Tracing the History of Early Black Ukulele Players from Vaudeville to Beale Street and Beyond
BY BLAIR JACKSON | FROM THE FALL 2024 ISSUE OF UKULELE
From our perch in the first quarter of the 21st century, the initial wave of ukulele popularity in the U.S. more than a century ago almost seems like ancient history. It was spurred in large part by the diminutive instrument’s appearance at the Hawaiian pavilion at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893 and then, most famously, at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco in 1915—a ten-month event that drew 18.8 million visitors from all over the country and the world.
“The Great Ukulele Craze,” as historian Jim Tranquada calls it, led to a number of mainland companies (Harmony, Regal, Kay, Stella, etc.) manufacturing inexpensive ukuleles and selling them through music stores and the ubiquitous Sears and other catalogs—and for the instrument to find its way into the dominant form of musical entertainment of the 1910s and 1920s, live vaudeville shows. Today, we remember such uke-playing vaudevillians as Cliff “Ukulele Ike” Edwards, Roy Smeck, Wendell Hall, Nick Lucas, and others, mostly because they were also successful recording artists during the incredible nationwide boom in sales of 78 rpm records and phonographs between 1920 and 1930. Sheet music from that era routinely included ukulele accompaniment info.
But I’ve long been interested in learning to what degree the ukulele—a remarkably democratic instrument seemingly accessible to every strata of U.S. society—was popular among African American players and music fans from the end of World War I until the beginning of World War II. The short answer is: Unfortunately, we’ll probably never know for sure. By now, serious record collecting sleuths have unearthed just about all the 78s we’re likely to find from that era, and there are scant few featuring Black musicians playing ukuleles.
Indeed, there is little more than a handful listed in the more than 1,000-page tome Blues and Gospel Records 1890–1943. Similarly, there is sparse evidence of many Black uke players being part of predominantly white vaudeville shows (in the early days of vaudeville, only one Black act was allowed per show), and scant historical mentions of ukulele acts at all-Black vaudeville shows or rural traveling medicine shows (multi-act entertainments sponsored by makers of allegedly curative elixirs). So-called race records by Black artists specifically marketed to Black consumers were dominated by folk, blues, early jazz, and gospel styles and utilized all sorts of guitars, banjos, and pianos—but not ukuleles. Why?
Grammy-winning musician, music historian, record collector, and self-described “American Songster” Dom Flemons notes, “The ukulele’s rise in popularity in American entertainment landed in a time before the blues and jazz became the dominant forms of Black entertainment, and I believe this is a reason that the instrument was both prevalent in its time but a rarity on recordings. The birth of race records gradually began to move away from the more prominent vaudeville style associated with Black entertainment of the time. It’s my belief that this led to not only the ukulele falling out of style, but also other types of Black music prominent in the later 1890s going into the end of the World War I era.”
Especially in the days before there was widespread onstage sound amplification, the ukulele was also at a distinct disadvantage in any sort of ensemble, sonically overshadowed by guitars, mandolins, and pianos. Likewise, even with their portability and relative ease of playing, ukuleles were not a great choice for groups busking on noisy city streets, playing in bars—or in recording studios, where a single microphone was generally employed to capture an entire group.
Still, those limitations did not prevent Hawaiian groups from using ukuleles on their recordings and in their touring groups, and as Flemons points out, “As the records made by Hawaiian musicians, both professional and home grown acts, were available to the general public, it is not too much of the stretch to think that Black record listeners would have the notion to adapt the sounds they heard into their own traditions in the same way their white counterparts did. For example, it is clear that the Hawaiian steel-guitar sound remained a part of the slide guitar in the blues, and the ukulele is the same.”
He adds, “With ukulele having taken such a distinctive association with pop songs and composed music of the early 1900s, it is quite possible that it limited the need for recording artists to feature the instrument outside of the well-known celebrities like Cliff Edwards. This is why [vaudeville blues singer, “mouth trumpet” master, and ukulelist] ‘Red Onion’ Joe Linthecome is appealing for a single record release as a novelty [1929’s “Humming Blues” b/w “Pretty Mama Blues”] while not being able to sustain as a consistent hit maker who would make multiple records.”
