There are a bunch of opportunities to play and sing coming up! Check ’em out:

Thursday, May 31
Sweetpea’s Ukulele Night at Skinny’s Ballroom, 7:00 – 9:00pm. Skinny’s is located at 115 San Jacinto. There’s free parking in the garage across the street and a $4.00 drink ticket if you bring a uke!

Sunday, June 10
The Uke Players Social Group will be holding a potluck dinner and jam session at 7:00pm. Details on their meet-up page: http://www.meetup.com/Austin-Uke-players-Social-Group/

Thursday, June 14
The June meeting of the Austin Ukulele Society! We’ll be meeting 7:00 – 8:30pm at the Memorial United Methodist Church, at 6100 Berkman Drive (Austin, TX 78723). More details and a new song sheet will be coming soon, so keep an eye out!

Saturday, June 23
Austin Uke Mob at the Hill Country Galleria Amphitheater, 7:30pm. Another live performance for the Austin Ukulele Society! About 20 people have signed up so far and we want as many uke players there as possible — andwe’ve got a bunch (we’re no longer accepting participants). We’ll be playing “Runaway,” “Margaritaville,” and “Love Potion #9.” Song sheets are available for download from our Music Library, and we’ll go over the songs at our June meeting on the 14th.

Enjoy!

Hope to see you soon,

Bob

Here’s an amusing clip from an early sound movie, ‘The Hollywood Revue of 1929.’ This short clip features the talented Cliff Edwards (Ukulele Ike, later famous as the voice of Jiminy Cricket) performing “Nobody But You.”

If you enjoyed this, YouTube has other Ukulele Ike performances to check out.

Austin Ukulele Society member Kevin Carroll is having his first Ukulele Summer Camp for children aged 6 – 11. It has 2 open spots, 9am-1pm, June 4-8. There’s also a teen session for ages 12 – 18, 2:30-6:30 pm, on the same dates. If you are interested, please give him a call at 512.739.5946 or send him an email at kevin@kevincarroll.net. For more information about Kevin’s teaching and music, please visit: www.kevincarroll.net.

Jessica Graves is giving, not one, but TWO uke workshops on Sunday, April 29th at Fiddler’s Green! The first will be for beginners and will focus on basic technique and chords. Students will be able to play a song by the end of the workshop. The second workshop will be for intermediate players. Jessica will teach students how to write their own arrangements and make conscious chord and rhythm choices. While this class is designed for intermediate players, students from the beginning class are welcome to attend.

Get 20% off a ukulele when you preregister! Offer good through the day of the workshop (4/29). Does not apply to National Ukuleles or consignments, but everything else if fair game!

Time: Beginners Workshop: 1:00-2:30pm; Intermediate Workshop: 3:00-4:30pm

Place: Fiddler’s Green Music Shop
1809 W. 35th Street
Austin, TX 78703

Price: $30 for one workshop, $50 for both.

Early sign-up is recommended, as space is limited. Call the shop at (512) 452-3900 to sign up today!

After a long period when we thought it wasn’t going to happen, the 2012 Lone Star Uke Fest Registration is open after all at www.LoneStarUkeFest.com. The festival will happen June 1st & 2nd, with some great workshops and concerts. The Fest is a limited attendance event and only 60 more tickets are available–if you’re interested in spending a few days in the Dallas area escaping to Uke-World, with no real-life distractions, take a look. Early Bird Registration is only $99 until April 30th!

Here’s the Futulele, a ukulele made out of an iPad and an iPhone. Well, more correctly, it’s made out of an app on each device, held in a special framework:

Does anyone need to make a ukulele out of two expensive electronic products when the real thing is so much easier to strum? We think that question’s an easy one to answer, but to each his or her own.

Here’s the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain’s version of the classic “Sleigh Ride.”

A good bunch of holidays (whichever ones you celebrate) to all! See you next year!

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!

Here’s a video you may enjoy–especially if you remember the non-uke original:

Addicted to Love– uke version

Hey–here’s an article from the HawaiiBusiness.com site, “Ukulele Boom Generates Global Sales for Hawaii Companies.” It shows that ukes are such a popular product that many of these U.S. companies, such as Koolau, are outsourcing some of their uke construction to Asia. But it also points out how popular ukes have become, to sales levels that no one could imagine ten years ago:

Ukulele sales are growing so rapidly that NAMM – the 9,000-member National Association of Music Merchants – started tracking domestic sales two years ago as part of its global sales report. U.S. sales jumped 16 percent in 2010 over the previous year and the organization expects a similar increase this year.

“Ukuleles are a hot ticket right now,” says NAMM marketing and communications director Scott Robertson. “The popularity of the instrument continues to surge. There are quite a few popular artists including ukuleles in their music and people are responding to that. Plus it’s a less intimidating instrument, very portable, and easy to get started and play your troubles away.”

Take a look. There’s also a brief (and far from complete, but worth reading anyway) history of the uke as a consumer product.