Actress, Singer, and Songwriter Nellie McKay’s Ukulele Accompanies her Everywhere, from Broadway to Egypt

BY HEIDI SWEDBERG | FROM THE FALL 2024 ISSUE OF UKULELE

In 2006, Nellie McKay received her first ukulele from the legendary actor, singer, and comedian Jim Dale when they were working together on Broadway in the Roundabout Theatre Company’s production of The Threepenny Opera. “He gave it to me so I would leave him alone, and of course I didn’t,” she says. “I started bugging him with the uke. I loved having something to carry. I love walking around with it. I’ve played this for so long… It has become a lifelong friend.”

There is no hard line between the worlds of acting, music, and writing for McKay. “Music is so pure, but acting is so immediate,” she says. “It’s nice to have as many worlds as possible. I mean, why limit yourself to two? Writing is so often musical. It can be iambic pentameter; it could be how bebop influenced the language of the beats. Everything has its rhythm and its pitch. I think they can come together. They can be a lovely complement.” 

I caught up with McKay by phone from Asheville, North Carolina. She was between performing a set at Citizen Vinyl—a venue dedicated to “creating a space where people can build their own stories”—and editing an interview she had given to animal rights organization Lady Freethinker. She shares her resume with reluctant humor and her convictions with kindness, tying it all together with optimism. “We may be pitted against each other, but I think most people think alike; most people are decent, in spite of it all,” she says in an unplaceable accent that reflects her peripatetic past. Her light, high tone has a soothing sweetness—all honey, no vinegar—which serves her hidden talent: “I can get really angry and no one can tell.”

Straightforward Approach

McKay’s primary instrument is a 1920s “The Gibson” soprano. Its voice is similar to hers: sweet and airy yet flexible and surprising. “She can be loud, she can be social, or she can be introspective, like a personal friend,” says McKay. The instrument she often travels with, however, is a decidedly cheap one. “You want to be able to travel without sweating it too much,” she says. “She might even be a toy, but she keeps a tune. We practically got her at a dollar store, and she’s pineapple shaped.” Though McKay refers to her instruments with a female pronoun, she’s not yet given them names. “Maybe Heidi,” she teases.

Unlike many other players, McKay is not a uke geek. Questions about tuning, brands, strings all draw blanks. “Is there a different tuning than standard? I’ve never even thought to tune it differently,” she says. “What kind of strings? I don’t know. I can’t remember the last time I put strings on. I worry when I change it that it’s going to snap!” 

McKay’s approach to the instrument is straightforward: simple arpeggios and strums. “I should be a lot better,” she says of her playing. “One time I opened for Jake Shimabukuro, and boy, did I not want to open for him. It was inadvertently, at a festival. And I just thought, Oh, God.” That was in 2012, at the fifth annual Denver Ukulele Festival, one of two festivals at which she has performed. Opinions posted in the Ukulele Underground online forum by audience members were highly complimentary. One commenter wrote, “Nellie Mckay was another showstopper—although not for ukulele, for stage presence, total songwriting brilliance, and staggering piano chops. Her ukulele approach is very basic, but it works and is authentic, just like her 1920s Gibson uke . . . McKay was so over-the-top talented that even her piano songs were good with me . . . one rarely encounters her degree of professionalism.”

The Softest Lavender

The ukulele, albeit beloved, is not a fetish for McKay. It is a means to an end, an accompanist to the story of the song. Watching videos of her online, or listening through her recorded oeuvre, it is impossible not to be struck by the precision with which she employs the uke’s fragile, vulnerable tone and nostalgic qualities in her arrangements. It is an element in her musical toolshed which she deploys, alongside the piano and many other instruments, to tell the story at hand, never asking the ukulele to do work better suited to another musical voice. 

Unlike some of the more lush or electric, rocking orchestrations on her albums, in the ukulele-centric tunes you hear only one color in McKay’s spectrum: the softest lavender. Normal as Blueberry Pie: A Tribute to Doris Day, her fourth album, released in 2009, is the first with a strong uke showing. It features two songs with just her voice and the barest of ukulele accompaniments. One of them, Antônio Carlos Jobim’s “Meditation,” has never sounded lovelier or lonelier. She introduces the song with an arpeggio starting far up the neck, which swirls down with chord inversions deftly outlining the emotions of the lyrics. The wan ploink of the mostly intonated vintage Gibson is a perfect substitute for bossa nova.

