How Texas Duo Folk Uke Got Their Own Holiday By Doing Nothing

It’s been a fairly eventful year for Folk Uke, the acoustic duo that first formed in San Diego back in the late 1990s. They were one of the musical guests during Bernie Sanders’ Austin campaign rally back in February. Their latest album, Starf*cker, came out back in September, and over the summer, one of their catchiest songs, “Motherf*cker Got F*cked Up,” was featured in Orange Is The New Black’s fourth season premiere.

Their year was capped off with a ceremony at Austin City Hall to commemorate December 1st as an official holiday — Folk Uke Day, an honor that came as a complete surprise to the band. “I was wondering, do we have some friends in city hall that we don’t know about? I don’t even know how it happened. It’s baffling,” said Cathy Guthrie, who sings and plays the ukulele.

“And why us,” added Amy Nelson, who abandoned her ukulele for an acoustic guitar, giving their sparse sound a tad more low-end when playing. Cathy jumped in and suggested maybe they’re “trying to really keep Austin weird?”

“Good answer. Let’s go with that one,” said Nelson, decisively.

In typical Austin fashion, it was a warm and sunny first day in December for their commemoration. About an hour before it would officially be decreed as Folk Uke Day, I met up with Nelson and Guthrie out in front of City Hall.

“I think they’re so pro-musician in Austin, they’re really good about honoring musicians and recognizing them,” says Guthrie. After all, the city does have a reputation as the Live Music Capital of the World. “I mean, we don’t even have that big of a draw,” Guthrie continued. “I think it probably should have been someone else, but we’re really glad it was us.”

The pair not only live in a city known for its live music scene, but they’re both descended from music royalty. Cathy Guthrie is the daughter of folk musician Arlo Guthrie, and the granddaughter of Woody Guthrie, one of the architects of the folk genre. Amy Nelson is the daughter of legendary country music outlaw Willie Nelson. Even their first meeting has a folk music tie-in — they both formerly worked at Croce’s in San Diego, a restaurant and bar ran by Ingrid Croce, the wife of late folksinger Jim Croce.

Folk Uke started out as an informal venture, the two would come up with songs for fun, without any real intention of becoming the kind of band that would play shows, tour, and put out albums. The moment when that changed still feels unclear. “Jury’s still out on that one,” Guthrie said, when asked when the shift happened. “Whenever we get an offer for a show we’re like, ‘Wow.’ It’s almost a surprise.”

“And then we wrote songs and we’re like, ‘We might as well record them and get them down, because we’ve written them,'” Nelson said. “I think it kind of started with that. ‘What’s the next step? We might as well just do that.'”

“It still feels accidental,” Guthrie. “Everything. It doesn’t feel like we’re doing anything on purpose. We’re just kind of going along.”

Their carefree approach has nonetheless allowed their band to flourish outside the shadows of their respective families, merging whimsical folk ditties with a distinct sense of humor.

“Since we’re doing something so different, and we’re not really taking ourselves seriously, it has gotten a little easier I think,” Nelson said. Still, they’re often pegged as a novelty act, given they’re a band that features two-part female harmony and write songs spiked with humor and occasional profanity.

“Somebody tried to represent us one time and was saying that we were a comedy harmony duo,” Nelson said. “And we were like, ‘Aw, I don’t know,’ because then there’s an expectation of comedy and we don’t necessarily deliver comedy. Maybe a couple zingers, if we’re lucky. But there’s expectation there and I think we’re trying to be more on the musical side [of things]. But I think that life is just so heavy already that we make music to soothe ourselves and make ourselves laugh.”

The idea to write and play music for themselves came from Guthrie’s father, Arlo, during one of their first big gigs at Woodyfest, a festival in Okemah, Oklahoma dedicated to Woody Guthrie. Arlo Guthrie asked Folk Uke what songs they were planning on performing, and since the duo noticed a large number of children in the audience, they explained how they planned to omit some of their more profane numbers, including “Sh*t Makes The Flowers Grow” and the aforementioned “Motherf*cker Got F*cked Up.” At this, Arlo Guthrie offered them some frank advice.

“He’s like, ‘You don’t change your set,” Guthrie said. “This is who you are, you have to be who you are.’ So they gave them a little warning and we did it. We try to keep that in mind.”

“We might have to keep that in mind today,” Nelson said with a smile, knowing they’d be performing a song in the same room where the Austin City Council holds its meetings.

That’s not to say that they’ve never been asked to censor their setlist for an audience,” Guthrie said. “I remember we did a radio interview one time and we had to be really good and they wouldn’t even let us play ‘Knock Me Up.”

As far as their inspiration, Nelson cites Roger Miller. “He writes either really funny songs or really sad ones,” she explained. “I can’t really say we get that from him, but he’s someone we both admire.”

Beyond the penchant for humor, and wearing his heart on his sleeve, Miller’s style of “just being who you are in song” is a staple for Folk Uke.

“Don’t change — we don’t change ourselves to write,” Nelson said. “It’s not very often that we feel that we’re taken seriously. Not that we feel unappreciated, but things like [Folk Uke Day] are just so baffling. Like, wow.”

“This might be our one and only kind of classy recognition, we need to cherish this one,” Guthrie said.

As for that recognition itself, it turned out that the two were given their choice of a handful of days to declare their holiday, and they chose December 1st specifically because it’s Richard Pryor’s birthday.

“We made it Richard Pryor’s birthday because he’s our hero,” Guthrie said. “We feel like he kind of wrote the word ‘motherf*cker.'”

The two also compare the honor of their own city-wide holiday to their most popular song making it onto the Orange Is The New Black soundtrack, a show they both enjoy. “It’s kind of cool because it’s something that we accomplished,” said Nelson. “It’s something that kind of legitimizes us. I don’t know if we feel personally legitimized, but it’s something that we actually did.”

After such a monumental year, the question of what 2017 will bring doesn’t phase them, or their sense of humor. “We’re going to have to get political — starting now,” quipped Guthrie.

“We’re going to finally be a typical folk band,” added Nelson with a smile. “I guess we’ll just see what the universe has in store for us. I think, most of the things that we’ve really put a lot of time into haven’t panned out, and the things that have just fallen into our laps are the ones did pan out. So we’ll just not do anything.”

It would seem like not planning anything has worked out for the best. That afternoon, inside the Austin City Council Chamber, acting Austin Mayor Pro Tem Kathie Tovo officially declared December 1st to be Folk Uke Day, followed by a rendition of their seasonally appropriate song “All I Want For Christmas.” So far, with a tour of Australia planned for the spring, Folk Uke shows no signs of slowing down in the coming year, which is good, since it will give us something to celebrate on the 2nd Annual Folk Uke Day next year.

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