg of a projected round-the-world cruise. Twenty-seven days later, overdue and feared lost, the Snark limped past throngs of well-wishers lining the wharves of Honolulu Harbor. The following day, Mrs. London took notice of a dark-skinned young man delivering the mail and recorded the moment in her journal: “My first Hawaiian on his native heath.” However, she was mistaken; he was full-blooded Portuguese. “Alack, my first Hawaiian is Portuguese,” she lamented, “and Jack is hilarious.”
mong the first to settle in Honolulu were cabinetmakers Augusto Dias (1842-1915), Manuel Nunes (1843-1922), and Jose do Espirito Santo (1850-1905). By 1886, all three had opened shops making furniture and stringed instruments, including guitars, five-string rajãoes, and machetes—the latter two referred to as taro-patch fiddles. Within three years Dias, Nunes, and Espirito Santo would create a hybrid instrument that combined the small size and figure-eight body shape of the machete with the “my-dog-has-fleas” tuning (sans fifth string) of the rajão. It was called the ‘ukulele.
rafted from the indigenous Hawaiian wood Acacia koa, the ‘ukulele made its debut in Island society during a party aboard the British yacht Nyanza at Honolulu in 1889, introduced by a trio of young women that included Princess Victoria Kaiulani. Due in part to royal patronage (Kaiulani’s uncle, King Kalakaua, was also a player) and the association of koa wood with aloha aina or love of the land, the ‘ukulele quickly assumed a Hawaiian character and an unprecedented popularity with the native population.
riter Charles Warren Stoddard was especially taken with the music he heard everywhere in Honolulu. “Hawaiians are passionately fond of music,” he wrote, whether it was “the clang of gourds…beaten by savage palms,” a passing “troop of troubadours strumming a staccato measure,” or “Professor Berger and his clever native lads”—Henry Berger (1844-1929) and the Royal Hawaiian Band. Berger and his musicians sailed to San Francisco in 1883 to perform at the Triennial Conclave of the Knights Templar, an event that would also include the first Mainland performance of Liliuokalani’s beloved “Aloha Oe.” After a week of grueling, nonstop performances that included light classics, marches, ballroom dance tunes, and an a capella vocal rendition of “Hawaii Ponoi,” the Royal Hawaiian Band were declared “prime favorites with the populace” by the San Francisco Chronicle. During his forty-year tenure, Berger continually expanded the RHB from its martial roots to include full orchestral strings, vocalists, and a glee club that sang Hawaiian songs while accompanying themselves on guitars, banjos, and ‘ukuleles. In the three decades following the Triennial Conclave, the RHB blazed a trail for all Hawaiian musicians—from San Francisco, throughout the West Coast, and ultimately across the continent.
he act of substituting experimental materials for traditional ones in the process of string instrument building is as old as the craft itself. The gradual discovery and implementation of new and better tonewoods, appropriate uses of slab and bias-cut lumber, improvements in design, and gains in the sciences of physics and acoustics have all contributed to the constantly evolving creative act of luthiery. Interestingly, the motives for change are as varied as the changes themselves: popularity, availability of raw materials, new musical styles, old musical styles, demands of recording and broadcasting—or performing plugged-in or unplugged—improved sound and playability, etc. However, the one factor overarching all these is economics and the mantra that has driven mass production is to make things cheaper, faster.
The development in the first half of the 20th century of synthetic materials — plastics — which could be milled, molded, or drawn into virtually any shape, or designed for nearly any use, had a profound effect on the manufacture of objects in general and musical instruments in particular. Introduced into peripheral items such as tuning peg buttons and bindings, materials like pyralin, Bakelite and nylon were quickly expanded into use as integral vibration-transmitting parts like reeds, strings, and nuts and saddles, replacing cane, gut, wood, bone and ivory. While much of the development of plastics occured in the 1930s—most significantly, polystyrene and nylon—widespread commercial exploitaton did not take take place until after the Second World War.