McKay’s 2018 album, Sister Orchid, features a soft, rhythmic strum carrying her voice with kid gloves on “Lazybones.” And a handful of simply strummed American Songbook standards on the follow-up 2019 EP, Bagatelles, really do “Accentuate the Positive,” as her recording of that tune would suggest. True to form, McKay slips in a spoonful of medicine with the sugar at the conclusion of “The Best Things in Life Are Free,” winsomely exclaiming, “Healthcare for everyone!”

Her most recent release, Hey Guys, Watch This (2023),is a spirited mix of eclectic originals. Here, McKay slips the ukulele into her rhythm pocket and sometimes features it as a special musical flavor. “You can learn all kinds of tunes on the uke,” she says. “There’s no such thing as a ‘proper’ uke tune.” To wit, “The Drinking Song” begins with a ukulele intro that makes way for a classic country lament on slide guitar.

“‘The Drinking Song’ was very much written on the uke at an airport,” McKay says. “You can’t do that with a lot of instruments.” She likes to write music on her ukulele, she says, “partly because you can play it lying down, you can play it walking around, whereas at a keyboard you generally have to be stationary and upright. People always think you have to approach work in one way, but Keith Richards wrote ‘Satisfaction’ on the tiles of a motel floor.” 

Independent Spirit

The breadth of McKay’s unique talents comes together when she is onstage performing her own work. From subject matter to styling, she overflows with energy, verve, and commitment. She gravitates toward complicated, personal stories and, to date, has written four musical biographies. One, I Want to Live: A Death Row Musical Revue, tells the story of Barbara Graham, the third woman executed in the gas chamber at San Quentin, with a surprising amount of humor. 

In A Girl Named Bill: The Life and Times of Billy Tipton, McKay nimbly tells the story of a jazz musician who was revealed to be transgender after his death. (It was named one of the best concerts of 2014 by the New York Times). She shines singing behind the piano, which she plays with a feverish passion, telling the stories of these figures with both standards and original pieces. Leaping to her feet to sing with the ukulele, her energy is non-stop. 

“It’s lovely to be someone else,” says McKay. “People can inhabit another world when they play. And that’s part of the appeal. You have to make yourself be angry when you’re happy or be happy when you’re sad. That can be tricky, because the audience can be so kind and you’re smiling at them, and then you go into the song you sing at the bar at the end of the world.” For her, by the way, that song would be “One for My Baby (and One More for the Road).”

“I always encourage people who can suffer anxiety to do their own thing. There is so much you can do on your own, it is good to be independent. And the uke is a free-spirited instrument. We all kind of have to goose each other because we’re trained from an early age to do what we’re told, and you kind of lose your ability to have ideas for yourself or to follow through on them. You get used to taking orders. And that can seem easy. But in the end, it can be harder.”

By the uninhibited sound of it, she certainly took her own advice while working on Hey Guys, Watch This. “I’d wanted to work with this group called the Carpenter Ants, who are in Charleston, West Virginia—not too far from here [North Carolina]. It’s in Appalachia.” She adds, “I think the album has a haunted feeling. There’s so many ghosts through the centuries in those mountains.” 

Citizen of the World

“I don’t want to be based out of any one place, that’s my problem,” says McKay. “It’s good to be a citizen of the world. A uke is quite a passport, and it’s easier to travel with than a guitar.” Born in London to an English writer-director and an American actress, McKay began her nomadic life early, traveling with her mother in a Volkswagen Bus between Harlem in New York City, Olympia in Washington, and Mount Pocono in Pennsylvania. “I guess I’ve just been kind of all over the place,” she says.

“I went to Egypt, and I worked with a few different rescues—one is called the Egyptian Society for Mercy to Animals. We recorded Masters of War there with Egyptian musicians— that’ll be coming out soon. There’s music everywhere, and that is a common language.” 

Although she refers to herself as “an annoyingly vocal advocate,” she uses her ukulele, humor, love and her extraordinary musical gifts to shine light on the causes closest to her heart. For someone who tells intricate and nuanced stories for a living, her own personal message is quite simple: “We must all be very kind to one another.”