Cat’s Ukulele Songbook 1 (2016 Updated version)
2015 Songbook 2 (2016 Updated version)
Hope you enjoy them, visit my site often and feel welcome to post a comment.
Thanks,
Cat Krestel Porritt
We are setting up uke shop with the Station Arts Centre, located at 41 Bridge Street W in Tillsonburg. We are using the Red Station, which has it’s very own bathroom and ensuite kitchen. (Parking spaces are available right on Bridge St.)
Beginner meetings are taking place on Tuesdays, from 6:30 til 7:30, 
and we don’t charge for participating but we do shamelessly beg for donations. We spend the first 5 minutes getting everyone tuned up and ready to go.
Our 7 students have got their own ukulele’s and invested in some electronic tuners, purchased beginner books and are well on their way to mastering a new instrument. The Academy of Music store on Brock Street told us they will be able to offer our members some kind of discount, so we will arm any one who shows up with one of our group business cards. They have a decent variety of ukulele books, some ukuleles and I have been told by one of our students that they will special order in a ukulele for you if you pay some money down.
Currently we will be at the Station Arts Centre up until March 8th, at which point we will break until the first Tuesday in April, continuing until the end of May. After that, Station Manager Deb Beard says we might be able to play outside in the courtyard of the Station.
We’re looking forward to leading players in ukulele jams in the future, and to taking part in the Tri-County Country Jamboree being held at Avondale United Church on Harvey Street, 2 Saturdays a month. The one night last December when Cheryl and I played 2 Christmas songs there on our ukes, we really had a great time listening to all the players and visiting with new people, PLUS we attracted 5 more beginner players to our group!
Here is a printable flyer: Want to learn how to play the ukulele 3
To contact us for more information, visit our group page on Facebook under Tillsonburg Uke Society or email us at tillsonburgukulele@gmail.com.
In a key that I can’t sing in…..
It’s the version circulating the internet: Richard G’s, Dr. Uke, BUG….. they all start with Dm on “eyes”. The “home chord” is C. It’s too low for me to sing, and when I put it up one octave, guess what? It’s too high for me. Sir Paul McCartney will likely cringe to read the next paragraph, but he’s not too likely to visit my website in reality, so….
After experimenting around, I found the Key of G makes this song much easier for me to sing rather than the Key of C, and also the Bridge/Chorus section follows the family of G chords much easier.
Don’t be daunted by the line-up of chord progressions when you first look at my arrangement. Many people feel awkward when trying to progress smoothly between the G chord and the traditionally positioned Em chord, however, over the years I have learned a sneaky way to accomplish this without moving from the G chord formation, at all. You just reach around your third finger with your baby finger and use it to hold down the 3rd string in the fourth fret. Hey, your baby finger is already curled over anyway since the rest of your fingers are busy forming G chord. Might as well use it! Diagram below.
There are three main chords in the Bridge/Chorus of All My Loving: G; a root chord of G; and another root chord of G.
According to THREE websites I visited from my Google search!
Hey! If it’s on the internet, it must be true, right? Going with that theory, here are the three chords:
It’s obvious that the anchoring notes of these chords are B on the 1st string (1st string, second fret) and G on the 2nd string (2nd string, third fret). Those two notes are what all three of these chords have in common, which links them with a nice-sounding “walk-up” of the 3rd string. Starting with Em, you will move up one fret from the fourth fret position on the 3rd string to the third fret position for the augmented G chord, and then finish in the regular position for the G chord itself, which will be the second fret of the 3rd string.
Below is the finger positioning I recommend for this sequence of chords:
Practice this particular section of the song beforehand. I also included optional [stop]‘s in my arrangement, just before playing that Bridge/Chorus section. This gives you a small enough pause during playing to get your fingers into the best position to take on the Em – Gaug – G sequence.
Hope you enjoy it! All My Loving in the Key of G.
And here is a bonus song: Eight_Days_A_Week in the Key of C. 🙂
Today is Tuesday, January 12/2015, and a big Nor’Easter just blew into my town and buried us in snow. It’s all very exciting stuff, and the wind was blowing so hard that I decided to stay in the house after I got home from work. It was pretty hard to breathe coming up the walk-way!
