Richard Roberts, along with his wife Carol, left, and their daughter, Linda Griffin, play and sing with the SLO Strummers at the Art Center.
On a mild Monday evening, a woman holding a baby peers into a window at the San Luis Obispo Art Center and smiles.
Because inside the building, 14 people are sitting in a lopsided circle, strumming “Sweet Georgia Brown” on their ukuleles.
The woman walks in the open door and bobs, baby in arms, to the music. But the uke players don’t even seem to notice her presence. Instead, they’re all zeroed in on their binders, each containing music for up to 130 songs.
The group — called The SLO Strummers, the Ukulele Society of the Central Coast—meets twice a month. They don’t have any grand goals of performing before a crowd; they just get together and strum their ukes.
“We try to have a variety of songs,” said Richard Roberts, who has been with the group since it started about three years ago. “We play Hawaiian songs. We play the old Vaudeville songs, like ‘Five Foot Two’ and ‘Ain’t She Sweet.’ And we play cowboy songs.”
The ukulele is most often associated with Hawaii — or Tiny Tim. But, as a quick YouTube search will reveal, it has experienced a resurgence of popularity in recent years, led by uke players like Jack Johnson and Jake Shimabukuro.
“We’re well into a third wave of popularity,” said Jim Beloff of Connecticut, noted author of a series of ukulele music books. “The first one is often times tied to an event called the Panama Pacific Exposition, which was in 1915 in San Francisco. It was sort of a world’s fair, celebrating the opening of the Panama Canal. And Hawaii had a pavilion there, and that was a major introduction to Hawaiian culture.”
The next wave of popularity, he said, came in the 1950s, when actor Arthur Godfrey gave the ukulele massive exposure.
“He had learned to play the uke from a shipmate in World War II, and he started to play the ukulele on his television show,” Beloff said.
The third wave, beginning in the mid-’90s, is partially credited to a Hawaiian musician named Troy Fernandez,
who played fast uke licks that kids tried to emulate. But credit also belongs to Beloff, a name just about any uke player recognizes.
After Beloff found a ukulele at a flea market in Pasadena in the early ’90s, he was hooked.
“It was a real shock how lovely and interesting and sophisticated this four-stringed instrument could be,” he said.
Noticing a lack of modern chord books, he put together “Jumpin’ Jim’s Ukulele Favorites.” When that did well, he wrote more books. And eventually his company, Flea Market Music, was also putting out CDs, videos and its own line of ukuleles.
“We just kept pushing it, and then all of the sudden, we started hearing from people all over the place, saying, ‘I thought I was literally the last person playing the uke.’ ”
Uke players never went away, though.
Nancy Piver, another Strummer, has been playing since she was a little girl.
“We’ve always had ukuleles in the family,” she said. “Our mother went to Hawaii in 1933 for a summer and was taken with everything Hawaiian. So she took hula lessons and learned to play ukulele and passed down her love of Hawaii to us.”
Roberts, of Grover Beach, discovered the ukulele more than 50 years ago.
“I took it up in college,” he said. “It was a good beer-drinking and party song instrument.”
Their group started with a few strummers gathering at a restaurant in Arroyo Grande. Then it moved to the bigger art center.
Piver, a multi-instrumentalist who has performed with her uke at retirement communities and mobile home parks, is the musical director of the group. As director, she sometimes arranges the songs, leads the singing and chooses what tunes to play. Roberts’ wife, Carol, keeps a file box containing sheet music for all the tunes, including extra copies for those in need.
On this day, knowing a photographer would be there, everyone is wearing a Hawaiian shirt. Though Roberts said they have strummers of various ages, many of the strummers present are older—past retirement age or not far from it. And the music they play is mostly from the old days — well before their time.
“This is one of our newer ones,” Piver announces at one point, picking out the next song, “but it was written in 1912.”
Then she leads them into “Ragtime Cowboy Joe,” a song first popularized by a performer named Bob Roberts and revitalized decades later by Alvin and The Chipmunks.
The group will also play “I’m in the Mood for Love,” “Blue Moon” and “Five Foot Two,” among others.
While the SLO Strummers play mostly older songs, they are open to members pitching new ones. Members just need to bring copies of the music and lyrics for everyone.
“We’ll all give it a try, and if it works, we put it in the book,” Roberts said.
Like uke festivals, Beloff said, groups like the SLO Strummers have become popular around the country.
When groups like that get together, Beloff added, many of the players are new to the instrument—as they are when he leads workshops.
“And yet when 50 people play different kinds of ukes — all out of tune with one another— and play a C chord, some sort of harmonic magic occurs,” Beloff said. “And it sounds lovely.”
As they gently strum at the Art Center, the SLO Strummers appear to be in sync with each other—some even showing off good chops. Many of the strummers are also singing along, if a little timidly.
More than a dozen is a pretty good showing of strummers. But Piver suspects there are more closet uke players out there, waiting to be part of a bigger group.
“I think there are a fair number of people who play the ukulele in their homes,” she said. “And they would have a really good time joining this club.”
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Watch a video of the ukulele players