All that said, there are several interesting Black musicians from the first half of the 20th century who played ukulele professionally (sometimes in addition to other instruments, like guitar or banjo) and offer us glimpses of the kinds of music they played and the lives they led. Very little is known about most of them—a few only recorded a couple of sides or not at all; photos are rare or even nonexistent. No doubt the Great Depression (1929–1939) ended the careers of countless musicians, including several of the talented ones mentioned here.
Hear a playlist for this article.
Rediscovered: Rabbit Muse, Little Laura Dukes, and Lemon Nash
These three are probably the best-known representatives of early Black ukulele simply because they lived long enough to be “rediscovered” during the folk boom of the 1950s and early ’60s—much as guitar-playing blues greats such as Mississippi John Hurt, Fred McDowell, Skip James, Reverend Gary Davis, Son House, and so many others were plucked out of obscurity and enjoyed second careers decades after their original heydays.
Lewis “Rabbit” Muse (1908–1982) was born into a musical family in rural Franklin County, Virginia. “My mother played accordion, my daddy played piano and tenor banjo some,” he recalled in an interview in Cadence magazine in 1977. “I had a cousin who played washboard—had thimbles and things on his fingers, and tin pans. I played the tenor banjo a little bit; couldn’t play that so good. Got in on the ukulele, that’s a little easier. I learned how to play that pretty good. We played all kinds of music—country music, hillbilly music, jazz, blues.”
Muse had seen the ukulele played in minstrel shows when he was young and then, when he around 12, “a fella came in—he was a good ukulele player, but he couldn’t sing. He learnt me two or three chords on the ukulele. Then I got me an instruction book. I finally got so I was doin’ good with it and just kept goin’. I borrowed his ukulele but I got me one pretty quick after that. I bought it in Roanoke [Virginia], a music shop over there.” He learned further by listening to records and slowing down the Victrola so he could catch all the lyrics and chord changes.
By his mid-teens he was already developing a local reputation as a singer, player and comedian—that last part had been inspired by the minstrel shows he saw—and he was even recruited by the Broadway Rastus revue to perform with them when they were in the area. “People flocked in there to see me. So, I’d get up there and they’d black my face and I’d go up and dance and crack jokes” and play and sing. “I played with every country band, every hillbilly band, that came in. They used to have a lot of fairs here and I played in every one of those.” He’d also occasionally perform in blackface for white groups in town, such as the Lion’s club, playing country music and telling jokes; and for Black audiences, “I played jazz [mostly ragtime] and blues.”
Though Muse always played music, it rarely made him enough money to call it a career. So he earned money by working as a chauffeur for a prominent judge’s widow, toiling in a glass mirror factory, and for many years, as a hospital orderly. (He performed at all the hospital parties and events.) Later, he had a period where he did well playing ukulele in an otherwise white quartet he led, called Rabbit Muse and His Jazz Hounds (uke, two acoustic guitars, and bass). They played dances and were often featured on local radio until the Korean War broke up the band. He also performed occasionally with such bluegrass notables as Tommy Magness, Red Smiley, Smokey Graves, and Don Reno. He chose to use steel strings to get more volume out of his instrument.
His first album, Muse Blues (on Rod Shively’s small, bluegrass-oriented Outlet Records), wasn’t recorded until 1975, when he was 67. It’s a barebones affair, “nothin’ but me and my ukulele [and some kazoo],” with Muse tackling such traditional tunes as “Swanee River,” “The Sun’s Gonna Shine in My Back Door Someday,” “Melancholy Baby,” and “Rocking Chair Blues.” Producer Shively chimed in during Muse’s Cadence interview, “He plays ukulele more like a guitar, because he plays blues on the ukulele. He has a little lick with his finger there on the ukulele strum, like a snare drum. Then he strums full chords and has a picking style I’ve never seen before.” Muse said, “I’ve never seen but one man that could pick a ukulele. That was Arthur Godfrey.” Muse made one more album for Outlet: Sixty Minute Man, 1977.
