Dan Scanlan Has Spent a Lifetime Fighting Injustice and Uniting Communities Through Ukuleles

BY JIM D’VILLE | PHOTOS BY JEREMY McCAIN
FROM THE WINTER 2024 ISSUE OF UKULELE

Earl Daniel (Dan) Scanlan, Jr. has been playing the ukulele for longer than most—70 years, to be exact. Who knew that a childhood gift of a ukulele would eventually turn him into a ukulele revolutionary who would fight political and social injustices his entire adult life? You could also call Scanlan a ukulele jack-of-all-trades—an accomplished songwriter, educator, author, luthier, and wandering minstrel. He has certainly crammed a lot of ukulele experiences into his eight decades on planet Earth.

L.A. Story

Scanlan was born and raised in Los Angeles. His four-string journey began the Christmas of 1954 with the gift of a plastic Maccaferri Islander ukulele. “My mother showed me the my-dog-has-fleas tuning, and I was on my way,” Scanlan remembers. “The first song I picked out was ‘Red River Valley.’” 

After high school, he attended Loyola University (now Loyola-Marymount) on a full-ride scholarship, graduating in 1965 with a bachelor’s degree in English and communications. On his first day of college he met Pat Sauer standing in front of him in an alphabetically arranged line, waiting to sign up for his English classes. The two students struck up a conversation. That chance meeting led to a musical partnership that lasts to this day. Just a couple of groups they have played in together over the years include a quartet in college called What the Hell Four and a project called Flathead in the 1970s. “Pat and I started a conversation we haven’t finished yet. He knows all my songs, and I know his.” 

Scanlan continued playing the ukulele during college but also had musical flings with the bongos, tenor banjo, and guitar. However, it was a vintage Wendall Hall-Ludwig banjo ukulele that would become his lifelong musical partner. “In 1973, I bought a 1930s Gibson archtop guitar from John Dopyera [the founder of both the National and Dobro instrument companies] for $100,” he says. “The next summer, I worked as a Volkswagen mechanic in Sacramento. I walked into a music store on K Street and saw a 1920s Wendall Hall Professional Model. It was the first time I had seen anything like it. I offered the Gibson in trade, and they took it. It began a 50-year musical relationship.”

Finding Purpose in the Folk Scare

In the mid-’60s, Scanlan stopped listening to the radio. To him, pop songs seemed inconsequential. So, during college, he started writing songs focusing on critical social issues like the Vietnam War, L.A. smog, and plastics. And like some musical Nostradamus, Scanlan predicted the current scourge of worldwide plastic pollution in a song. 

“My friends and I were English majors and always messed around with verses,” he says. “The song ‘Plastic Will Eat You Alive’ came from those poetry exercises: ‘You can drink your coffee from a Styrofoam cup/ but you’ll also disrupt how the fish take their sup.’That might be my oldest song and probably the most relevant today. We’ve got islands of plastic waste floating around in the oceans, yet we still want to drink our water from a plastic bottle.”

The Vietnam War also profoundly impacted Scanlan’s early songwriting. One image that had a significant effect on him was the Pulitzer Prize–winning photo of a young Vietnamese girl running naked down a road in South Vietnam after being burned by napalm in 1972. Seeing that photo led Scanlan to write “Marshlands Void of Green,” a songabout the devastating effects of napalm. He says, “I saw the ukulele as a way to express what I felt was going on in the world.”

Like Minds Online

From the early 1950s to the 1990s, you could count the number of other ukulele players Scanlan encountered on your strumming hand. But as computer communication evolved in the 1990s, Scanlan discovered there were indeed other ukulele players out there.

He first stumbled upon a newsgroup dedicated to the instrument. “When I found this newsgroup, they were having a heated discussion about whether or not one should use a strap. One of the participants, a fellow named R. Bruce, wrote a poem about the controversy. I thought it was spot on, so I wrote to him and asked if I could set the poem to music. He told me to go for it. It’s called ‘10,000 Ukuleles’—I think it had to be the first time two people who had never met before wrote a song together over the internet.”

Around the same time, Scanlan created one of the first ukulele-centric websites—Cool Hand Uke’s Ukulele Lava Tube (coolhanduke.com), which is still online 28 years later as a virtual cornucopia of resources for the instrument. “In 1989, I did a gig on the Big Island with two ukulele players who called themselves Hoopele. From them, I learned that local musicians sought lava tubes—huge underground holes in recent lava flows—to use as recording studios, thus the name of my website,” says Scanlan. “A high school kid in a computer store in Reno showed me how to build my site around 1995, and I was on my way.” 

To Madeira and Beyond

In 1989, Scanlan was contacted by João Mauricio Marques of Funchal, Madeira Island, Portugal. Marques had an idea to reunite the ukulele with its predecessors from Portugal, the four-string braguinha and five-string rajão. Almost a decade later, in September 1998, the braguinha and the rajão met the ukulele in person for the first time when ukulele players from the United States performed concerts in Madeira and Lisbon, Portugal, at various venues, including the World Expo in Lisbon.

“The project, ‘A Father and Son Reunion: The Braguinha Meets the Ukulele,’was a significant historical event in the history of the ukulele, a cultural and musical exchange between the Hawaiian and Madeiran peoples,” says Scanlan, who served as “American coordinator,” as he puts it, finding ukulele players and financial support for the project.

The American participants that traveled to Maderia included Scanlan on ukulele, braguinha, and vocals; Fred Fallin, a player and historian from Chicago; Alfredo Canopin, a player and teacher from Honolulu, Hawaii; and Leslie Nunes of Honolulu, a great-grandson of Manuel Nunes, one of the three Madeiran woodworkers credited with creating the ukulele. The Madeiran participants were Danilo Fernandes, lead braguinha and ukulele; Mario Andre, rajão and vocals; and Carlos and Noberto Cruz. “Carlos and Noberto are wonderful mandolin players who learned the ukulele for the project,” Scanlan says. “They are talented ukulele players now.”

