Happy Easter!

Hello All,

Here’s a song to celebrate this beautiful Easter Sunday! It’s called “Easter Morning”.

Today I thought it would be kicks to post it from a group of Church Ladies. The choir is led by an accomplished Cuatro player, and once they get going, there’s no stopping these women (and their back-ups).

Umm ….once the commentator starts speaking, even if you know Spanish you can tune out.

I can’t understand all the lyrics, as it’s in an English patois that is more South American than Central American (even there I am only partially fluent). But we’ve got a lady who sings beautifully in our little church and who comes from Trinidad. She may be able to help me and if so, I’ll post an update later after service.

So Rock out, Church Ladies!



And if you want to kick your morning up a notch more, check out Serenata Guyanesa who took the song out of “local status” (Callao in Spanish Guyana and around the southern Caribbean) and made it popular:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xY_9olb4cLA

Another great version is from the current Kings of Cuatro, the C4trio. On their first album, they had Serenata Guyanesa sing the lyrics, and even though it was in English (sort of) it was the most popular song on the album and had a part in making the C4trio what they are today:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jj3w9ZFauQM

Down south, they’ve been on holiday for all of the Holy Week. But even if we only have one (or two) days up north, Happy Easter, y’all!

Thank you for the links to brighten up my morning. Happy Easter Sunday to you Dirk.

May this beautiful day of Spring renewal brighten everyone's heart!

Happy Easter Dirk. In Puerto Rico they have been at it all week as well. We came back north a few weeks early and missed it.

O.K., got it.

It was pretty much what I thought, the one uncertainty being the word "rindin". Turns out it's a gathering or party. So the lyrics are:

Easter Morning, Easter Morning when I wake,
Easter Morning Easter Morning,
Mama rindin me begging for take.

The last line, to paraphrase, Mama begging me to take her to the party. Here, we do the same thing on Easter usually with a Crawfish Boil. Big sacks of those things, boiled or live, were flying out of the grocery stores and seafood markets yesterday. Ours is next week, though, instead of this; we'll have a Cajun trio (accordion, fiddle, guitar) on hand as well.

If you want to learn it, here's a site with a gazillion songs, mostly Venezuelan, but some others, even in English, as well. Cuatro chords are the same as Ukulele chords, so no troubles there.

When you click the link to the Easter Morning page, you'll see this site has some handy features, like an auto scroll-down (not that you need it on a song this short), and a feature to transpose the chords. Fixed note Cuatro tuning is in D however, and so be advised if you tune to C and want to switch it over. Take a look at the D chord shapes versus the C chord shapes. Usually you find the D chord shapes easier to play since the arrangement was done that way to begin with. Most of the time you just want to play those shapes. Actually, if you're playing solo, you can just look through all the transcriptions and play the shapes of whichever progression you like best even if you're tuned to C.

http://micuatro.com/acordes/todo-lo-publicado/

Don't know why the edit feature is on the blink lately, but let me correct something on the last post about the micuatro site. The button doesn't change tunings but chords for tuning in key of D. So best bet is to play the D chord shapes; you'll actually be playing in Key of C.

Happy Easter everyone.

Lovely, thanks for sharing.

Happy Easter! Most important day of the year for me and my family.

Thanks for this trick! Most people would be amazed to learn that the chord figures are all the same for cuatro/ukulele, just transposed one note down.

Good to know the Cuatro pages are also helping ukulele players discover and learn some folk songs like this one.

I wanted to add that if you're looking for other songs in English or Spanish for Cuatro (or Ukulele, just use that same tuning trick), we have two distinct sections for both languages:

English: https://tucuatro.com/songs/
Spanish: https://tucuatro.com/es/canciones/

All songs are available for Ukulele, Cuatro or Guitar, transposing options and soon chords will be synced to the video:

Cheers and keep the music flowing!

southcoastukes said:

Don't know why the edit feature is on the blink lately, but let me correct something on the last post about the micuatro site. The button doesn't change tunings but chords for tuning in key of D. So best bet is to play the D chord shapes; you'll actually be playing in Key of C.

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Dirk was such a generous person to the uke community. His strings were great and he would reach out and personally make sure you had what you needed/wanted. He is greatly missed.

Sad to hear. Thanks for reaching out on his behalf. I hope his contributions to the forum are still helping many,

Cheers!

Osprey said:

Dirk was such a generous person to the uke community. His strings were great and he would reach out and personally make sure you had what you needed/wanted. He is greatly missed.

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