Despite its diminutive size, the ukulele has always punched above its weight as a unifying musical force – even during decades of disfavour, says Tom Service
ILLUSTRATION: MARIA CORTE MAIDAGAN
THE LISTENING SERVICE
The ukulele: the sound of pseudo-tropical holidays and the strains of George Formby cleaning windows; a slight, four-string cousin of the guitar designed to make a soundworld of jingly-jangly innuendo. What else is there to say?
A whole lot! Because the ukulele plays everything from massed Beethoven to solo Bach, as well as being the choice of thousands of schoolchildren and families, as it knocks the recorder off the top spot as the classroom’s favourite musical instrument.
And the ukulele is the sonic soul of Hawaii, where the instrument was born. Ukulele means ‘jumping flea’, named after one of its first virtuosos, Colonel Edward William Purvis, who was small in stature, fidgety by nature – and the vice-chamberlain of King Kalākaua in the late-19th century. His fingers moved like fleas across the instrument, which was invented by Portuguese immigrants, who came to Hawaii to work on the sugar plantations and who made a diminutive and portable four-string, based on Madeira guitars like the machete and the cavaquinho.
What started in Hawaii quickly swept the globe: from Japan to Europe to the US, the world was gripped by ukulele mania in the early decades of the 20th century. The ukulele was cheap to manufacture, quick to learn, and in the hands of millions of players it crossed genres from jazz to country. So what happened to turn it from a musical essential to a novelty instrument by the mid-decades of the 20th century?
The sound of the ukulele was too intimate and too quiet for the bombast of rock’n’roll, and the instrument was overlooked by generations of classical composers. In Hawaii, however, it never