Scanlan extended his ukulele travels in 2003 after receiving an invitation to the International Ukulele Ceilidh in Nova Scotia, Canada. The Ceilidh is a semi-annual festival that has featured ukulele luminaries such as J. Chalmers Doane, James Hill, and many others. Scanlan’s first trip to the Ceilidh started an annual fall tradition of a cross-country ukulele tour in his Toyota camper van. “The first year I went, it cost me a thousand dollars to get there. The second time, I drove back and broke even. The third time, I made a thousand dollars. After that, I stopped counting.”

Community Spirit

While living in the Sierra Nevada foothills of Northern California, Scanlan discovered a group of a dozen women ukuleleists in their 80s at a senior home in nearby Chico. They called themselves the Vokuleles and had been playing together for three decades. Scanlan says, “I went up to play with them one day, and we did the song ‘I Can’t Give You Anything But Love.’ When it ended, a 90-year-old woman with a twinkle in her eye came up to me and said, ‘I can’t give you anything but love—I’m on social security.’”

He led the group for seven years after the Vokuleles’ leader died in 1996. Later, Scanlan began his own group—the Strum Bums—in his adopted home of Grass Valley, California. “Seventeen people showed up for our first meeting, most of whom had never played an instrument. We took second place in the Fourth of July parade six months later, playing ‘The Stars & Stripes Forever.’” 

Under Scanlan’s direction, the Strum Bums played the Hawaii International Ukulele Festival (twice), the New York Ukulele Festival, and appeared in the widely popular documentary, The Mighty Uke. They perform at numerous county fairs, convalescent and retirement homes, schools, and special events. 

After performing in Hawaii in 2010, Scanlan recalls, “A couple of weeks later I gave a workshop in Dun Laoghaire, County Dublin, Ireland, to about 17 players. At the end of the daylong workshop, I urged them give their group a name. I suggested that since the Hawaiians use the word huli for revolution, and since the Irish are fond of revolution and hoolie in Ireland means a jam session, they should call themselves Ukuhooley.” The Ukulele Hooley by the Sea is now an annual event in Dun Laoghaire and is Europe’s longest running ukulele festival.

The Mad Luthier

Back home in the alchemistic recesses of his tiny workshop, Scanlan is free to create whatever goofy, odd, or unique instrument that comes to mind. He began building instruments about a decade ago after moving to his current home in the gold country foothills of Nevada County, California. “A local luthier, Luke Wilson, gave me a rough-cut maple body and neck as a housewarming gift. It was really just two clumps of wood,” says Scanlan. “Well, that sat around for years until I finally got out the rasps, files, and some sandpaper and turned what was supposed to be a mandolin into a solid-body electric braguinha. That was my first build.” 

Not trained as a professional luthier, he collected his knowledge of instrument construction from some very curious sources, including a former brewmaster for Anheuser-Busch. “After retiring from Budweiser, Thomas Merkal began building ukuleles. He was the one who taught me how to bend wood using nothing more than a light bulb and a piece of metal,” says Scanlan, whose current wood-bending tool for making ukulele sides is a curling iron he purchased from a thrift store. 

Scanlan is sound-curious. He once built a ukulele using two wooden dinner plates facing each other to reflect the sound waves, inspired by a conversation with Dopyera, the inventor of the resonator ukulele. “He once told me he tried to improve the sound of his instruments by arranging two cones that would face each other,” he says. “So I thought I would try that.” Scanlan’s current project is a banjo ukulele where the resonator is suspended from the instrument’s body to increase the airflow. 

By far, his most ambitious project is a copper ukulele. “My neighbor and daily walking partner was artist Richard Gill. He recently passed away at age 94. His family gave me his torches, tools, an anvil, and two big sheets of copper. I decided to make a copper-body ukulele.” The one thing Scanlan didn’t plan on, however, was the unpredictability of copper when heated. “I cut all the body pieces like I would for a wooden ukulele, but the pieces began warping once I heated the copper. Nothing would fit together. Well, Richard had given me a copper statue of a guitar player. When I studied how he created the guitar, I saw that he had hammered the pieces together. It was no jeweler’s job; it was a blacksmith’s job!” 

Another of Scanlan’s unique creations is a three-neck instrument that outlines the ukulele’s historical lineage. All attached on one big soundbox are necks for a re-entrant ukulele, a five-string rajão, and a braguinha.  

Spreading the Uke Gospel

In addition to expanding and connecting ukulele communities around the world, Scanlan is a tireless teacher. Nearly 4,000 students have taken his online ukulele course at Udemy.com. He has also written multiple ukulele instruction books, including a songbook of 131 original songs called The World as I Uke It (self-published), and the comprehensive How to Play the Ukulele: A Complete Guide for Beginners (Simon and Schuster). The latter is, in his words, about “getting at one’s own music by exploring how the ukulele eases the journey with its many never-ending paths.” If there’s anyone that knows about the ukulele’s never-ending paths, Scanlan certainly fits the bill.

What he Plays

Dan Scanlan’s main instrument is his 1925 Wendell Hall Professional Model banjo ukulele by Ludwig. In smaller solo performances, he often plays his 1920s Martin 5K, 1940s Kamaka, or 1920s Makini mahogany soprano. As for strings, Scanlan says, “Although I’ve tried most strings, I tend to put Martins on my Martins, and I sometimes use D’Addarios. But the truth is, I don’t particularly pay a lot of attention to strings—action and intonation are far more important for playability.” —JD