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“Little” Laura Dukes (1907–1992) earned her nickname two ways: The daughter of the drummer in W.C. Handy’s legendary band, she started singing and dancing on Beale Street in Memphis at the age of five; and as a full-grown adult she stood at just four feet, seven inches, and weighed 85 pounds. During the 1920s she toured with various tent shows as both a singer and dancer for local groups and several name acts, including Ma Rainey. In the early ’30s she traveled the South with guitarist Robert McCollum (also known as Robert Nighthawk), who taught her how to play guitar. However, because the instrument was too big for her small hands, “I just learned how to play four strings on the guitar,” she said in a 1976 interview, and instead gravitated to the banjo-uke and, later, the regular ukulele. “I always did like a small instrument with four strings,” she said.
Dukes played a significant role in the loose and convivial Beale Street music scene for her entire career, which spanned from the teens until her death in the early ’90s at the age of 85. She was most closely associated with Memphis’ long line of down-home folk-blues jug bands, sitting in with nearly all of them at one time or another—usually playing rudimentary banjolele and singing.
As a player, she was no doubt influenced by her Memphis Jug Band/Memphis Sheiks friend Charlie Burse, who played the banjolele early in his career (even earning the nickname “the Ukulele Kid”) before switching to the similar-sounding and identically tuned tenor guitar. Dom Flemons notes of Burse, “I can hear the overlap with ukulele,”
adding, “I noticed that in blues and jazz the tenor guitars are metal National tenors, and I wonder if the volume of these guitars provided what was needed to cut through a band where a ukulele might not. I also think about Bud Scott, who worked with Louis Armstrong, or Danny Barker, who worked with Cab Calloway: Both were said to have started playing music on ukulele before transitioning to the tenor guitar, banjo, or regular guitar.”
In the late ’30s Dukes began a long association with Will Batts’ South Memphis Jug Band, and she also had stints in Charlie Banks’ Beale Street Originals and with other groups, performing in small clubs, at private parties, on riverboats, and, later, at folk festivals. She seems to have spent very little time in studios; rather, most of her very limited recorded output comes from informal performances captured later in her career, and released decades after her prime. She was lifelong friends with jug band pioneers Will Shade (Memphis Jug Band) and Gus Cannon (Cannon’s Jug Stompers), and one of the more fascinating aural documents we have of her is the three of them in different configurations captured in an intimate home recording (along with blues giant Furry Lewis) called Memphis Sessions 1956–’61.
A number of other tracks she recorded later—including a 1964 session for Swedish radio that featured Shade, Lewis, and harmonica ace Charlie Musselwhite—have filtered out over the years, but by and large she is underrepresented as an artist. By the late stages of her career she was widely admired as sort of the grand dame of the Memphis folk and blues scene, and she happily reminisced about her glory days. “Everybody had a real good time on Beale Street,” she said in one of her last interviews, “including me!”
“Papa” Lemon Nash (1898–1969) lives on today thanks to a wonderful set of solo recordings made by Folk-Lyric Records founder Dr. Harry Oster between 1959 and 1961, later committed to CD (along with snippets from interviews with Nash from the same period) by Arhoolie Records, called Papa Lemon: New Orleans Ukulele Maestro and Tent Show Troubadour. Of the few 20th-century Black uke players whose work was recorded, Nash is unquestionably the most accomplished musician of them all, equally adept at confident strumming and—fairly rare among the early players—nimble fingerpicking.
“For the most part, I had assumed that strumming was the main style of playing until I heard Lemon Nash,” Flemons says. “Nash brings a couple of interesting revelations about ukulele players. First, in the recordings made in the late 1950s one has to marvel at the variety of playing styles that he uses. He strums a few, fingerpicks a few, and plays a variety of both, especially on the blues material. Another noticeable aspect is the multifaceted nature of his repertoire. The songs are a gumbo of different types of material catered to an everchanging audience on the stage and the street.”
