How Ukulele Saved the Sheet Music Industry in Radio’s Early Days

BY JIM TRANQUADA | FROM THE FALL 2026 ISSUE OF UKULELE

America’s first commercial radio station, Pittsburgh’s KDKA, went on air November 2, 1920. Two years later, there were almost 500 stations nationwide—a development then-Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover called “astounding.” Consumers quickly adapted it into their daily lives. Songwriters and music publishers soon came to see the disruptive new technology as a threat to their bottom lines, so much so that in 1923, Gene Buck, president of the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP), lamented that broadcasting was “pounding the life out of popular song hits before the composer has time to receive a reasonable return on his production.”

At the same time, boosted in part by its ubiquitous presence on early broadcasts, ukulele sales continued to climb: by 1925, the ukulele was reportedly the top-selling instrument in the United States. Even as radio cut into sheet music sales, popular music publishers didn’t hesitate to embrace one of radio’s biggest beneficiaries to prop up their earnings. They added ukulele arrangements to sheet music and turned out hundreds of inexpensive but profitable ukulele methods and songbooks. 

“Maybe the ukelele [sic] has been designated by a divine Providence as the Messiah that is to step in and save the music business from utter annihilation,” one anonymous music executive told Billboard in July 1925. “Quite a few of the music publishers are inclined to think so.”

Powering the Presses

From the beginning, the ukulele was a constant through the chaotic jumble of different types of music heard on-air as newly launched stations searched for easy, inexpensive ways to fill airtime. “The radio listener is certain to tune in on some ukulele playing somewhere or other before any evening is over,” one music industry analyst observed in 1925.

Radio was a key to the career of such ukulele artists as Wendell Hall of Chicago, aka “The Red-Headed Music Maker,” who became a national celebrity in 1923 by promoting his new record, “It Ain’t Gonna Rain No Mo’,” on a national tour of radio stations. That summer, as preparations were underway for the National Association of Sheet Music Dealers convention, association president S. Stanley Philpitt urged members to come ready to discuss “the possible effect of the radio upon sheet music.”

That year also marked the publication of two trend-setting ukulele books by two New York publishers: “Hank’s” Book of Eukadidles for the Ukulele (Jack Mills) and Smith’s Comic Songs for the Ukulele (William J. Smith Music). Slim (16 and 32 pages, respectively), and cheap (18 cents wholesale, 35 cents retail), the success of the two titles unleashed a flood of similar publications.

Previously, most ukulele books were self-teaching methods published by retail music houses and ambitious music teachers. By 1926, Sherman, Clay and Co. of San Francisco claimed its Practical Method for Self-Instruction on the Ukulele, by Ohio native Nelson B. Bailey, had sold two million copies, despite its drab brown cover and 75-cent price tag.

It was the ukulele’s popularity and portability that prompted the publication of Eukadidles—a bid to boost sales during the summer, traditionally a slow period for music industry in a pre–air-conditioned era when few people wanted to gather around the piano in a hot room indoors. 

“The sales of Eukadidles has exceeded our fondest dreams,” publisher Jack Mills said. “And since we have been issuing the ukulele music and other standard compositions we have no dull months. When the people quit buying piano music and take to the outdoors our ukulele music takes a decided jump. . . . The ukulele has been a blessing to our business.”

Other publishers were quick to follow suit, issuing a stream of songbooks and self-instructors with flashy, three-color covers and in a new format small enough to tuck into a ukulele case. Robbins-Engel of New York went so far as to open a separate ukulele department. Because “celebrity sells,” the books featured not only such well-known players as Wendell Hall, Cliff “Ukulele Ike” Edwards, and Frank Crumit, but also bluesman W.C. Handy and the Happiness Boys—Billy Jones and Ernest Hare—then the most popular singers on radio, who, truth be told, didn’t play the ukulele.

“Publishers ought to accept the new Harms publication, Keep Smiling at Trouble, from Jolson’s Big Boy show, as the official anthem of the industry,” Billboard wrote in April 1925. “For in the face of the depression culminating from the universal sweep of the radio craze a new savior looms up before their troubled gaze in the shape of the lowly ukulele. It is no secret that ukulele publications kept many publishers in business last summer . . . the first signs of spring find music printers’ presses busy on ‘uke’ productions of every sort.”

Expanding the Repertoire

No book better exemplified the link between radio and the ukulele than Eddie Chapelle’s The Original Radio Course for the Ukulele and Banjo Ukulele . . . Exactly as Broadcast from Station WIBA (Chapelle claimed to be the first person to offer ukulele lessons on the radio). Printed on cheap paper and barely there at eight pages, the 25-cent venture provided an overview of the on-air lessons offered by Chapelle in Madison, Wisconsin.

Such was the popularity of ukulele books—one wholesaler estimated there were 500 on the market at the end of 1925—that even classical music publishers issued their own versions. As early as 1917, Carl Fischer published a ukulele method by Leon Coleman, followed by its own comic songbook; Boston-based Oliver Ditson published the Bickford Method for Ukulele by Vadah Olcott-Bickford and Zarh Myron Bickford, two of America’s leading classical guitarists.

Meanwhile, ukulele performer, teacher, and composer May Singhi Breen of New York was leading a successful campaign to encourage music publishers to include ukulele arrangements in their sheet music. “Three years ago, 95 percent of sheet music was purchased by pianists,” Robert Crawford, sales manager for Irving Berlin, Inc., told Billboard late in 1925. “I venture to say that at least one-third of the sheet music sold during the past summer was bought by ‘ukists.’”

While Breen was a prolific arranger who worked with multiple publishers, the demand meant work for scores of others, including such unlikely colleagues as George J. Trinkaus, the Yale Music School graduate and former first violinist for the Boston Symphony, and Henry “Hank” Linet, the Russian-born pianist with a chemistry degree who later became a Hollywood publicist and claimed never to have learned how to play the ukulele.

All Good Things . . .

But the power of radio ultimately was greater than ukulele arrangements—or the ukulele itself—as instrument sales began to decline after reaching a peak in 1925-26. “The constant playing of popular songs over the radio enabled the public to learn songs without buying sheet music and sales have fallen off drastically,” said Breen, herself a popular radio artist whose national show was on the air for 16 years.

Soon, music publishers were facing an even more disruptive new technology: movies with sound. As with radio, the tech-friendly ukulele helped usher in the new era: Roy Smeck’s short film His Pastimes, featuring his virtuoso ukulele playing, was one of the films that launched the sound era in August 1926.

Beginning with Al Jolson’s “Sonny Boy” from 1928’s The Singing Fool, movie theme songs dominated the market. Music publishers could see the handwriting on the wall: M. Witmark & Sons sold to Warner Brothers in May 1929. Four months later, Warner bought many of the other top music firms, including Harms, Remick, Harms-Chappelle, Famous Music, and DeSylva, Brown and Henderson.

Publishers and instrument makers kept up a brave front—“This is only a temporary condition,” manufacturer Fred Gretsch insisted in early 1930—but the ukulele quickly faded as public taste turned to big bands, and sheet music began to feature guitar arrangements. “Where is the instrument today?” asked one entertainment columnist of the time. “The ‘uke’ is apparently going rapidly into the limbo of the mandolin.”