Two hot cocoa’s and half a bag of Jr. Peppermints later, I just managed to finish combining all of the songs I arranged last year (2015) and compile them into one big PDF document. As I was working, I would get the occasional friendly message, “There are too many graphic inserts in your document” with one of these [!], so I had to rearrange some of the songs a bit from what I had posted.
Some of them are now one page – imagine that! – instead of two.
And I gave it a cooler name. 2014’s was called Cat’s Ukulele Songs. This follow-up song book I have called Cat’s Ukulele Songs 2015. Pretty snazzy, no?
These arrangements are a lot of work, but compiling them into a PDF document so that they don’t run into the next page or hang over and create a blank page, etc. is a lot of work. I know it’s only January, but I am seriously considering not putting a PDF together next year….. (blots brow with damp cloth)…… 🙂
With no further ado (and even less fanfare) here is 2015 Songbook 2.
Aloha, Ukulele friends!It’s barely a week past the holidays and with the New Year fresh upon us I am still working on songs for the ukulele. This week I am focusing on getting all of the songs I arranged in 2015 into a PDF document to be posted. Not quite there yet! I found that I had arranged 31 but had posted around 40 using free online sources. Before I post it however, there is an issue I had to resolve regarding the song, “Beautiful Kaua’i”.
A friend of mine forwarded a copy of “Beautiful Kaua’i” to me that had an embellishment right on the first line: a three chord turn around. Another friend of mine emailed me to say that there are other versions of the song using different words for the chorus, notably the word pertaining to the Falls of Wailua. 
But first, I want to address the issue of the spelling of the name of the Hawaiian Island of Kaua’i. If we consult with websites and published books dedicated to the correct spelling and pronunciation of the Hawaiian language, then we should be spelling it with an ‘okina before the “i”. (If you want to learn something interesting about the name “Hawaii” itself, just Google it, or go to Wikipedia. Very good explanation of it.) Now, if you realize that Kaua’i is pronounced kaw-AH-ee, then singing the song will be a lot easier for you.
I first encountered this song on my trip to Honolulu in February/March 2015. The organizers had emailed everyone to see if they wanted to contribute 4 or 5 songs towards a group strum happening on one of the nights. We did this song then, and a couple nights later we enjoyed a group strum with a local family group, who regularly host kani kapila, and we did this song again. I loved it! They also did a real funny one about a General Store. Most of the songs were in English, but the ones in the Hawaiian language were just as sweet and enjoyable.
After my two friends emailed me, I took up an internet search. First I tried to find the words as written by Rudolph “Randy” Haleakala Farden. As stated at http://www.huapala.org/B/Beautiful_Kauai.html, they claim that their version of the words to the song are confirmed by ohana, or family members, to have been composed and copyrighted by Randy Farden in 1965.
They have the chorus of the song as follows:
The SUPA (Seattle) website has this song identical to those words, even using the correct spelling of Kaua’i. You can find a copy at seattleukulele.org, in the Key of C, with an interesting use of 2 beats on C and 2 beats on C7 to form a 4/4 measure. Also, their verses forsake the use of Dm or D7 for “Beautiful Kaua’i, beautiful Kaua’i”. They hold on C, go strait into G7, then hold on G7 and go strait back to C. It sounds a bit different from what I was introduced to while in Hawaii, and I am by NO means at all an expert with this song, but if you play it and you like it, then that is all that matters.
Unfortunately for me, once I learned of the existence of other versions, the English major in me reared it’s ugly head and just had to analyze! The words of the chorus as written above do not make a grammatically correct sentence. There! I said it! The problem is with the word “and”.
My second version of this song I will give you is from the Mele Ohana website. It is actually the last version I found in the Key of C, and the most embellished, but I’m putting it second in line because it also uses the correct spelling, and the same words for the chorus as stated at the huapala website. This arrangement is for a children’s school or choir, and the director has written her notes on it. She has taught her players the second position of the C chord and embellished a line in the chorus for “Mother Nature made her home”, by using 2nd position C for 2 beats over “Nature”, B for 2 beats over “made her”, and returning to that C for “home”. It sounds very pretty but be aware that the 2nd position C chord is much higher sounding when played this way compared to 1st position, or what we think of as normal, C.
