Emerging from Hannibal, Missouri, he quit school at fourteen, drifted to St. Louis and learned the ukulele as a self-made accompanist, a skill that earned him the nickname “Ukulele Ike.” A breakthrough at Chicago’s Arsonia Café in 1918 launched a vaudeville run that included the Palace and the Ziegfeld Follies, and by the early 1920s he was recording for Pathé and topping the charts with numbers s…