Nash took up the ukulele while he was a teen growing up in New Orleans. “Uke was famous out here at the beach and different places,” he said in a 1960 interview I found in the archives of Tulane University in New Orleans. “I saw everyone was playing the ukulele, seemed like they all liked the ukulele, so I got with the uke.” Nash also played guitar and banjo, but the uke was his main instrument. During the 1920s he was a part of the traveling Big Chief Indian and Western Cowboy medicine show, usually playing in blackface and wearing what he called a wild “Dr. Jekyll” wig [actually it would be the evil “Dr. Hyde”]. He made $25 a night—“the most I ever made in my life.” He also toured the South with various traveling circuses, and lived in Nashville for a spell, playing on the radio in a nine-piece band sponsored by a music store.
For much of the rest of his life, aside from doing menial jobs here and there and a stint in the Merchant Marine during the ’40s, he earned money playing in the streets and bars of New Orleans, at fish fries, and on riverboats, sometimes solo, sometimes with other musicians: “Anywhere we could get a dollar we’d go play there.”
His broad repertoire included blues, vaudeville, folk, Dixieland jazz, and even pop numbers popular during World War I. And his sophisticated knowledge of different keys (Bb and F were his favorites), scales, and diminished and augmented chords was quite impressive in his time.
Other Notable Players
The earliest recordings by a uke-playing Black musician I’m aware of are the two sides cut by vaudeville performer “Ukulele” Bob Williams in Chicago in 1924, “West Indies Blues” b/w “Go ’Long, Mule”—the former was a popular vaudeville and jazz song that year; the latter is a comical, bluesy 19th-century minstrel show tune. Williams had a successful career in the late ’20s and early ’30s, touring widely with both mixed race and all-Black revues. One of the most popular in the former category was called “Rarin’ to Go,” which was hyped in newspaper ads as the “greatest array of colored and white stars ever assembled in one show!” and played all over the Northeast and Midwest.
Williams sang, danced, played his uke and did comedy bits that were well-received everywhere he went. Then, in the late ’20s, there was the all-Black Joe Sheftell’s Southern Revue, which made it to the Midwest, the West Coast, and even to Hawaii: a 1927 review in The Honolulu Advertiser on February 2, 1927, noted, “The success of the revue has been phenomenal.”
Very little is known about Williams’ life, though I did track down one article from the December 26, 1931 edition of the weekly Baltimore-based newspaper The Afro-American in which “Looking at the Stars” columnist Ralph Matthews describes the “jovial carefree” Williams as “a graduate of Cornell University, an all-around athlete, and an accomplished musician… A likable sort of chap is this tall, lanky boy they call ‘Ukulele’ Bob Williams. He got that way because he dared to bring one of those dwarf guitars on the stage way back in the days when it just wasn’t being done.”
A few have suggested that Williams taught the ukulele to Cliff Edwards, but no one has successfully confirmed that so far.
“Ukulele Mays” (Harry Mays) was another popular late ’20s ukulele-playing entertainer who made his living primarily from traveling in a duo with Danny Small on the Orpheum Theatre chain’s “mixed” vaudeville circuit and also recording a few sides for the great Black music label Paramount Records.
Typically in that era, the live variety revue featuring musicians, comedians, and circus-like acts such as jugglers, acrobats, knife-throwers, and contortionists would perform for about an hour, followed by a silent short and then a feature-length film. Musical acts would usually play just two or three songs, often interspersed with dancing and/or some comic material. (The massive popularity of talkies in the early ’30s contributed greatly to the downfall of the vaudeville circuits.)
Mays’ output for Paramount began in the spring of 1925, when he recorded two blues instrumentals with harmonica and washboard player Herbert Leonard as The Two of Spades (with Mays playing banjo-uke). By late fall of that year, however, he’d gotten together with singer/uker/comedian Danny Small and recorded four tunes that leaned more toward the traditional vaudeville sound at Paramount’s studio in Grafton, Wisconsin.
