My Mother's Ukelin

By Marjorie Rommel
This article originally appeared here on TooWrite.com and is
reprinted with kind permission of the author. All rights reserved.

My mom has this odd, amazing old instrument called a ukelin - it's been leaning against the organ in the corner of the living room for at least 20 years.

It's about two and a half feet long, maybe a foot wide at its base, has two sound holes, one in either end, 16 coil-wrapped wire strings arranged in four chords along the length of the sound box, and 16 more thin plain wire ones in two sets of eight angled toward the top from either side.

Each set of angled strings is attached at the side by means of a kind of steel loop that acts as a bridge for just that one string. The thing is played by plucking and strumming the 16 base strings with the left hand, and bowing (with a very short, thin bow) the 16 angled strings - up on one side, down on the other, between the loops.

Darndest contraption you ever saw. Dad paid $8 for it at auction, some years ago.

Mom knew a girl named Wilma who kept one under her bed, back in Winnet, Montana. She said Wilma played it by bowing between those steel loops, though that seemed unlikely until I actually saw it done.

That happened because two years ago I struck up a friendship with a poet/musician named Peter Ludwin, who plays the Celtic Autoharp. Peter, a slight, greying, curly-headed elf of a guy - very pleasant - makes me think of one of those old medieval troubadours.

He has travelled through the Amazon, all over Europe and Africa, even down into Peru. Sells Christmas trees in New York City every December, and when he's in Seattle stays with his mother in one of those gorgeous old homes with the curtains pulled so the furniture doesn't fade.

I met Peter when he showed up at a poetry reading I was doing in Seattle - he's a poet, too - and I told him about Mom's ukelin. He referred me to Abel Fortune, a reformed Seattle street musician he used to play with years ago at the Pike Place Market. Abel works in a place called Hammond Ashley - a factory that makes, restores and repairs all kinds of stringed instruments, including Peter's autoharps.

So I took the ukelin and went to see Abel Fortune.

At Hammond Ashley, you step through tall double doors into a dark, cool showroom with probably a hundred gleaming dark wood bass viols, cellos, violas and violins hanging in ranks from the rafters. Just opening the door is enough to set them all humming.

In an adjoining room, surrounded by monster cases that look for all the world like black sarcophagi, young Sara Greed was playing Bartok on the most gorgeous-sounding instrument imaginable, a dark, dark cello made in Yugoslavia in the 1600s. Asking price $35,000, more than my house. The bow would bring more than $8,000 price of a car I could never afford!

Sara pointed me across the yard to where Abel hangs out in the workshop, and handed me a folded newspaper to protect my mom's poor old battered ukelin from the mist. I picked my way through tall raspberry bushes along the narrow path, past a bunch of old instrument crates - odd plywood shapes leaned against the fence and wall - and opened another set of double doors, like the ones on my Somerset grandfather Harry Baker's "old" barn.

Inside, it's like Santa's workshop. Three cute old guys in denim aprons, Ben Franklin spectacles, long grey hair and beards; one youngish guy, probably 30 or so, close-cropped, clean-shaven, snug tee-shirt, jeans and muscles, very solemn; and the instruments! Tops and bottoms and curly sides of cellos, basses, violins stacked everywhere. Bodies with no tops and their guts exposed, viced onto workbenches, necks with their strings springing out like steel ringlets.

"Abel?" I asked the air.

"I'm here," a lilting voice floated out from the far corner, and out Abel came right after it, looking as if he'd float, too, if he wasn't weighed down with callipers and all sorts of odd implements stuck haphazardly into the bib of his denim apron.

Wild white hair down past his shoulder blades, a wild white beard down onto his chest, watery blue eyes peering through little goggle-type glasses, plaid flannel arms held out away from his sides - not flapping as if he were trying to fly, but more like steering, as if he were already airborne. What a merry soul!

Oh, he says, a ukelin, look at that! And proceeds to tell me the history of the thing while he's leading me through the maze of instruments and pieces of instruments, back to his cubby-hole in the back, which is like my house, only crammed full of wire and bridges and necks and odd bits of things instead of books and paper and odd bits of things.

The ukelin, Abel tells me, is one of a class of instruments known as "farmer instruments". They were made from the turn of the century up till about 1920, and were sold door to door all across the prairie states where most people couldn't read words, never mind music.

The price marked inside the sound holes is $35, but he said that would have been about a month's wages in those days. He figures the drummer would give you a today-only price, and it might be higher if he thought you could afford it, or lower if you fed him a good meal, lower still if you let him stay overnight, and practically free if you had a good-looking daughter.

Hitchcock used one in his movie, Psycho. That eeek! eeek! eeek! Sound in the shower scene? And Jim Morrison once carried one on stage somewhere, in Paris, maybe, though I don't know if he played it.

Back in his hidey-hole, Abel perches me on a beat-up folding stepladder, props the ukelin against the workbench, reaches up one arm - without looking, mind you - and snatches down a bow, which he applies to Mother's dirty, gouged-up old instrument. A plaintive, tender note shivers the air.

One of the guys out front hollers, "Sounds like a bowed psaltery you got there, Abel." Another one says mildly, "Nope. That's some kind of zither (emphasis on the th.)" Within microseconds, all four them are crowded into Abel's cubby, talking nine to the dozen and waving callipers and such. All I can see for about five minutes is backsides and elbows, then they troop back to their own business.

Abel looked over Mom's goofy instrument with lively interest, told me the only music for it is written in numbers, not letters, and probably is nonexistent at this late date. He dug out its sound ball - kind of like a wispy dustbunny or a hairball said lots of musicians won't let you take theirs out because they think it would ruin the sound if you did.

Abel said you can tell a lot about whoever owned an instrument by examining its sound ball (now there's a clever murder mystery clue). This one had raw wool in it. Wouldn't it be strange if this turned out to be the same one Wilma had? Pretty much everybody back in Winnet was a sheep rancher, I think.

Abel said I'll never play the Orange Blossom Special on the ukelin - it's only for slow tunes, waltzes and such, written all in one key, which is fine since my level of expertise is literally nil - and not too versatile, which is probably why it went out of fashion in the 30s, superseded by the Autoharp.

He found me a good, short wood bow, which I bought for $25, sent me off for a guitar string and maybe a violin string - gave me the proper calibrations - to replace two missing, told me it would cost about $60 to restring and tune the thing, maybe I could do better. I took it down to Green River Music here in Auburn, and yup, by golly, the guy who owns the place restrung and tuned it, $20.

When we were kids I used to plod along on the piano, accompanying my sister Katherine playing "Greensleeves" on the violin and driving our father nuts. Neither of us was any good, but we did love to play together, though we haven't in years.

Mom played an old Hohner harmonica sometimes, mostly when she thought nobody was listening. Dad played the radio. What I've always wanted is a penny whistle. Costs about $12, has no more than a dozen holes and a slide. Simple. I think I could play one of those. And if I couldn't, well, it's small enough to hide in a pocket real quick, so nobody'd ever know.

Oh - and a bodhran! I heard Yevgeny Yevtushenko read in Seattle a few years ago with the Paul Winter Consort - and one of the consort played a huge bodhran that must have been five feet across, with a sound like a gong. Breathtaking.

The ukelin's sound is of an entirely different order, high, strangely resonant, and sweet, and well, like I said, plaintive as the wind blowing off the prairies at night. You almost expect to hear a coyote chorus joining in.

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The information presented on this site represents my exhaustive search for ukelin information If you have anything to add to this site, or if you find any information in this site to be in error, please notify me at bob_buzas@lowesmsny.com.