10 Famous Ukulele Players, and What Each One Actually Played

The ukulele has been famous three separate times, and each boom had one player behind it. Cliff Edwards sold America millions of them in the 1920s. George Formby did the same to Britain in the 1930s on an instrument that was not quite a ukulele. Tiny Tim put it back on prime-time television in 1968. Everything since — Israel Kamakawiwoʻole, Jake Shimabukuro, the YouTube generation — has been the instrument being taken seriously rather than sold by the crate.

1. Israel Kamakawiwoʻole

Israel Kamakawiwoʻole made the most widely heard ukulele recording in the world, and it was an accident. His medley of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” and “What a Wonderful World” was recorded in 1988, in one take, in the small hours — a friend called a Honolulu studio at three in the morning asking for time, and Iz came in and did it. The recording sat around, appeared on Ka ʻAnoʻi, and then went onto Facing Future in 1993, which became Hawaiʻi’s first certified platinum album and has sold over a million copies.

He was born in 1959 and died in June 1997 of respiratory failure, at 38. He stood 6 ft 2 in and weighed 757 lb at his heaviest. His brother Skippy, who played with him in the Makaha Sons of Niʻihau, had died of a heart attack in 1982 at 28.

He played a tenor rather than a soprano — Martin’s tribute model, the 1T IZ, is a mahogany tenor. The playing itself is the least complicated thing about the recording: the medley is a handful of chords, and what makes it work is the voice and the timing behind them. That is genuinely good news if you have owned a ukulele for a week, because the arrangement is within reach almost immediately.

2. George Formby

Formby was the biggest star in Britain for the best part of a decade — the highest-paid entertainer in the country from 1938 to 1942, and the top British male box-office draw from 1937 to 1943, across some twenty-two films. He was born George Hoy Booth in Wigan in 1904 and died in Preston in 1961, at 56.

The instrument in his hands is a banjolele, not a ukulele: a small banjo body with a ukulele neck and ukulele tuning, built to be heard at the back of a music hall over an orchestra and an audience. Anyone who tries to reproduce his sound on a wooden soprano is going to fail at the first bar, and the reason is the drum head rather than the technique.

The technique is worth the trouble anyway. His right hand ran a “split stroke”, a syncopated pattern that sounds twice as fast as the tempo it is played at, and uke players still take it apart bar by bar. The songs are music-hall innuendo and they have aged unevenly; “When I’m Cleaning Windows” and “Leaning on a Lamp-post” are the ones to start with, and the playing has aged far better than the lyrics. There are statues of him in Douglas on the Isle of Man and in Wigan.

3. Jake Shimabukuro

In April 2006 somebody uploaded a clip of Shimabukuro playing George Harrison’s “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” to YouTube without telling him. It had been filmed in New York for a show called Midnight Ukulele Disco. It has since passed seventeen million views, and the modern ukulele revival dates from roughly that moment.

He was born in Honolulu in November 1976 and plays a custom four-string tenor built by Kamaka, the Honolulu family firm that has been making ukuleles since 1916. Peace Love Ukulele (2011) went to number one on Billboard’s world music chart, Grand Ukulele (2012) to number two, and Trio (2020) topped the contemporary jazz chart. He has a shelf of Nā Hōkū Hanohano awards, Hawaiʻi’s own music prize.

The honest caveat for anyone watching that video and reaching for a credit card: the instrument is a one-off from a maker with a waiting list, and it is not what is doing the work. What separates his playing from everyone else’s is right-hand independence and a willingness to treat four nylon strings as an orchestra. None of that is bought.

4. Cliff Edwards

Cliff Edwards was the first ukulele star, and he is the reason the 1920s boom happened. He picked up the instrument because it was portable and cheap, got the name “Ukulele Ike” from a waiter who could not remember his real one, and became one of the biggest recording artists of the decade. He made the first recording of “Singin’ in the Rain” in 1929, had a hit with “I Can’t Give You Anything but Love” in 1928, and sold enough records to move millions of ukuleles along with them.

Then he became a voice. He was Jiminy Cricket in Pinocchio in 1940, which means he sang “When You Wish Upon a Star”, and one of the crows in Dumbo the following year. The voice outlasted the records by fifty years.

The end of the story is grim and worth telling. He died in 1971, aged 76, of cardiac arrest, in a convalescent hospital as a charity patient; his body went unclaimed until Disney arranged the burial. Start with the 1929 “Singin’ in the Rain” — the fast, chattering strum underneath it is a whole style that mostly died with him.

5. Tiny Tim

Herbert Khaury, born 1932, took “Tiptoe Through the Tulips” to number 17 on the Hot 100 in 1968 and became a television fixture on Laugh-In. When he married Miss Vicki on The Tonight Show in December 1969, somewhere between thirty and thirty-five million people watched — a figure no ukulele performance will ever come close to again.

He was treated as a novelty and he was not one. Khaury spent years in the New York Public Library researching the history of recorded sound and photocopying sheet music from the 1900s to the 1930s so he could learn it properly. The falsetto was a performance choice; he had a perfectly good baritone and used it when he felt like it. What he was actually doing on television was reviving Tin Pan Alley repertoire that nobody else was singing, on the instrument it had been written for.