The next version of this song that you can look at is available online, as BEAUTIFUL KAUAI, from what calls itself “the Moonlight Beach Strummers”, but you download it from Lanai City Rentals. Somehow. This version also claims it is by Rudolph “Randy” Haleakala Farden, but the wording of the chorus is different. This version was emailed to me by one of my friends. It has the nice little three chord turn around at the end of the first line, and uses the progression from A7 to D7 to G7 back to C for the “Beautiful Kauai, beautiful Kauai” lines.
The wording for the chorus in this version is as follows:
They are still using the word “In” but we are now in the “mist”, and we 
are going “to” the Falls of Wailua. They have the chorus written out twice, and modify the second one to “From the mist of Fern Grotto.” If that’s the case, then have we changed the meaning to say that Mother Nature made her home from the mist? Or is it a location of Mother Nature’s home, occupying a geographical area from Fern Grotto to the Falls of Wailua?
Click to access Beautiful_Kauai_Key_of_C.pdf
Searching for answers to these questions we go to (yet another) website, http://www.squareone.org/Hapa/b1.html, who say Randy Farden composed this song on the Garden Isle in 1967, and a wonderful recording can be found on a CD called Aloha Pumahana Serenaders, Hula Gems, 1968. According to that recording, the words to the chorus are as follows:
Which also happens to make the most grammatical sense to my way of thinking. I have also heard (via Youtubing) the word “near” instead of “neath”, which still makes sense. Despite my discoveries, songlyrics.com has the lyrics by Don Ho as “In the midst” and using “and” for the Falls of Wailua. Another lyrics website has credited Kawai Crockett with the lyrics the same as Don Ho’s. It’s interesting because Hawaiian performer Mark James has recorded this song with the chorus as found above, same as at the squareone.org website.
And now, for The Big Reveal: I have taken all of the embellishments and applied them to my original version, posted many months ago, and modified the wording in the chorus (which some might say is just a bridge) to the ones that I as the English major prefer best. However, I have put both mist and midst in the first line, and I have “Near” typed above ‘Neath on the third line. Using the Mele Ohana’s embellishment of the second line in the chorus as my inspiration, I substituted B7 (instead of B) when using the regular C chord, or 1st position C. It also sounds good using the Hawaiian D7 so I leave it up to the player to choose their preference. Lastly, I incorporated an ending I admired from the Mele Ohana version. 
I hope everyone enjoys my version, LOL!
To all of you brave ukers who decided to follow my blog or sign up for notification emails, I thank you, and to the 690 of you out there who visited my site on September 22nd I want to say, “What? Really?” (Was that a special day or something?) LOL Anyway, I am posting today some of my favourite songs by some of my favourite groups, and/or from movies.
I hope you enjoy them like I do.
Hallelujah, by the Langley Ukulele Ensemble, from BC, Canada.
Mele Kalikimaka, from the movie Christmas Vacation:
A Charlie Brown Christmas (the Meaning of Christmas)
You’re a Mean One, Mr. Grinch, from How the Grinch Stole Christmas, animated, 1966.
Have you ever wondered who that voice belonged to? A fella named Thurl Ravenscroft is credited as being the owner.
Have a Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays and Happy New Year!
Cat
I finally finished compiling my favourite holiday and performance songs into one big document. I am very proud of this little song book to date. All of the Christmas and holiday songs I posted are in this song book, but the descriptions for strumming and other helpful hints are not included.
I will write a couple of paragraphs below to help with some of the content.
A couple of days ago I posted a separate song sheet for additional Scottish verses for Auld Lang Syne. It turned out to be too small of a font for me so I retyped it out larger and added my choice of chords to it. You can print out the newer version here: Auld Lang Syne Scottish lyrics.
“Away in a Manger” is my favourite version of this sweet children’s Christmas song. It’s the version where you start up high and travel down: they refer to it as the “non-traditional” version.
The “Chipmunk Song”. This song is in 3/4 Timing, or Waltz Timing. The only thing I left off is the ending, whereby I strum 3 beats on the last G (instead of 4), then 3 beats on C minor and one ending Down strum on G.
For “Hallelujah”, it is probably best to go back and look at the post I wrote on it and view Brett McQueen’s how-to video.
“Mele Kalikimaka” is not in the traditional Key of F, and the strum is the traditional D Du uDu pattern.
I hope everyone has fun and enjoys these songs. If anyone has any other concerns or questions just fill in the comment section and I will answer you. Anyone just wanting to criticize my arrangements, needn’t bother, you know exactly what you can do with that….
