Canada Jim
Well-known member
I believe I must have joined this site a while ago and then forgotten it. I have been following and contributing for about a week now.
When I was about 15, a cousin left a ukulele at our house by accident and I learned 3 chords and the song "Froggie Went A Courting" and soon switched to guitar and abandoned the uke.
Flash forward about 50 years and I'm at a party playing some music with my friends when a fellow named David Newland comes in with a shiny metal reso-uke. I admired it and he asked if I'd like to give it a try. I'm sure he meant for one song or maybe two, but he ended up playing the guitar for the rest of the night and I was hooked on the uke.
I have played guitar, banjo, mandolin, harmonica, Autoharp and several other instruments in various musical groups and in various genres since my debut with The Rovers Three in a church basement hootenanny in 1960, but one of the groups I play in now, The Maple Leaf Champions Jug Band, is the first time I've played the ukulele for an audience. I now own a few ukuleles and banjoleles and the instrument in the photo is an old S.S.Stewart tenor banjo with nylgut strings tuned gCEA (with a capo at the 2nd fret to avoid string breakage).
An instrument that I thought of as a toy a short time ago has started occupying more and more of my time and I now realise you can do a lot more than just strum chords to back up your singing. It's a legitimate musical instrument.
When I was about 15, a cousin left a ukulele at our house by accident and I learned 3 chords and the song "Froggie Went A Courting" and soon switched to guitar and abandoned the uke.
Flash forward about 50 years and I'm at a party playing some music with my friends when a fellow named David Newland comes in with a shiny metal reso-uke. I admired it and he asked if I'd like to give it a try. I'm sure he meant for one song or maybe two, but he ended up playing the guitar for the rest of the night and I was hooked on the uke.
I have played guitar, banjo, mandolin, harmonica, Autoharp and several other instruments in various musical groups and in various genres since my debut with The Rovers Three in a church basement hootenanny in 1960, but one of the groups I play in now, The Maple Leaf Champions Jug Band, is the first time I've played the ukulele for an audience. I now own a few ukuleles and banjoleles and the instrument in the photo is an old S.S.Stewart tenor banjo with nylgut strings tuned gCEA (with a capo at the 2nd fret to avoid string breakage).
An instrument that I thought of as a toy a short time ago has started occupying more and more of my time and I now realise you can do a lot more than just strum chords to back up your singing. It's a legitimate musical instrument.
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