Many of us in the ukulele community have heard of Bill Tapia, a professional musician of Portuguese parents born in Honolulu on the first day of 1908. He started playing the ukulele as a boy, and by the 1920s had become a professional musician. He was performing in Hawaii and on cruise ships during the first ukulele craze of the 20s and 30s, and switching back and forth between ukulele and guitar, kept on performing until his death on December 2nd–only about a month before he would have turned 104.

If you look for him by name on the Web, you’ll find plenty about him, but you can read about his death here. What a big loss for the uke world!