While My Guitar Gently Weeps

In April 2006 someone posted a video of Jake Shimabukuro on YouTube without telling him. It showed the Honolulu ukulele player alone, working through George Harrison's "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" with fast, intricate finger work, and it had originally been filmed for a New York television show called Midnight Ukulele Disco. The clip spread quickly and became one of the first viral videos on the site, eventually passing 17 million views. Shimabukuro had been playing since his mother, herself an accomplished ukulele player and singer, gave him one at the age of four. He first made his name in Hawaii in the late 1990s with the trio Pure Heart, whose debut album won four Na Hoku Hanohano Awards, and from 2002 he built a solo following in Japan. Outside those two places, few people knew him. The video changed that. Concert offers multiplied, he began touring the world eight or nine months a year, and requests to collaborate came from Jimmy Buffett, Béla Fleck, Ziggy Marley, Cyndi Lauper and Yo-Yo Ma. In September 2006 he released an album named after the song, Gently Weeps, which reached number two on Billboard's world music chart and won a Na Hoku Hanohano Award. For many viewers far from Hawaii, that one unplanned upload was their first sense of what a ukulele could do in the right hands.