Lutes & Ukes

Lutes and Ukes were born from the realisation that groups of plucked instruments improvising, arranging songs and creating sublime anarchy share a long story.  From the fragments of the Wolfenbuttel Lute Book – the earliest surviving tablature for the lute – through to blues legends and their inheritor “the King” himself, many connections were lying in wait to be explored.   Shakespeare’s lute player Robert Johnson and his blues namesake shared a preoccupation with the theatrics of devilry and also the beauty of unrequited love: the lyrics of “Love in Vain” (apart from the giveaway echoes of the railroad blues at the train station) “I could not help but cry...” could be from either era.  The “doleful dumps” and the “blue devils”  (a phrase first used in 1798 by George Colman) found their natural expression with melancholy lutes, guitars and…ukuleles.