It’s St. Patrick’s Day on Friday. Just enough time to ditch your dullest friend, threaten to cut off your fingers and dedicate yourself to achieving musical immortality.

Chords

The Cranberries – Linger (Chords)
The Dubliners and The Pogues – The Irish Rover
Fontaines D.C. – Boys in the Better Land
Imelda May/Blondie – Dreaming
The Pogues – Fairytale of New York
The Pogues – Fiesta
The Pogues – If I Should Fall from Grace with God
The Pogues – Irish Rover
The Pogues – Sally MacLennane
The Pogues – Streams of Whiskey
The Pogues – Waxies’ Dargle
The Undertones – Teenage Kicks
Van Morrison – Keep It Simple

Tabs

The Cranberries – Linger
The Cranberries – Zombie
Damien Rice – 9 Crimes
Damien Rice – The Blower’s Daughter
Father Ted Theme
The Foggy Dew
Lisa Hannigan – Knots
Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova – Falling Slowly
The Irish Washerwoman
John King – Larry O’Gaff
John King – Swallowtail (Tab)
Jonathan Lewis – Lonesome Fiddle Blues
The Parting Glass
The Pogues – Dirty Old Town
Sinead O’Connor/Prince – Nothing Compares 2 U
Thin Lizzy – Boys are Back in Town (Riff)
Turlough O’Carolan/Jonathan Lewis – Loftus Jones
U2 – One
U2 – Sunday Bloody Sunday (Riff) (Tab)
U2 – With or Without You (Tabs)
Whiskey in the Jar/Kilgary Mountain

Irish Riffs and Solos

The Pogues – Dirty Old Town (Tab)

To celebratre St Patrick’s Day on Friday, I thought I’d cover a song written by an American about a place in England. But it has become thouroughly Irish-ised through versions by The Dubliners and the Pogues version. For this arrangement, I worked from The Pogues version.

Intro: A quick couple of bars then into the thumb-and-strum pattern which carries on through the song i.e. the thumb alternates between picking the g- and C-strings with a couple of strums in between.

Verse: The first verse is the most straightforward. The second and third have a couple of extra bits of filigree.

Solo: I like The Pogues version, this arrangement modulates to C for the solo. It’s heavily based on the melody with a few extra twiddles. I particularly like the campanella run in bar 48. As always, feel free to add your own ideas and adapt it to your own style.

Links

Buy The Pogues’ version
More Irish tabs and chords
Uke Hunt Patreon

Hawaii News Now are impressed by Jake’s sons’ ukulele playing.

Choan Galvez has a new ebook out: For Four Fingers and a new one on the way Eight Rags a Week.

Billy Costello (the original voice of Popeye) and his ukulele.

A book teaching you to play ukulele is banned in Oregon prisons.

Ukulele Player Lands Dream Job Scoring Kickstarter Campaign Video:

“Here at Kickstarter headquarters, we maintain a stable of fresh four-string talent, sort of a ‘Wrecking Crew’ of ukulele players,” said Taylor. “We put the campaign videos onscreen in the recording studio and just let these cats cook. Last week one of our players slipped into a uke trance—we knocked out twenty videos in one afternoon. It was like watching Miles Davis in his prime if he were promoting a water bottle that connects to Wi-Fi.

Twenty One Pilots attempt to debut a new uke song.

Patreon

A massive thanks to all Uke Hunt’s Patreon backers for keeping the site up and running this month. And double thanks go to these legendary patrons of the arts:

– Arthur Foley
– Colleen Petticrew
– Dan
– Dennis Boutsikaris
– Elizabeth Beardsley
– Ivo
– Jameson Gagnepain
– Jeff K
– Jeff Otto
– Jon Kenniston
– Kelby Green
– Kie77
– Lisa Johnson
– Monika Kolodziejczyk
– Moses Kamai
– Nevylle Carroll
– Nick Parsons
– Pat Weikle
– Pauline LeBlanc
– Robert
– Thorsten Neff
– Tina Knight

If you join Patreon at the Concert level or higher, you’ll get access to all previous exclusive tabs including February’s: Elton John’s Tiny Dancer

Yeah Yeah Yeahs – Maps (Tab)

Yeah Yeah Yeahs guitarist, Nick Zinner is one of my favourite guitar players. His playing is very minimal but he makes every note count. Never more so than on Maps. This arrangement is minimal too. With a few nods to the acoustic version which is a bit more fleshed out with the chords.

Links

Buy the original
More 2000s tabs and chords
Uke Hunt Patreon

Justin Bieber – Sorry

Wet Leg – Wet Dream

Fat Joe and Remy Ma – All the Way Up

Harvey Danger – Flagpole Sitta (aka Peep Show theme)

100 gecs – Hollywood Baby

Culture Club – Karma Chameleon (Tab)

In keeping with the theme of the song, Culture Club’s Karma Chameleon is a mish-mash. Including some country harmonic, funky bass, cheesy 80s keyboards and a catchy pop chorus.

