Some people in a family become a story you pass down. In ours, one of them is Sione ʻAleki Johansson.

He was our uncle. He was also one of the finest ukulele players Tonga has ever produced, and most of the world never got to hear him. That is worth putting right.

A ukulele made from a tin

Aleki was born in Tonga on 2 March 1945.

Severely visually impaired from a young age, he was unable to attend school as a boy. So he gave his childhood to music instead. At six he was given his first ukulele, a handmade one, built from a discarded corned-beef tin, a stick and horsehair strings. No shop, no brand, no lessons. A tin and a stick and a boy who could not see the strings but could hear everything.

That is where it started.

Playing it every way but the ordinary way

Aleki did not just play the ukulele. He played it behind his head. With his teeth. Behind his back. There is footage from 2007 of him playing with his bare feet.

His younger brother, Afa Johansson, later explained where that came from. Local stories and childhood challenges pushed Aleki to experiment. If people said someone could play behind their head or with their teeth, Aleki wanted to see whether he could do it too. It was the spirit of a challenge taken up and answered, again and again, until the impossible tricks were just part of the show.

And the shows were something. Not novelty for its own sake, but a man in complete command of an instrument, turning it into theatre, carrying the room with him.

A mentor, and a life in music

His talent was spotted by Bill Sevesi, often called the godfather of Pacific music. Under Sevesi, Aleki learned not just music but timing, the deeper craft of it.

Records like Pacific Ukulele captured what he could do. Wide mainstream fame never quite found him; his name was known best in Tonga and in New Zealand, carried by the people who had seen him play. But inside the Pacific, among those who knew, he was the standard.

Why we carry his name

Aleki passed on 21 December 2009. He was 64.

We put him on this blog for the plainest reason there is. He is family, and a man like that should not be a name only a few households remember. A boy who could not see, handed a tin with strings on it, who taught himself to do things with a ukulele that most sighted, trained musicians never manage. That is not a sad story. That is a Tongan story, and an honour to carry.

The tricks were the surface. Underneath was the thing our family holds to and the thing NK is built on: you take what you are given, however little, and you make something out of it that outlasts you.

Rest easy, Uncle.

Malo. ʻOfa atu.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/1RCLjfjY-A4

Biographical detail from Ukulele Magazine and the 2009 tribute at Ukulelia. Dates confirmed via SecondHandSongs and FamilySearch. Family recollection from Afa Johansson.