By ALLEN SALKIN

Suddenly there’s something irresistible again about ukuleles, an international voraciousness for all things having to do with the tiny four-string instrument. From wildly popular Web videos to car commercials and concert stages, the ukulele, born in Hawaii more than a century ago, is gently plunking heartstrings everywhere.
“You can’t walk down the street with a ukulele without being asked about it,” said Chris Johnson, who plays the instrument with the Deedle Deedle Dees, a rock band for children based in the New York borough of Brooklyn. “I teach some kids music lessons, usually starting with piano, but they are all interested in ukulele.” What the world seems to need now is something tiny, fun and inexpensive.
“In darker times there is something appealingly light about it,” said Jim Beloff, who wrote “The Ukulele: A Visual History” and sells ukulele merchandise at fleamarketmusic. com. “There’s a lightness and a sweetness about the sound, and it doesn’t hurt that the association people have is with Hawaii, which is a beautiful place. It’s kind of a vacation in your mind.”
The ukulele’s first golden age started during World War I, when the instrument was demonstrated at the 1915 Panama Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco, California. By the 1920s, Roy Smeck, whose nickname was the Wizard of the Strings, became famous by playing it in early sound movies.
The second era started at the height of the cold war, in the 1950s, when Arthur Godfrey played the ukulele regularly on his show “Arthur Godfrey and His Friends” and recommended a plastic Maccaferri Islander model, which sold millions.
Tiny Tim had a 1968 hit with his ukulele version of “Tiptoe Through the Tulips With Me,” which played as something of a parody of 1950s earnestness, and managed, despite the song’s huge success, to render the instrument uncool, Mr. Beloff said. When Mr. Beloff, a former associate publisher of Billboard magazine, became fascinated with the ukulele and published his first ukulele songbook in 1992, “people thought we were nuts,” he said. “The uke in 1992 was pretty off the pop culture radar.”
Then suddenly it was back on.
The dawn of the third great ukulele era can be traced to 2006, aficionados say, with the appearance of a video on YouTube by Jake Shimabukuro, a Hawaiian- born ukulele player. He had recorded a video for the New York cable access show “Midnight Ukulele Disco” that shows him sitting in New York’s Central Park, playing an astonishing virtuoso version of the Beatles’ “While My Guitar Gently Weeps.”
As his fame spread, Mr. Shimabukuro, 31, went on tour with Jimmy Buffett, and earned the nickname Jimi Hendrix of the ukulele. He recently played at the Newport Jazz Festival in Rhode Island.
“All of those places I go to, the ukulele is huge,” he said in a phone interview from Kaimuki, the Honolulu suburb in which he lives. “All these teenagers coming to the show with their ukuleles, asking me to sign them. It’s amazing to see that.”