Recently, while looking around on the BUG website under Songbooks, Christmas, I discovered that there are a lot more lyrics to the “Auld Lang Syne” song. Cool. They are even half-decent to pronounce.
Enjoy! Auld Lang Syne plus Lyrics
While looking for Christmas songs you might come across several on-line song books. You can find an extensive list at the BUG website:
http://www.bytownukulele.ca/Songbooks.aspx
In the past, one of the best Christmas song books that I have experienced 
with a group and for solo-ing is by the Seatle Ukulele Players. I am not sure if it is still available at their website, but you can get a download from the BUG site. It’s called SUPA. It has three huge pages of chord charts PLUS it has an entire page of key transposing, which is basically priceless.
There are several songs from that book I recommend. One is the “Chipmunk Song”. “Blue Christmas” is good because it has lots of embellishing chords. The only drawback may be that it is in F, and you might have a problem with G minor. If so, there are better arrangements elsewhere. (I like it in C, replacing the Gm with Dm.) Others I enjoy start from “The Christmas Song”, pages 11 to 16; “Holly Jolly” on 20; “I Want a Hippo” on 24; “Jingle Bell Rock”, 26; “Rudolph” on 32; “Santa Baby” on 34; “We Wish You/Christmas” on 40. “Winter Wonderland”, on page 42 is in the perfect key for me (I’m a soprano-alto singer).
Another good song book is Snowselele: Snowselele_Version_1_11.
Another good one is this one with the little reindeer on each song, uke club unknown. They have an excellent “12 Days of Christmas” on page 22. The only clue I have is the website it originated from – ukuke.co.uk. I believe this is the U.K. Uke club, some kind of overall UK directory of all the clubs there?
My very favourite books are of course from Jumpin’ Jim Beloff and Flea Market Music. Right now you can get both of these books, around 50 Christmas songs arranged professionally with standard notation, chords and lyrics, for $25!
Go to http://www.fleamarketmusic.com/store/Scripts/prodView.asp?idproduct=184 for more information.
Hope everyone has fun and shares free and good locations for Christmas and Holiday tunes!
Yes, another 80’s song! High five!
Hallelujah was written by Leonard Cohen in 1980. A very famous and popular version was recorded on guitar in 1994 by Jeff Buckley.
A version by Rufus Wainright was used in the 2001 film Shrek, featuring (another Canadian) Mike Meyers. Other famous artists to cover this song include Jon Bon Jovi.
So this arrangement is intended for linear ukulele, which means it sounds better on an ukulele that has the low G string on it.
That’s what I use.
(Actually, I use both.)
The video below is a really good instructional by Brett McQueen over at Ukulele Tricks, explaining how you can do two possible picking patterns, and how it fits together with the chords. I use a lot of his video’s both at his website and on youtube.
Brett’s website:
Here is another throw back to the 80’s, by Dan Fogelberg. Some say the lyrics of the song were the inspiration for the “cute meet” scene in the movie, He’s Just Not That Into You. That’s a rumour, so don’t quote me on it.
The song “Same Old Lang Syne” by Dan Fogelberg is called a “cyclical song”, where the writer takes you through an event from start to finish. The album it comes off was considered cyclical in nature, called the Innocent Age, in 1981. The song was actually released in late 1980, but the album had not been released yet. There is some internet conjecture that it was not completed yet. Why the song was released ahead of time was not explained, but may have been a marketing ploy by the record company because the Innocent Age wound up going double platinum.
I’ve always loved this song. It starts out with nostalgia, revisiting the past and then ends with the present. The lyrics at the end, “and the snow, turned in.. to… rain……” manage to evoke two emotions at the same time. The beautiful whimsy of fresh falling snow, and the happy awe that it evokes, the positive feelings of snow associated with Christmas, turning into melancholy and sadness with the rain. And how he takes us from one sensation to the other from the beginning of the song to the very last words, from that moment back in time to the reality of now, exposing a deep longing that can never be satisfied, that unresolved ‘what if’ regarding the road not taken. Is genius.
And on top of it all, I managed to arrange the song in the same key! You can pretty much strum along to the song as you listen to it!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ar9Ip7pSqEg
Cat's Ukulele Songs 