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Getting back to the question with which this article is titled,
the significance of the current upsurge and interest in the
ukulele would seem to be based on one or more of the following:
1. People want to sing and play some instrument and the ukulele
is easier than the guitar, or
2. People who can play the guitar want another instrument
with a distinctive sound, or
3. People want to play a ukulele because it sounds better
than a guitar when you are playing the Tin-Pan-Alley and musical-comedy
songs described above.
If you think you might be interested, try to find some recordings
of music written by Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, George and
Ira Gershwin, Rogers and Hart, Frank Loesser, Al Dubin and
Harry Warren, Walter Donaldson, Johnny Mercer and others from
the early part of the 20th century up until the beginning
of the sixties. These men are mostly forgotten today so you
can buy records of their music on 33-1/3 lps very inexpensively.
This probably represents the greatest entertainment bargain
now available. For best results try to get the original show
recording or the original recorded version by the original
artist.
I need to inform the reader that I have never been interested
in spectator sports. I like sports I can be a part of. From
the time that I was in junior high school I wanted to play
music in the Dixieland style which had had a brief resurgence
in the ‘50s. Since none of this music was available in the
stores, or at least, I did not know that it was available,
I tried to pick it out by ear with very limited success. After
I started hunting down music for the ukulele though, I found
most of that Dixieland music which was written from a period
starting in about 1900 and continuing up until the ‘50s. Since
this music is full of dissonant chords such as the diminished,
minor seventh, minor sixth and augmented seventh chords, only
a few musicians will be able to pick it out by ear. I was
finally able to achieve a measure of success by buying the
music and playing the chords on my ukulele while singing the
tune. I thought it would be helpful to other frustrated musicians
if I explained some of these things in this article. Even
though it’s hard to believe, there are people, (including
me), who find sports pretty much of a yawn, and see the current
crop of TV programs to be an interminable bore. The art of
conversation is dwindling in importance as many jobs now leave
people mentally exhausted by the time they get home. This
has driven me into my current state of amateur musician-audience
not required. If this is happening to other people also this
could in some measure explain why people are buying all of
these ukuleles.
As I may have indicated earlier on, the search for ukulele
music brought to my attention examples of entertainment from
the past which make current efforts look very inadequate.
Just the song titles can give an indication of what I mean.
When have you heard a song recently which expresses the tender
sentiments of “How Could You Believe Me When I Said I Love
You, When You Know I’ve Been A Liar all of my Life”, as sung
by Fred Astaire in Royal Wedding. How about this one from
No No Nanette produced in 1925: “You Can Dance With Any Girl,
As Long As You Come Home With Me”, or “It’s Got to be Love,
it Couldn’t Be Tonsillitis” from On Your Toes. How about “I
Had Someone Else Before I Had You, and I’ll Have Someone After
You’ve Gone” or “Somebody Else is Taking My Place”. These
sentiments are sort of hard to put into words in the current
milieu.
Two of the men who should get a lot of the credit for the
current upswing in ukulele interest are Jim Beloff who has
a website at fleamarketmusic.com and Ian Whitcomb whose website
is ianwhitcomb.com. Jim Beloff’s books titled Ukulele Gems
and Ukulele Favorites are his two best, (at least in my opinion)
and probably my opinion is influenced by the fact that these
two have songs from the ‘20s and ‘30s. Ian Whitcomb has been
compiling old music for some time now and his book Ukulele
Heaven, has the music to such classics as “Where did Robin
Crusoe Go With Friday on Saturday Night” and “They’re Wearing
‘em Higher in Hawaii”. Ian Whitcomb’s books come with a CD
of his band playing the tunes so you can tell what they sound
like before you play them.
A number of good ukulele songs were written before 1923 and
thus, in the U.S. are in the public domain. These include,
“After You’ve Gone”, previously mentioned, “Daddy Wouldn’t
Buy Me a Bow Wow”, as well as “(Rufus Rastus Johnson Brown)
What ‘Ya Gonna Do When The Rent Comes Round”. Songs in the
public domain can be performed without paying royalties and
without getting permission, provided you can find original
sheet music to work from which has the copyright date of 1922
or before.
Even though I consider the ukulele a great instrument for
amateurs, in the interest of giving the reader a complete
description of what’s happening today, I am forced to mention
that there are professional players on the scene at the present
time. Ian Whitcomb performs regularly at venues on the West
Coast and his website has many CD’s and videos, as well as
songbooks and other books that you can obtain. Janet Klein
plays the ukulele with her band which she calls The Parlor
Boys. Her specialty consists of finding the classic songs
that you’ve never heard of from the twenties and thirties
and performing these in California and sometimes Japan. Examples
are: “(Any-kind-a-Man) Would Be Better Than You”, “I Use To
Love You But It’s All Over Now”, “Tain’t No Sin To Take Off
Your Skin and Dance Around In Your Bones” and “Cooking Breakfast
For The One I Love” formerly a hit by Fannie Bryce. These
songs are on her album called Paradise Wobble available from
fleamarketmusic.com. Also, currently performing is Estelle
Reiner, Rob Reiner’s mother, who sometimes plays the ukulele
and has an album entitled Ukulele Mama available from fleamarketmusic.com.
In England there is the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain
which may be heard on the CD Legends of Ukulele available
from rhino.com and fleamarketmusic.com, a CD which also features
another contempory player, Lyle Ritz, playing an instrumental
of “Lulu’s Back In Town”. Most of the recordings on this CD
are from an earlier era.
