God gave rock and roll to you ukulele chords

A pivotal moment came one day when he was just five and his father came home to the familyвЂ™s tenement apartment with an old wind-up gramophone and a 1919 recording of Henry Burr singing вЂњBeautiful Ohio.вЂќ Young Herbert was entranced by it and spent hours with his ear inside the gramophone horn, listening to the song over and over again. Herbert adored music from a very early age-thanks to the influence of his music-loving parents who played records around the house and sang to him. He was born Herbert Butros Khaury in Manhattan in 1932, the son of poor immigrants: His mother, Tillie, was a Belarusian garment worker, whose own father was a rabbi his father, Butros, son of a Maronite Catholic priest, came from Lebanon and also worked in New YorkвЂ™s textile industry.

He also lived a really unusual and interesting life that found him rubbing shoulders with celebrities such as Bing Crosby, Bob Dylan, Zaza Gabor, George Harrison, John Wayne, and Jim Morrison, to name just a few. In the midst of the late вЂ™60s electric rock вЂ™nвЂ™ roll explosion, he shined a light on the humble, long-ignored ukulele, leading to the biggest uptick in popularity of the little instrument since Arthur Godfrey in the early 1950s. He was no ukulele virtuoso-he was a strummer first and foremost-but he had a savant-like knowledge of popular music from the turn of the 20th century through the 1950s, and he could play hundreds of songs. He rode the wave of his truly odd celebrity for a few years, and though he never achieved much more commercial success, he managed to eke out a living (barely, sometimes) until his death at the age of 64 in 1996, of a heart attack, onstage, ukulele in hand. He had one album that made the Billboard Top 100- God Bless Tiny Tim, which came out in early 1968 and was on the charts for 32 weeks, making it all the way to #7-and one noteworthy single from that record, вЂњTiptoe Through the Tulips,вЂќ which peaked at #17. Yes, he was unquestionably a freakish novelty act, who traded on a bizarre gimmick-an unearthly, quavering falsetto-and a sunny, solicitous stage personality that was either charming or borderline creepy (if you didnвЂ™t buy it). I think itвЂ™s safe to say that there has never been a figure in the ukulele world who has provoked as much derision, dismissal, and out-and-out hostility as the late-вЂ™60s uke-playing phenomenon known as Tiny Tim.

BY BLAIR JACKSON | FROM THE SPRING 2020 ISSUE OF UKULELE

God gave rock and roll to you ukulele chords