The History of the Ukulele: From Madeira to the Grammys

Hi, I'm Charles Gremillon, ukulele teacher and founder of EasyUke. I have always thought that knowing where an instrument comes from changes how you play it. The history of the ukulele is genuinely remarkable: migration, royalty, near-extinction and three separate resurrections. Here it is in full.

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The history of the ukulele is not what most people expect about ukulele history. The instrument did not start in Hawaii. It began as a small Portuguese folk instrument called the machete on a mountainous Atlantic island, crossed the Pacific on a sugar plantation ship in 1879, was adopted by a Hawaiian king, survived three near-extinctions, and eventually became the most widely played acoustic instrument in the world after the guitar. That is a remarkable life for a small wooden box with four strings.

Ukulele History: Where the Instrument Actually Comes From

The ukulele originated not on a Hawaiian beach but on Madeira, a small mountainous Portuguese island in the Atlantic roughly 350 miles off the coast of North Africa, closer to Morocco than to mainland Portugal.

In the early 19th century, a small four-stringed instrument called the machete (also known as the braguinha or cavaquinho) was popular among working-class musicians in Madeira. Compact, light and practical for people who worked with their hands, it had a body shape and stringing that would be immediately recognisable today. Its four strings, its bright cheerful timbre, its small body: all of it was already there.

In 1874, Hawaiian planters faced a labour crisis. Native Hawaiian population had declined dramatically due to introduced diseases and there were not enough workers to run the expanding sugar plantations. Plantation owners recruited internationally, reaching eventually to the Portuguese islands of Madeira and the Azores. A Hawaiian official named Henry Peirce travelled to Madeira with a promise: three-year labour contracts, paid passage, food and housing in a warm and productive place. Many Madeirans signed on the spot, sometimes without knowing exactly where they were going. The boat was already waiting.

The SS Ravenscrag: The Ship That Brought the Ukulele to Hawaii

On August 23, 1879, a ship called the SS Ravenscrag docked in Honolulu harbour after a four-month journey from Madeira via Cape Horn. It carried 419 Portuguese immigrants, men, women and children, destined for the sugar plantations of Oahu, Maui and the Big Island.

Among the passengers were musicians. Among the musicians were craftsmen. Three of them would become central to everything that followed: Manuel Nunes, Augusto Dias and Jose do Espirito Santo. All three were experienced builders of the machete. All three had brought their instruments on the voyage and had played music during those four months at sea.

The Hawaiian Gazette noted the Ravenscrag's arrival in August 1879, describing "a band of Portuguese musicians, fine performers on their strange instruments which are a kind of cross between a guitar and banjo but which produce very sweet music." This is the first written record of what would become the ukulele in Hawaii.

Over the following years, Nunes, Dias and Espirito Santo set up workshops, first on the plantations and later in Honolulu, building their machetes using local Hawaiian materials. The most significant discovery was koa, a dense and beautifully grained hardwood endemic to Hawaii. Koa produced a warmer and fuller tone than the European woods the craftsmen had used in Madeira, and gave the instrument a visual identity that was distinctly Hawaiian. Manuel Nunes in particular is credited with adjusting the body shape, scale length and stringing in ways that produced the modern ukulele as we know it. He kept building instruments until his death in 1922, more than four decades after the Ravenscrag arrived.

Ukulele History: How the Instrument Got Its Name

The word "ukulele" is Hawaiian, and its exact origin is genuinely debated, which is itself revealing about how completely the instrument was absorbed into Hawaiian culture.

What does ukulele mean?

The most widely repeated explanation is that ukulele translates to "jumping flea" in Hawaiian: uku meaning flea and lele meaning to jump or fly. The story goes that Hawaiian observers named the instrument after watching players' fingers move rapidly across the strings, which from a distance resembled a flea jumping. This translation appears in most histories of the instrument and is generally accepted as the most likely origin.

A second theory attributes the interpretation to Queen Liliuokalani, the last reigning monarch of Hawaii and an accomplished musician herself. She read the word differently, as "the gift that came here": uku as gift and lele as to come. This reading is poetic and fits the instrument's origin as something that arrived from elsewhere and was adopted as genuinely Hawaiian.

Both interpretations exist in the historical record. Neither has been definitively confirmed. What is certain is that the name was in common use by the mid-1880s, and that by the time it appeared in writing it was already firmly Hawaiian, not Portuguese, not machete, but ukulele.

Ukulele History: King Kalakaua and the Royal Elevation

The ukulele would likely have remained a plantation instrument if not for King David Kalakaua, the last male monarch of Hawaii, known as the Merrie Monarch.

Kalakaua was one of the most musically sophisticated rulers of his era. He played guitar, wrote songs, composed the lyrics to Hawaii Ponoi (still the state anthem today) and actively promoted Hawaiian music and culture at a time when American missionary influence was suppressing it. He saw in the ukulele something worth preserving and elevating.