He died in November 1996, at 64, of a heart attack on stage at a benefit in Minneapolis, in the middle of that song. God Bless Tiny Tim (1968) is the record.

6. Roy Smeck

Roy Smeck was billed as “The Wizard of the Strings” and earned it. A 1926 Vitaphone short called His Pastimes, released alongside Don Juan, made him famous overnight — it was one of the first sound films anyone had seen. He played at Franklin Roosevelt’s inaugural ball in 1933 and at George VI’s coronation in 1937, and was still working on television decades later.

He played the ukulele with his teeth, behind his back and with a violin bow, and in one 1933 film he appears playing steel guitar, tenor banjo, ukulele and six-string guitar at once through split-screen. He also designed the Harmony Vita-Uke, the pear-shaped instrument with the seal-shaped soundholes that sold in enormous numbers.

The tricks are what got him billed and they undersell him. Strip them away and the playing underneath is cleaner and more inventive than almost anything else recorded on the instrument before 1950. He lived to 94, dying in 1994.

7. Taimane

Taimane Gardner was born in Honolulu in 1989, started on the ukulele at five, and was playing on the street in Waikīkī when Don Ho heard her at thirteen and put her in his show. Her first album, Loco Princess, came out in 2005, followed by Ukulele Dance (2012), We Are Made of Stars (2015), Elemental (2018) and Hawaiki (2022). She took Favorite Entertainer of the Year at the 2019 Nā Hōkū Hanohano awards, and her NPR Tiny Desk set in March 2020 is the performance most people have seen.

Her right hand is the thing to watch. It is flamenco technique — rasgueado rolls, percussive taps on the body, tremolo — applied to an instrument that has no business supporting it, and it fills a room in a way a strummed ukulele does not. Elemental is the album to start with.

8. Eddie Vedder

Pearl Jam’s singer released Ukulele Songs on 31 May 2011 and it went to number four on the Billboard 200 — sixteen tracks in under thirty-five minutes, produced with Adam Kasper. It is mostly one voice and one strummed ukulele, with Glen Hansard and Cat Power turning up for a duet apiece and a couple of standards from the 1920s and 30s sitting alongside the originals. He had already used the instrument on the Into the Wild soundtrack in 2007.

Nothing on the record is technically difficult and that is the point of it. A rock singer with an enormous voice recorded an album on the quietest instrument in the house and let the arrangements stay as bare as they sound, which is why half of it is playable by someone six weeks in. Start with “Can’t Keep” or “Sleeping by Myself”.

9. James Hill

James Hill is the best case anyone has for the ukulele as a serious solo instrument, and he came out of a school program. Born in Canada in 1980, he learned through the Langley Ukulele Ensemble under the classroom method J. Chalmers Doane built for Canadian schools, took a music degree at the University of British Columbia, and then co-wrote the Ukulele in the Classroom books with Doane in 2008. He teaches through his own online school and has written a six-volume method of his own.

True Love Don’t Weep (2009), made with the cellist Anne Janelle — now his wife — won Traditional Album of the Year at the Canadian Folk Music Awards, and The Old Silo (2015) was nominated for a Juno. He plays custom instruments by Mike DaSilva, a Mya-Moe tenor and a Beltona resonator, and uses percussion off the body and old analogue effects as part of the arrangement rather than as decoration.

Find his solo arrangement of “Billie Jean”, where the bassline, the backbeat and the melody are all happening on one ukulele at the same time.

10. Grace VanderWaal

Grace VanderWaal won the eleventh season of America’s Got Talent in September 2016, aged twelve, singing songs she had written herself and accompanying them on a ukulele. Born in Kansas in January 2004, she released the Perfectly Imperfect EP that December, Just the Beginning in 2017, Letters Vol. 1 in 2019 and Childstar in 2025.

In 2017 Fender made her its youngest signature artist and its first ukulele player, and the instrument arrived the following year. Fender signature ukuleles are rare and this one is priced like a beginner instrument: a soprano in navy with gold hardware, a gold sparkle rosette and a floral soundhole label taken from the Just the Beginning cover art.

Her later records lean on production and the ukulele much less, so the AGT performances and Perfectly Imperfect are where the uke playing is. It is straightforward strumming — the songwriting is what won the show.

What they play, and what gets you close

Four sounds cover this entire list, and only one of them costs real money. A soprano gets you Cliff Edwards, Tiny Tim, Roy Smeck and both of the modern singer-songwriters. A tenor gets you the Hawaiian players. A banjolele gets you Formby and nothing else will. And one signature model on the list is an instrument rather than a museum piece.

Where to start playing

Two of the most-heard ukulele recordings ever made — the Kamakawiwoʻole medley and most of Ukulele Songs — are within reach of somebody who has owned the instrument for a month. That is unusual, and it is the strongest argument for starting on the ukulele rather than something with six strings.

If you have not bought one yet, the size question matters more than the brand and we have worked through both: how to choose a ukulele covers the sizes, the beginner guide covers the instruments themselves, and there are dedicated shortlists for sopranos and tenors. The Makala above has its own review here, and the rest of the Kala range is worth a look if it turns out you want to spend more. Once there is an instrument in the house, strumming is the thing to work on first — it is what every player above has in common and what separates their records from everyone else’s.