In our own era change has been rapid and is nowhere more representative than in the ukulele family of instruments. Initially introduced into the Hawaiian Islands in the late 19th century, the forerunners to the ukulele (the machete and rajão) were constructed of woods native to the island of Madeira. Within twenty years of its importation the newly christened ukulele began to be made of Hawaiian hardwoods, most notably koa. Not only the backs and sides but the tops—traditionaly made of soft woods like spruce and pine—were made from the indigenous Hawaiian wood, a situation driven perhaps more by availabilty and cost rather than tonal considerations. The zenith of ukulele making in Hawaii was arguably reached by 1905, the year that Jose do Espirito Santo died. With the uke boom of the teens and twenties the mode of production moved from individuals hand-crafting instruments to factory operations both in Hawaii and on the mainland. As an enormously popular instrument, the uke was made incarnate in larger and larger forms from such seemingly disparate materials as wood, coconut shell, steel, tin, composition and plastic. With rare exception, the trend towards mass production lead to a cheapening of the instrument throughout the twentieth-century.
Consider the case of Harry E. Hall of Chicago, Illinois. When Hall filed a patent application in December 1925 for a mass-produced “sheet metal finger plate” for ukuleles, it was a milestone in the odyssey to low-cost and quick production. While Hall’s innovation eventually hit store shelves as a cheap brand called “Tru-Fret,” it had been his intention that the time and money saved by mass producing fingerboards would be lavished on better woods for the rest of the instrument: “Instruments of better tone quality than heretofore can be produced at a given price, not necessarily as a direct result of the tone qualities of the finger plate itself, as by reason of the great saving in price in the construction of the fingerboard, which makes it possible to put a better sound box in the instrument without increasing the total cost.” In practice the concept worked a little differently; inexpensive, mass produced fingerboards were attached to ukulele bodies made of inferior materials so as to further reduce costs and maximize profits. For instance, in the 1950s, ads for the Chicago manufacturer Harmony boasted that “Harmony creativeness and Harmony’s craftsmen teamed to produce this ingenious “Accurately Molded” polystyrene plastic fingerboard for moderately priced wood ukuleles. Offers fretting that is perfection itself. Mechanically exact – provides a freedom of technique hitherto unknown in low priced ukes.” Unfortunately the legacy left us by Harry E. Hall, at least with regard to ukulele construction, and notwithstanding his stated intentions, is this: vintage instruments constructed with molded, screw on fingerboards are the epitome of cheapness.
ut what about the all-plastic ukuleles first manufactured in the 1950s? There were many brands, and several patents, all for injection-molded polystyrene instruments of varying quality. The Strad of plastic ukes was Mario Maccaferri’s Islander, made by Maccaferri’s Mastro Plastics Corp. in the Cremona of the West: Bronx, New York. Highly collectible today, the original plastic Maccaferri ukuleles were made of Dow Styron polystyrene and had Du Pont nylon strings supplied by the National Musical String Co. of New Brunswick, New Jersey. In March, 1950, according to a report in Newsweek Maccaferri was turning out 2,500 ukuleles a day—almost one every thirty seconds—with a backlog of 100,000 orders on hand. Plans for the rest of 1950 included projected sales of half-a-million ukuleles.
Maccaferri had originally planned to invest $10,000 and turn out a five-dollar toy, but reconsidered. “I know how to make the best,” he reasoned. “Why shouldn’t I use all my experience and make a real ukulele?” Why, indeed. When he finally had a product he was satisfied with, Maccaferri had gambled $75,000 on the success of the Islander but “had a much better instrument” than he expected. The major expense was for the four large molding presses that turned out the eight major parts of the ukulele: body, neck, and head (in one molded unit); the soundboard; the fingerboard, with molded-in frets; the bridge, the soundboard ring; the head cover; the inside sound bar; and the nut. Maccaferri’s five U.S. patents covered everything separately from the nut, soundboard, and bridge to the fingerboard and the method of making it. Compared to the simple patents of George Finder and David Rosenheim, Maccaferri’s ukulele patents look like rocket science, and in a way they really are blueprints for making space-age ukes.
According to one early report, the Islander came “in all colors, and one model is flourescent.” The official line was “simulated rosewood, with the head cover and soundboard in ivory.” Over the years, countless variants were made (if there is an official tally of the different colors I have not seen it). Like Magnus and his plastic harmonica before him, Maccaferri reduced the number of parts needed to assemble an ukulele from about twenty-one for a wooden instrument, to eight for the Islander—excluding the strings and tuning pegs.