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An article in the January 9, 1927 edition of The Daily Illini (student newspaper at the University of Illinois) previewed performances by the Demeaux and Hamilton Revue, noting that “Dan Small and Harry Mays, ‘The Ukulele Boys’ are youthful colored entertainers who sing, dance and play ukuleles. Harry Mays is one of the few who can play melody and accompaniment on the ukulele at the same time. The boys make a specialty of original double-stepping.” The Minneapolis Star wrote of another show: “A pair of exceedingly clever negro performers call themselves ‘The Ukulele Boys.’ They shake wicked hoofs and also do some nice singing. You can’t sneeze at their comedy, either.”
All six of Mays’ known recordings (four with Small, two with Leonard) can be found on a CD compilation called Hokum Blues 1924–1929 on the invaluable Document Records label. Alas, I have been unable to track down what became of Ukulele Mays (or Ukulele Bob, whose two sides also appear on the above release).
I also came up empty trying to find out anything about the curiously named St. Louis duo known as The Pebbles—Alphonsus Agee and Baxter White—who recorded six tunes for the Okeh and Victor labels in 1926 and 1927. All six tracks, which range from blues to ’20s-style pop, feature either banjo-ukulele or regular ukulele, along with guitar or banjo, though it’s unclear who plays what on each. These tracks, too, appear on Hokum Blues 1924–1929. As far as I can determine, the duo was never photographed (not unusual for lesser groups in the ’20s and ’30s), and again I have no idea what, if anything, either of them did after their time as The Pebbles.
I found just two mentions of them in the entire Newspapers.com database: In the
St. Louis Argus edition of January 29, 1926, there is mention of a big party at the Midget Café where “some red hot jazz music was furnished by Mr. Harry Decker and his two ‘Ukulele Ikes,’ Messrs. Baxter White and Alfonse Agee,” and in the Nov. 18, 1927
St. Louis Post–Disptach, a small item, under the headline “Negroes Present Musical Revue,” lists “a dancing and singing act by Alphonse Agee and Baxter White, known as ‘Pebbles,’ was the feature.”
We’ll close our look at early Black ukers with an amateur musician who never made a record, didn’t perform in clubs or theaters, but is still emblematic of the ukulele’s fun and social side, “Ukulele Joe” Thomas (1878–1950). A native of New Orleans, he resettled in Omaha and worked as a chef for a succession of railroad executives, including 38 years with the Union Pacific Railroad (headquartered in Omaha since Lincoln’s time). When those bigwigs would travel—as they often did—Thomas cooked for them in their private train cars. An amateur singer, songwriter, and ukuleleist (and player of other stringed instruments), he would carry an ukulele with him on his travels, entertaining his boss and others, earning the nickname “the singing chef.”
In a profile of Thomas, Tara Spencer, for the Douglas County [Nebraska] Historical Society’s website, writes, “During his travels with the company, he was a frequent visitor at radio stations along their routes, appearing on airwaves across the country playing a ukulele or ‘one-stringed violin.’… The mention of his name in newspapers outside of his hometown is proof of Thomas’ widespread appeal.” Among the many cities where he played on the radio were Chicago, Wichita, Salt Lake City, Spokane, Portland, Hollywood, Santa Monica, and Oakland.
One last note about Ukulele Joe: Back home in Omaha, he turned his kitchen into a giant musical instrument he called the Café de Melody. As a 1947 profile of him in the Omaha World-Herald explained, “Open the doors of the stove and you find that it’s an organ. A chair nearby is built with a neck and strings for twanging. The neck of the instrument is one of the back supports. The frying pan can double as a guitar. The broiler is another stringed instrument. A kettle has all that a fiddle has. A meat saw serves as a bow. A bacon pan is a ukulele in disguise.”
Special thanks to Dom Flemons, John Heneghan, and Del Rey for their valuable input on this article.