From the early 1880s, Kalakaua included ukulele performances in royal court events. He played alongside ukulele players and his patronage transformed the instrument's social status almost immediately. An instrument associated with sugar plantation workers became an instrument of the royal court. That shift, from immigrant labour to royal leisure, is one of the most rapid cultural adoptions in the history of any musical instrument.

Queen Liliuokalani, who succeeded Kalakaua and was herself an accomplished composer, continued the royal association with the ukulele. By the time she was deposed in 1893, the instrument was described in travel accounts and newspaper reports as distinctly Hawaiian. The Portuguese origin had not been forgotten: it was simply less relevant than what the instrument had become.

Ukulele History: The 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition and the First Global Boom

For its first three decades, the ukulele was essentially a Hawaiian phenomenon. That changed in 1915 at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco, a World's Fair celebrating the opening of the Panama Canal. Hawaii had a prominent pavilion featuring Hawaiian musicians playing ukulele and steel guitar. The music was unlike anything most mainland Americans had heard.

The response was immediate. Sheet music publishers rushed to produce ukulele arrangements. Instrument makers including Martin and Gibson, whose names are now associated primarily with guitars, began manufacturing ukuleles to meet demand. By 1916, ukulele instruction books were among the best-selling music publications in the United States. By the early 1920s, the ukulele was everywhere: in vaudeville acts, in college music clubs, in living rooms across America and Europe.

The Martin ukuleles of the 1920s are still considered among the finest ever made. Collectors pay thousands of dollars for them today. This first great boom produced instrument craftsmanship that has rarely been matched since.

Ukulele History: The Long Decline and the Novelty Problem

The 1920s boom did not last. By the late 1930s the guitar, amplifiable and more harmonically versatile, had absorbed the popular music space the ukulele briefly occupied. Jazz and swing required more volume. Rock and roll required considerably more.

The ukulele retreated. It became associated with two things equally damaging to its reputation: children's education (small, inexpensive, suitable for school music rooms) and novelty performance. The low point came in 1968 when Tiny Tim performed Tiptoe Through the Tulips on The Tonight Show in a deliberately eccentric falsetto performance that became a cultural landmark and set the instrument's mainstream reputation back by a decade. The ukulele became a punchline.

Ukulele History: Three Revivals That Changed Everything

First revival: Israel Kamakawiwoole

In 1988, a very large Hawaiian man called a recording studio at 3:30 in the morning. He had never been there before. The engineer had never met him. He sat on a borrowed steel chair and recorded Somewhere Over the Rainbow in a single take. The cassette sat unreleased for five years before it was added to the 1993 album Facing Future.

Israel Kamakawiwoole, known as Iz, died in 1997. His recording now has over 147 million streams on Spotify. It appeared in films, in television finales, at funerals and graduations across multiple decades. It demonstrated something the ukulele had not demonstrated publicly for years: that four strings and a small koa body could produce something devastating. Not charming. Not novelty. Devastating. That single recording changed what the instrument was capable of in the public imagination. To play the chords from that recording yourself, see my guide to Somewhere Over the Rainbow ukulele chords.

Second revival: YouTube and the beginner boom

In 2006, Jake Shimabukuro's video of him playing While My Guitar Gently Weeps on ukulele accumulated millions of views and introduced a generation to what the instrument could do in skilled hands. Tutorials followed. Communities formed. The ukulele, uniquely among acoustic instruments, suited the intimacy of a laptop camera and a bedroom recording.

The second boom was driven by accessibility. The ukulele is genuinely easier to start on than any other stringed instrument: four strings, nylon strings that are soft on fingers, a compact body, and a small repertoire of chords that unlocks an enormous range of songs quickly. As I explain in my honest comparison of ukulele and guitar for beginners, that accessibility gap is real and significant.

Third revival: mainstream pop and the Grammys

In 2013, Vance Joy released Riptide, a song built around a ukulele riff that became one of the defining pop tracks of the decade. Twenty One Pilots built an entire aesthetic around the contrast of ukulele intimacy with hip-hop production. Billie Eilish recorded bedroom pop with ukulele at its centre. In 2019, Kacey Musgraves performed Somewhere Over the Rainbow on ukulele at the Grammy Awards in front of 25 million viewers.

The ukulele was no longer a novelty. It had become the instrument of vulnerable and honest pop music, the choice of artists who wanted to strip away everything except voice and chord. That positioning is almost exactly the same position the instrument occupied in Hawaiian royal court performances in the 1880s. The history of the ukulele is a circle.

Charles Gremillon, Founder of EasyUke

Charles has taught over 1,200 adult beginners to play ukulele from scratch. He runs EasyUke and L'Ecole du Ukulele, the French-language version, and teaches in-person courses each summer in the French Alps.