The greatest ukulele player and singer of all time, now deceased,
was Ukulele Ike whose real name was Cliff Edwards. This is
the man who sings “When You Wish Upon A Star” on all the Disney
TV shows and records. He was born in 1895. His first hit song
was “Ja-Da”. He appeared in many movies and Broadway shows
and made many, many records. Every record he ever made is
worth listening to. He recorded the original versions of “Singing
In The Rain” and “Fascinating Rhythm”. He was the voice of
Jiminy Cricket in the Disney movie Pinocchio and of Jim Crow
in the Disney movie Dumbo. Some of his other hits songs were
“June Night” which sold over 3 million records, “Sleepy Time
Gal”, which sold over a million and “Toot Toot Tootsie”, which
he introduced, which was also later sung by Al Jolson. It
has been reported that he sold a total of over seventy-four
million records. Even though he made millions of dollars,
he was not overly prosperous because of payments to ex-wives,
losses on horse-race gambling and disagreements with the IRS.
The fact that he was never as affluent as many of his peers
may have accounted for the fact that he outlived most of them
and died after reaching the age of 76 or 77. (It must be pointed
out that people of his generation who enjoyed great prosperity
often died before the age of 50.) Ukulele Ike’s recordings
are especially interesting for ukulele players because many
of them consist of only him and his ukulele without the distractions
of other instruments. This shows the suitability of the ukulele
for the amateur solo player, a group which includes yours
truly. There are many Ukulele Ike recordings on CD, but many
of his best recordings can only be found on limited-edition
lp records that you have to search for on the internet or
at garage sales.
The fact that ukuleles come in four sizes gives the player
who wants to accompany his singing with the ukulele a lot
more flexibility than is the case with a guitar. This is because
each of the different sizes of ukuleles can be tuned to a
different key. This means that by selecting a ukulele in the
proper key, you can automatically transpose the song you are
playing into a key that you can sing. Most of the standard
songs of the twenties and thirties were written for female
vocalists. This means they have notes which most men are not
able to hit. It’s very convenient to just grab a ukulele that’s
tuned two or three notes lower and then you’ve got the song
in a key suitable for your voice if you are a man. This is
a big improvement over a karaoke machine which you would have
to slow down to change to a different key. Then it would sound
like the battery ran out of your record player. Not only are
the ukuleles able to be tuned in different keys, but the fact
that they are not nearly as loud as a guitar is a big help
for most people who cannot sing loud enough to be heard over
a guitar unless they have a microphone. If you sing through
a microphone you might well disturb the people in the other
room watching TV, so this may not be the best idea even if
you have one.
As is probably evident from the above discussion and from
your general listening, you can tell that the professional
ukulele players are a tiny minority compared to the guitar
players. When it comes to purchases though, the number of
people buying ukuleles is more than sufficient. I talked to
the manager of a large music store near Fort Worth who told
me that, other than harmonicas, ukuleles are his biggest sellers.
And when I was browsing the music store in Austin called Alpha
Music last fall, I noticed that by far the largest number
of any single musical selection was Jim Beloff’s Christmas-music
book of arrangements for the ukulele. What this means is that
the ukulele is being taken up by amateurs, but these are mostly
not eager to broadcast the fact. They are like other amateur
musicians such as barber shop quartets for whom no audience
is required.
Back before the world went haywire in the ‘60s there was a
tendency for children to study some musical instrument, usually
the piano or violin. Since then there has begun to be more
emphasis put on sports so that even the kids who start out
with music lessons usually give this up in junior high school
when they go out for basketball or volleyball. Nowadays a
lot of music fans find that they are unable to play the piano
or violin because of all of the years they wasted on sports
instead of practicing the piano. This is where the ukulele
comes in. This instrument, of all the instruments I’ve tried,
(which are many), is the easiest. It is well suited for girls
because the strings are nylon and thus easy to hold down and
the frets are not as far apart as is the case on the guitar.
This means there is still hope for the ex-ball-player who
is now looking for some other diversion, having grown tired
of seeing the same plots over and over on TV and jaded by
the antics of the pro-athletes. Even though the Amarillo music
stores do not at this time stock a large selection of ukuleles,
you can usually find one of your in-laws who brought one back
from Hawaii and is not using it. If they won’t let you play
with it, you may have a good excuse to go to Hawaii to get
one for yourself. They are also available from ukuleleworld.com
and fleamarketmusic.com and can be purchased inexpensively
on eBay where you can often buy a harmony uke for under $50.00.
Lots of sheet music from the twenties and thirties came with
ukulele chord diagrams. The cheapest way to get this music
is to go to garage sales and look in the piano benches. You
can order it from the websites mentioned above in this article
also. While you are at the garage sales you might as well
look around for the old records and record players which people
seem to be very eager to move out of the TV room these days.
At garage sales you can buy records for a dollar a piece and
high quality record players for under $30.00. If you get the
music with the chord diagrams and the records of people singing
this music then you don’t even have to be able to read music
to play it, just listen to the record and then play the chords
indicated on the diagram. You can adjust the key by picking
a ukulele with proper tuning.
What significance if any is there in the ukulele revival?
The significance is that just as happened in the movie called
the Matrix, significant numbers of the population have decided
to take the red pill and become active players. :.
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