For a finishing touch, Islanders were surface treated and waxed and packaged in re-usable polyethylene bags secured at the top with rubber bands! They retailed for $5.95 (later reduced to $3.95), and cost about $1.50 to make. Maccaferri said he made 25 cents on each instrument and the rest went to middlemen. The Islander line eventually featured several other products including an extended fingerboard model, a baritone ukulele, a child’s-sized Ukette, and a patented chording device called the Visual Chordmaster. Mastro Plastics Corp. continued making ukuleles well into the 1960s.
ne morning Edward Purvis awoke from a bad dream to find himself transformed into a diminutive, verminous insect. That’s the story, anyway: an article by Lorin Tarr Gill entitled “Portuguese Were First To Introduce Ukulele In Hawaii Says Miss Roberts” published in the magazine section of the Honolulu Advertiser on August 10, 1924. Forty-five years after the arrival of Madeiran cabinet makers who would craft and market the first ‘ukulele in Hawaii, the cultural memory of those remote times was rapidly fading. None of the principals involved in the story were alive in 1924, not the trio of cabinet makers cum luthiers, Dias, Santo and Nunes; not João Fernandes who claimed to be the first to play the machete in Hawai‘i in 1879 after disembarking from the Ravenscrag following a four-month voyage from Madeira; not Edward Purvis.
Charles H. Judd, the chamberlain and commissioner of crown lands, resigned “for certain improper conduct” on August 30, 1886, and Purvis resigned shortly after. Both were suspected of “feeding derogatory information about the government to the anti-Kalakaua newspaper, the Gazette.” Additionally, Purvis was probably the author or coauthor of two notorious burlesques on the Kalakaua monarchy: Grand Duke of Gynbergdrinkentstein and Gynberg Ballads. The caricature of Kalakaua shown here is attributed to Purvis and is from the Gynberg Ballads. The king is depicted holding a giant corkscrew—his left hand resting on an enormous gin bottle—and dressed in an Hawaiian postage stamp malo (bearing his likeness), spurs, garters, collar and cuffs. The illustration accompanies a parody entitled “The Order of the Bar.”
If you read that line without flinching (or even questioning the supposition) don’t feel too bad; it’s that old white magic, institutionalized racism. Mmm. Large-bodied slow-moving Hawaiians? Like the Kahanamoku brothers? Right. Here’s another take on the typical Hawaiian, from The Travel Diary of a Philospher by Count Hermann Keyserling:
The machete was exquisite. The turned ivory appointments, back and sides of Juniperus oxycedrus, spruce soundboard, rosewood bridge with finely wrought moustaches of miniature oak leaves and acorns, and the remains of a strap of colorful, twisted silk still attached to the peg head. It weighed in at fewer than seven ounces. The maker, Octaviano João Nunes da Paixão (1812-1874), is considered to be the most important among a handful of violeiros—stringed-instrument makers—known to have lived and worked in Madeira in the 19th century; a few of Nunes’ instruments survive in museums in Europe and in private collections in the U.S. However, the real treasure was not the machete, remarkable as it was, but the cache of old paper folded double on top of the instrument—the Estudos so casually described in Dr. Stradner’s email.
When I examined the manu-script the source of the spelling “Mabral” became clear. A casual perusal of the last name seemed to have a crossed-out letter “M” at the beginning, followed by “Cabràl.” I scanned the signature at 300dpi and looked at it in full resolution: the scratched out “M” was really an elaborate paraph or rubric made up from Cabràl’s initials, MJMC, the last of which ends in a flourish underscoring the other letters in the last name. The paraph is significant because it identifies the manuscript as an autograph, not merely the work of a copyist.
I was looking for the grave of Augusto Dias. It would have been about as old as the weathered marker in front of me, which I regarded with sober curiosity: a gray slab of crumbling, porous stone with pitted surfaces and ground off edges wearily upthrust through a rough-hewn granite base. Cratered by lichens and haired over with moss, the inscription was faint and without relief, as though melted, in the shadowless, muted light. I brushed the arc of letters—the name—with my fingertips, attempting to read it by touch, Braille-like, but the characters remained at large, elusive, anonymous.