Intro: A bit of everything here: the guitar riff, muted strums for the drums and a bit of harmonica.

Verse and Pre-Chorus: A fair bit of sliding up and down here but nothing too challenging.

Chorus: This is where it gets tricky. The melody notes here are very fast. You’ll need to use alternate picking to get them up to speed.

Bridge: I forgot this section existed before I relistened to the song!

Solo: A brief solo that I cobbled together based mostly on the chords.

Links

Buy the original
More 80s tabs and chords
Uke Hunt Patreon

Watch on YouTube

Tracklist
Aline Kelly – Consolação
Max & Veronica – If You Want the Rainbow
The Mood Swings – He's A Tramp
Chipped Nail Polish – Rut
The Bookshop Band – All My Wild Mothers
emily the band – all the good girls go to hell
CocoCapitainePoulet – Sentier
BoyWithUke – Rockstar
Jon’s Ukulele – Off to California

Billy Bragg/Kirsty MacColl – A New England (Tab)

A New England was originally by Billy Bragg and made more famous by by Kirsty MacColl. This arrangement starts with a riff inspired by Johnny Marr’s intro on Kirsty MacColl’s version. After that, it’s closer to the Billy Bragg version.

I’ve reduced the tempo for my recording. There are a lot of fast notes in it. With the most challenging run being bars 59-60. If you can play that at the tempo of the MacColl version, you’re a way better player than me.

Links

Buy the original
More 80s tabs and chords
Uke Hunt Patreon

Why Don’t You Do Right? (Tab)

Why Don’t You Do Right? has a colourful history. The tune started out as Weed Smoker’s Dream in 1936. It was adapted and released in 1941 by Lil Green (with guitar by Big Bill Broonzy). The most famous version was the Peggy Lee’s uptempo take. At least it was until Jessica Rabbit’s sultry version in Who Framed Roger Rabbit?

Tempo-wise, this version is most similar to the Lil Green version. But I took inspiration from all three versions.

There are a heap of places in the song for little licks, and I’ve included a solo as well. As always, I recommend using the tab as inspiration for your own ideas rather than slavishly following each lick.

When soloing, I mostly thought in terms of the D blues scale (D – F – G – Ab – A – C – D). In addition to that, I threw in a few notes that crop up in the chords: Db and Bb. And a couple of chromatic runs (in bars 31-32 and the blues turnaround in bars 35-36).

Links

Buy the original
More Jazz tabs and chords
Uke Hunt Patreon

I spend most of my time here posting angry, cynical songs. But I do occassionally deal with matters of the heart. So for Valentine’s Day, here’s a rundown of some of some of my favourite love song tabs. And for those of you celebrating St Skeletor’s Day on the 15th, there are some songs of rejection, scorn and infidelity for you to play between pushing couples holding hands into a puddles.

Valentine’s Day

The Beach Boys – God Only Knows

Definitely the best love song ever written and a strong contender for greatest song of all time.

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The tab

Tom Waits – Johnsburg, Illinois

Written by Tom Waits for his wife Kathleen Brennan who did grow up in Johnsburg, Illinois. Such a simple and beautiful song.

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The tab

The Temptations – My Girl

I’m not usually a fan of songs that are this sweet but this has an irresistible melody. And David Ruffin’s voice is buttery.

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The tab

Mama Cass – Dream a Little Dream of Me

You can’t have love without at least a tinge of sadness.

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The tab

Dolly Parton – I Will Always Love You

If you asked 100 people to name a love song, I guarantee this would be top answer.

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The tab

The Zombies – This Will Be Our Year

I listen to this one every year. And it never is our year but there’s always hope.

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The tab

St Skeletor’s Day

R.E.M. – Losing My Religion

Losing My Religion cropped up my favourite movie of last year, Aftersun, in an excruciating karaoke scene. Pro tip: when selecting a karaoke song, don’t go for one with an outro that’s just one note over and over at a crawling tempo.

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The tab

alt-J – Fitzpleasure

This has to be the nastiest song I’ve ever covered. I can’t believed they played this on the radio.

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The tab

Nirvana – Heart-Shaped Box

You could make an argument for this being a twisted Valentine song. But I think its violent images of obsessive love make it a good one for St Skeletor’s Day.

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Hank Williams – I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry

A good contender for the most pathetic song of all time.

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Lizzo – Truth Hurts

Lizzo is leaning a bit too far into the positivity stuff these days for my taste. I prefer her songs that have a bit more “fuck you” mixed in with the self empowerment.

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The tab

BLACKPINK – Kill This Love

Putting these lists together, it was very clear that the Valentine’s songs were mostly older and the Skeletor songs were much more recent.

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