Ukulele

The ukulele is a four-stringed instrument, a member of the lute family, about the size of a small guitar. You strum it with your fingers or a felt pick, and you fret chords with your left hand. The standard tuning — GCEA — is unusual because the top string is tuned higher than the next, giving the instrument its characteristic bright, re-entrant sound. Four strings. Four fingers. A handful of chords. That is the whole instrument. The simplicity is the point. The charm is in the voice.

The ukulele was born in Hawaii in the 1880s, when Portuguese immigrants from Madeira and the Cape Verde islands arrived to work the sugar plantations. They brought with them small stringed instruments — the machete, the braguinha, the rajão — that were the ancestors of the ukulele. The story goes that João Fernandes, a Madeiran cabinet maker, played his machete on the dock to celebrate the immigrants' arrival in 1879, and the Hawaiians were so taken with the instrument that they adopted it. The name "ukulele" means "jumping flea" in Hawaiian — a reference to the player's quick fingers.

King Kalakaua, the last king of Hawaii, embraced the ukulele and made it a fixture of the Hawaiian royal court. He played it at formal events and insisted his guests learn it. The instrument became synonymous with Hawaiian music and culture, and it spread to the mainland United States through the Panama-Pacific Exposition of 1915 in San Francisco, where a Hawaiian pavilion featured ukulele players and hula dancers. The mainland went ukulele-mad. Tin Pan Alley published hundreds of Hawaiian-themed songs. Sears sold ukuleles for $1.50 by mail order.

The instrument had several boom cycles. The 1920s and 30s were the first golden age — Cliff Edwards ("Ukulele Ike") was a national star, and the ukulele was the instrument of the college set. The 1950s saw a second wave through Arthur Godfrey's television show, which taught America to play. The 1960s brought the tiny instrument of Tiny Tim, which gave the ukulele a novelty reputation it took decades to shake. Then, beginning in the late 2000s, the YouTube revival — Jake Shimabukuro's "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" performance went viral in 2006, and a new generation discovered the instrument. The Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain, Israel Kamakawiwoʻole's "Somewhere Over the Rainbow," and a flood of YouTube tutorials made the ukulele one of the best-selling instruments of the 2010s.

The equipment is minimal. A decent starter ukulele costs $50 to $100. The four sizes — soprano, concert, tenor, and baritone — offer different voices and scale lengths, but the fingering is the same. A tuner (clip-on or app), a few chord charts, and a songbook are all the accessories you need. The instrument is small enough to keep on the coffee table, light enough to take on a plane, and quiet enough to play in an apartment without disturbing the neighbors.

The craft rewards consistency above all else. The ukulele is the easiest string instrument to learn a song on and the hardest to master. Three chords — C, F, and G — unlock hundreds of songs. A clean strum, a steady rhythm, and a smooth chord change are the foundation. The first song is a wobble. The hundredth is a performance you can give at a party, a campfire, or a grandchild's birthday. The distance between them is the distance of a thousand strums.

For the empty nester, the ukulele is an instrument that asks for nothing but ten minutes a day. It does not demand the hand strength of a guitar, the reach of a piano, or the breath of a wind instrument. It gives you a song in the first week, a repertoire in the first month, and a lifetime of music in the living room. The strings do not care how old your fingers are. They only care how willing you are to show up.