The small congregation of Portuguese graves surrounding me lay laterally round the flank of Punchbowl Crater like a ruin, a few uneven rows of teetering, lonely memorials. Uphill, a multitude of impeccably cared for Buddhist monuments clustered together to honor issei ancestors; downhill, near the lava wall facing Pensacola Street, plots for the kama‘aina and privileged white oligarchy stretched out, royalists and republicans, patriots and revolutionaries, equal now in their final repose beneath the terraced, grass-covered hillock of Makiki Cemetery. Away to the south, the modern towers of bustling Honolulu rose against the sky; to the east, block upon block of tall hotels perched on the sandy apron of Waikiki Beach, squeezed between the rugged promontory of Diamond Head and the serene, blue Pacific.
To my right was the granite headstone of João Fernandes, a plumber from the island of Madeira who arrived in Honolulu in 1879. By his own account, João was the first person in Hawai‘i to play the Madeiran machete, the little four-string guitar we now call the ‘ukulele. Reminiscing in 1922, a year before his death, he recounted playing for Queen Lili‘uokalani, composer of the immortal Aloha O‘e, and for her brother Kalakaua, the Merry Monarch, Hawai‘i’s last king. “Good music that ukulele makes,” João mused. “Good for dance, for sing, for everything. I go out with August Dias and Joao Luiz Correa in the old days. We would go to the king’s bungalow. Lots of people came. Plenty kanakas. Much music, much hula, much kaukau, much drink. All time plenty drink. And King Kalakaua, he pay for all!” The old man suddenly became contemplative. “But now—now all pau [dead].”
João and his friend August—Augusto—Dias made the four-month voyage from Madeira to Honolulu together with more than four-hundred and twenty of their countrymen, including Correa and Dias’ common-law wife, Roselina, and their four daughters. Seeking to escape a cycle of poverty and famine brought on by the collapse of the Madeiran economy, the Madeirense migrated to Hawai‘i by the thousands beginning in 1878, lured by promises of easy money and a sub-tropical climate not unlike the one they were leaving behind. But once in Honolulu, representatives of the Hawaiian and Portuguese governments coerced Fernandes, Dias and the rest to sign up as contract laborers on the sugar plantations, hardy European stock to replace earlier immigrants from China against whom there was a great and malignant prejudice in Honolulu.
With both knees planted and sinking in the hallowed ground, and my torso cantilevered out and over, I leaned in to get a closer look at the rough tablet. This was it, I thought. The end of the line. The last grave in the last row in the only Portuguese section of the cemetery. And the clock was ticking. I had a plane to catch. If only I had more time, there might be a break in the overcast. I reached out once more. The surface of the stone was sharp and wet against my fingers and wept where I touched it, sending angular rills of tear-like droplets down the rock face. And then it happened. The clouds relented, admitting effulgent streams of sunlight that swirled across the hillside, casting crisp, black shadows. The fuzzy, run-together letters of the inscription drew up in tight focus. It was in Portuguese:
emember the “free-roaming, vaporous, full-torso apparition” at the New York Public Library in the opening sequence of the 1984 film Ghostbusters? It spewed cards from the card catalog, blew books from the stacks and scared the socks off the prim librarian. Only in the movies, right? Well, think again. Ghosts do exist. Particularly in libraries. I’ve seen one.
He stares out at me from the dust jacket collage of George Kanahele’s Hawaiian Music and Musicians, a hand-tinted taropatch player perched on the left shoulder of King Kalakaua and flanked by Tandy Mackenzie and the Brothers Cazimero. It’s Ernest Kaai—Hawaii’s Music Man—the preeminent ‘ukulele player of his generation. I flip to the entry on Kaai; page 193. There he is again, same picture but cropped to just a head shot with the caption “Ernest K. Kaai. From his book The Ukulele.”
The three pages of text on Kaai in HMM probably comprise the most extensive biography of the man ever written, appropriately brief but full of wonderful facts: “…mandolin virtuoso, vocalist, publisher, composer/arranger, teacher, bandleader, impresario. Performed at Yukon Exposition in Seattle (1906); toured Australia (1911); recorded for Columbia in Honolulu (1911); featured at San Francisco and San Diego expositions (1915-1916); published ‘ukulele instruction manual (1916).”
