Hawaii's favourite instrument arrived aboard a ship full of Madeiran cabinet makers
The ukulele is a Hawaiian name for a Portuguese idea. Madeiran immigrants who stepped off the SS Ravenscrag in 1879 were soon giving nightly street concerts, and three cabinet makers among them became the first ukulele builders. A king's enthusiasm did the rest, and the word itself roughly means jumping flea.
Developed in the 1880s, the instrument descends from small guitar-like Portuguese relatives such as the machete, cavaquinho and rajão, brought by settlers from Madeira, the Azores and Cape Verde. Credit for the first ones usually goes to Augusto Dias, Manuel Nunes and José do Espírito Santo. King Kalākaua, a keen patron of the arts, featured it at royal gatherings. One legend ties the flea name to Edward William Purvis, a small, fidgety English officer at his court who played brilliantly; another suggests it describes the darting of a player's fingers.
Mainland America caught the bug at the 1915 Panama–Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco, where a Hawaiian ensemble sparked a Tin Pan Alley craze for island-themed songs. Cheap, portable and easy to start on, the uke became an emblem of the Jazz Age; sheet music of the 1920s printed chord diagrams for it, and Martin and other makers added ukulele lines. From the late 1940s to the late 1960s the plastics maker Mario Maccaferri produced about 9 million budget models, and Marilyn Monroe strummed one in Some Like It Hot in 1959.
Elsewhere it found new homes. Yukihiko Haida brought it to Japan in 1929, fans kept playing secretly when Western music was banned during the Second World War, and he founded a national association in 1959. In Canada, J. Chalmers Doane used it from the 1960s as a cheap classroom tool, reaching 50,000 learners at the programme's peak. In Britain, George Formby popularised the banjolele hybrid, and George Harrison handed ukes out to friends, teaching Tom Petty to play.
Rock pushed it into hibernation until the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain, formed in 1985, showed it could handle serious repertoire. Israel Kamakawiwoʻole's reggae-tinged 1993 recording pairing two classic standards spread it further, and a YouTube video of Jake Shimabukuro playing a Harrison song passed 17 million views by September 2020. Most ukuleles carry four nylon strings tuned GCEA, and the traditional wood is koa, an acacia found only in Hawaii.
Source: Ukulele
