{"id":28021,"date":"2016-04-11T08:02:15","date_gmt":"2016-04-11T15:02:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/spijue.wpengine.com\/news\/southeast-strummers-bring-tropical-flare-to-alaska\/"},"modified":"2016-04-11T08:02:15","modified_gmt":"2016-04-11T15:02:15","slug":"southeast-strummers-bring-tropical-flare-to-alaska","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/news\/southeast-strummers-bring-tropical-flare-to-alaska\/","title":{"rendered":"Southeast Strummers bring tropical flare to Alaska"},"content":{"rendered":"

KETCHIKAN \u2014<\/strong> When walking through the Ketchikan Public Library or down a hall of the University of Alaska Southeast Ketchikan Campus\u2019 Robertson Building or even through a quiet residential neighborhood one evening, there is a chance you could hear the dulcet tone of an instrument more often associated with the Hawaiian Islands, not an island in Southeast Alaska.<\/p>\n

However, a group of mostly local residents over the past year has gotten together to pluck out songs \u2014 ranging from \u201cBlowin\u2019 in the Wind\u201d to \u201cBad Moon Rising\u201d to \u201cHey Good Lookin\u2019\u201d and everything in between \u2014 on the ukulele. They are the Southeast Strummers.<\/p>\n

Marlene Kuehl, Christie Willett and Kathy Paulson were the primary organizers of the group, which played at the Sam Pitcher Concert in December and is scheduled to play the Monthly Grind in April.<\/p>\n

Kuehl, who splits her time between Ketchikan and the Lower 48, has played guitar, flute and piano in the past. She started playing the ukulele about two years ago.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m a beginner … but I just try to keep a step ahead of everybody else,\u201d Kuehl joked in February. \u201cSomebody invited me to go to a ukulele jam down in (Bend) Oregon, and the first time I went I couldn\u2019t even play one chord. But it was just so … people were really willing to have people join, whether they were beginners or advanced, and (they) made you feel welcome.\u201d<\/p>\n

Kuehl added that she likes the instrument\u2019s portability and the fun of playing.<\/p>\n

\u201cOnce you learn the basics, it\u2019s pretty easy. That\u2019s another good reason I did it,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

The Bend Ukulele Group \u2014 BUGs \u2014 can attract as many as 50 members to some of its events. There are about 10 to 15 active members of Southeast Strummers, according to Kuehl.<\/p>\n

Willett has been playing ukulele for about a year and a half, she said before a rehearsal.<\/p>\n

\u201cI just had kind of heard about it, kind of like pickleball is sweeping the nation with older people,\u201d Willett said. \u201cI was hearing rumors of ukulele, and I thought, \u2018Well, I think that would be fun.\u2019 We went to Hawaii (in 2014) for Christmas, and I got my ukulele there.\u201d<\/p>\n

Like Kuehl, Willett had some experience playing guitar when she was younger. The woman who sold Willett her ukulele also gave her a chord sheet.<\/p>\n

\u201cShe had me play several chords (and) she said, \u2018Ok, you\u2019re good to go, you can play almost any song there is out there,\u2019\u201d Willett said.<\/p>\n

While Willett didn\u2019t know of any ukulele players in Ketchikan when she and Kuehl started playing, word spread and the idea of a ukulele group gained steam.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe just started talking about it with friends, and ukuleles started coming out of closets,\u201d Willett said. \u201cI think there\u2019s just a lot of closet places in Ketchikan. … There\u2019s a lot of people in Ketchikan that play the ukulele, and it\u2019s one of the easier string instruments because it only has four strings.\u201d<\/p>\n

While the ukulele can be a common instrument, Kuehl thinks that people are surprised when they find out there are ukulele clubs and ensembles both across the U.S. and in other countries.<\/p>\n

\u201cI just thought it would be a good thing for Ketchikan to have something that\u2019s sort of accessible and fun to do and (to) maybe try to do what they\u2019ve done in some other communities,\u201d Kuehl said. \u201cWhat\u2019s kind of cool is if you go to another club, I mean you can go to different towns and just show up. (I thought) that would be kind of fun for Ketchikan, too.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n

Songs, instruments, strummers<\/strong><\/p>\n

In addition to the experience of playing in a ukulele ensemble in Oregon, Kuehl also brought songs from the BUGs library to Southeast Strummers.<\/p>\n

\u201c(We play) a lot of old \u201870s, \u201860s songs that are very accessible,\u201d Kuehl said. \u201c … A lot of them are old rock \u2018n\u2019 roll songs, but we can just about play anything. If somebody has a contemporary song, we\u2019ll do that. We have some contemporary ones, too. Some of us actually played at the (First) Lutheran Church, so we did some spiritual (songs). We did that last fall.\u201d<\/p>\n

She added that the group might play sea shanties and other nautically inspired songs at the April Monthly Grind.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s not going to be like a polished performance, it\u2019s more of a sing along with the crowd,\u201d Kuehl said.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re on the poster, so we kind of have to do it,\u201d Willett joked.<\/p>\n

The performance at the church also helped to attract a new member \u2014 Biz Robbins \u2014 to the group.<\/p>\n

\u201cRight after that service \u2014 I go there \u2014 they asked a few of us if we wanted to join in,\u201d Robbins said. \u201cIt was really quite an inspirational thing to watch all those women play and sing.\u201d<\/p>\n

While most of the players in Southeast Strummers use soprano ukuleles, there are some tenors and baritones as well.<\/p>\n

\u201cSomeday maybe I\u2019ll get a bass ukulele, because one of the things they say \u2014 we\u2019ve taken some workshops \u2014 is it\u2019s always good to have a beat going, and that\u2019s probably the most important thing when you\u2019re playing in a group,\u201d Kuehl said.<\/p>\n

She added that, while the ukulele is the group\u2019s primary instrument, people who might only want to sing along are welcome to come to practices.<\/p>\n

At least two strummers \u2014 in addition to Willett \u2014 bought their ukuleles in Hawaii.<\/p>\n

One of them, Adell Bruns, has been playing for about six years.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe play most of the things in the key of C, so there\u2019s only like four chords at the most, and some of those chords are one-finger chords,\u201d Bruns said.<\/p>\n

\u201cThose are good ones,\u201d Willett added.<\/p>\n

Lois \u201cLotis\u201d Munch learned to play ukulele in 1963 in Hawaii before taking a hiatus and has several reasons \u2014 including being able to play the instrument again \u2014 that she enjoys being involved with Southeast Strummers.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s nice camaraderie,\u201d she said. \u201cIt\u2019s fun to come here, everybody is really nice.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

KETCHIKAN \u2014 When walking through the Ketchikan Public Library or down a hall of the University of Alaska Southeast Ketchikan Campus\u2019 Robertson Building or even through a quiet residential neighborhood one evening, there is a chance you could hear the dulcet tone of an instrument more often associated with the Hawaiian Islands, not an island […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":107,"featured_media":28022,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_stopmodifiedupdate":false,"_modified_date":"","wds_primary_category":4,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[230],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-28021","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-state-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28021","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/107"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28021"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28021\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/28022"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28021"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28021"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28021"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=28021"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}