Hey, I think. I have a copy of Kaai’s 1916 method in my stack of ‘ukulele primers. It’s a beauty, too: full-folio with chocolate-brown paper wrappers and a marvelous half-tone frontispiece portrait of Kaai. But something’s not right. The title of my Kaai 1916 is The Ukulele and How It’s Played, not The Ukulele: A Hawaiian Guitar and the picture isn’t the one referenced by Kanahele. And it was published by The Hawaiian News Company, not Wall, Nichols. And I have a bunch of ‘ukulele methods published in California in the early 1910s. Way before 1916. What’s up with that? And would Kaai really have published two different methods with two different Honolulu publishers in the same year?
I sneak away during a family vacation to spend a couple of precious hours doing research. Through the internet, via telnet, I learn there is a copy of a Kaai method at the Hamilton Library with the same title and publisher as the one in Kanahele—The Ukulele: A Hawaiian Guitar—but apparently with a copyright date of 1910! I’m here to scope it out. Most of the books in the Hawaiian Collection have to be paged and the Kaai is no exception. I surrender my driver’s license as collateral, fill out the page form and turn it in at the desk.
hey say you always find the things you’ve lost in the last place you look. The HMCS Library wasn’t simply the last place I looked, it was the last place to look. I visited the library in 2004, compared their Kaai 1906 to a copy of the Revised 1910 and noted the differences—not many: re-engraved, some corrections, of course a different picture of Kaai—the one in Hawaiian Music and Musicians. The head librarian, Marilyn Reppun, was kind enough to make a photocopy for my records which I picked up the next day.
Recently I acquired an original of the Kaai 1906, from a Goodwill store in Oregon. Black paper wrappers printed with gold ink, a small octavo-size, just right to slip into an ‘ukulele case. And do you know what’s funny? It has one less piece than the copy at the HMCS Library. Nothing is missing from either one; there are just two states. I believe mine is the earlier: on page 21 (out of 39 pp.), Kaai references ‘preludes’ when there is only one prelude to be found. In the HMCS Library copy, a second prelude is printed on page 40, the verso of page 39, which is blank in my copy. It was apparently left out of the first printing and inserted out of sequence in the next. What’s wonderful about the copy I have is that it’s filled with annotations and corrections by Kaai himself. The original owner obviously took lessons from “Hawaii’s Music Man.”
I first came across this beautiful image in Nathaniel Emerson’s pioneering work, Unwritten Literature of Hawaii: The Sacred Songs of the Hula (Washington, D.C., 1909). Captioned ‘Hawaiian Musician Playing on the Uku-lele’ and printed with the permission of the artist, Hubert Vos (1855-1935), I was dumbfounded that this masterful painting was virtually unknown in the lexicon of ‘ukulele iconography. I wondered what had become of the original. Nearly as surprising was my next encounter with Vos’ ‘ukulele player. While perusing a copy of The Oxford English Dictionary, Vol. XVIII (Oxford, 1989) at the Poynter Library, USF St Petersburg, I stumbled upon this citation:
It was shortly after I released my Bach CD in 2001 that I learned Vos’ painting (titled Kolomona: The Hawaiian Troubador) was part of the permanent collection of the Honolulu Academy of Art, a gift of Henry B. Clark, Jr. in 1994. A year later the Art Academy produced a CD entitled The Art of Solo ‘Ukulele (I’m grateful to Byron Yasui for my copy) which included performances by Byron, Benny Chong, Gordon Mark, and Jake Shimabukuro. Not surprisingly, the cover art featured a full-color reproduction of the Vos painting. 
Since then, Kolomona has shown up a few more times. The Hawaiian Historical Society used an image of the 1900 Century Magazine litho for the cover of The Hawaiian Journal of History, Vol. 37, 2003 which featured an article by Jim Tranquada and me (‘A New History of the Origins and Development of the ‘Ukulele, 1838-1915’); Spirit of Aloha (November-December 2005), the in-flight magazine of Aloha Airlines, used the same image as a full-page illustration to accompany an article I wrote entitled ‘How I Learned to Play the Ukulele.’ Recently, at Byron’s suggestion, I provided Malamalama, the alumni magazine of the University of Hawai‘i, with several illustrations, including Kolomona. It accompanied an article by UH alum George Furukawa called ‘An ‘Ukulele Comeback’ (Vol. 32, No. 1, January 2007).