All the cool kids are now playing the ukulele. Yes, really

Adalynn Cuevas and Ella Mathias, both 8-year-old students at Leon Springs Elementary School, pluck the C string on their ukuleles in unison. Intensely focused, they shift to the E string. Adalynn shakes out her hand to loosen up her fingers. It’s hard work, this instrument.

As they continue their efforts, a plucky cover of “When the Saints Go Marching In” emerges. Their instructor, a ukulele player from Hawaii named Kainoa Kamaka, gives them a high five. After almost two months of ukulele lessons in the living room of Ella’s home, the girls can add another song to their repertoire, right next to “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.”

Both Adalynn and Ella played the ukulele in their music class at school last year, and both loved it so much they each asked for one for their birthdays. The recorder, and its old fashioned “Hot Cross Buns” tune, will have to wait until the third grade.

Thanks to an unlikely cast of musicians and to Grace VanderWaal, the ukulele-playing preteen winner of season 11 of “America’s Got Talent,” the instrument once associated with novelty acts and beachside jams is being picked up by the cool kids.

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VanderWaal’s audition video, in which she performed a spunky original ukulele tune, has more than 86 million views on the site.

“‘Look! She plays it!’” Adalynn’s mother, Stepfanie Cuevas, remembers her daughter saying as they watched. “‘She plays it and I can get a strap like her.’”

VanderWaal is now touring the nation with the chart-topping band Imagine Dragons.

The instrument’s newfound appeal to younger players is a part of larger, longer lasting revival, said Gary Smith, a sales manager at Alamo Music Center.

Smith said he used to sell about 25 ukuleles a year. But over the past five years, he’s sold more than 450 annually. According to the National Association of Music Merchants, in 2013 almost a million ukuleles were sold nationwide. Last year, almost 2 million were sold.

VanderWaal has attracted a new generation of girls to ukuleles in a way that Taylor Swift attracted young girls to guitars, said Greg Olwell, the editor of Ukulele Magazine. His said his own 10-year-old daughter was disinterested in the instrument that fueled her father’s livelihood until she saw a video of the young ukulele star.

Even the magazine, which has about 2,000 unique online visitors, is an unlikely testament to the girl-power potential of the ukulele. The publication’s social media followings are split almost evenly between males and females. That parity is very unusual for instrumental magazines, which tend to have a predominately male readership, Olwell said.

And though the magazine’s subscribers skew older, the publication’s Instagram is especially attractive to younger audiences, he said.

“Instagram is filled with young people learning songs,” he said. “The internet has really helped spread it, I think.”

VanderWaal’s audition video is part of a large catalog of ukulele videos on YouTube. Elise Ecklund, a young ukulele expert, has at least two videos that have been viewed more than a million times.

With the help of the internet, Adalynn learned a ukulele rendition of “Remember Me,” the hit song from the animated movie “Coco.” Ella has a ukulele app that showed her the chords of the alphabet song and “Happy Birthday to You.”

Young girls are an unlikely group of admirers for an instrument once associated with Tiny Tim, the long-haired 1960s performer. When his ukulele version of “Tiptoe Through the Tulips,” which he sang in a falsetto voice, became a novelty hit, it solidified the instrument’s place as a joke for many years after.

“It really didn’t do the ukulele any favors at all,” Smith said.

But kids today aren’t corrupted by Tiny Tim — in fact, they probably don’t know who he is. They only thing they know is this new, cool ukulele, the one that even rock stars take seriously.

VanderWaal is only the latest on a roster of popular musicians who helped save the soul of the instrument. In the early 2000s, Jake Shimabukuro, a ukulele virtuoso, posted a popular Beatles cover on YouTube. And while his ukulele gently wept, Jason Mraz came out with a chart-topping ukulele hit “I’m Yours.”

And then Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam surprised his rock fan base by accurately naming his second solo album “Ukulele Songs,” without a hint of irony. Though Vedder and Mraz may be before Adalynn’s and Ella’s time, they are part of an epic comeback story that results in two 8-year-olds strumming on a summer morning.

In the ukulele, kids have found a friend. Compared with the guitar, the strings are gentler and it’s easily learned.

“It almost feels like a toy. Kids put it on, they almost feel like rock stars ,” Kamaka said.

And when Kamaka puts on the instrument, he is a rock star in his own right.

He shimmies and skips onstage at talent shows and festivals while performing a rocking uke rendition of “Johnny B. Goode.” He said it’s always been considered a “bona fide instrument” in Hawaii, no matter how it has been viewed elsewhere.

The girls’ mothers are hoping Kamaka will give a performance with their daughters at their school’s talent show next year. Before she began ukulele lessons, Ella avoided piano classes out of fear of the recitals, but maybe with Adalynn and their teacher by her side, and with a ukulele in hand, the spotlight wouldn’t be so bad.

lizzie.stokes@express-news.net