Manuel Nunes

Manuel Nunes & Sons


If you read any of the histories of the Ukulele, the name Manuel Nunes crops up very quickly as one of the three cabinet makers credited with inventing the Ukulele.

After working off his passage Manuel Nunes opened a cabinetmaker/luthiery workshop in Honolulu like the other two credited inventors, (Augusto Dias and Jose do Espirito Santo), but unlike them he expanded to start a company, M. Nunes & Sons, in 1910 specifically making Ukuleles. After he retired in 1917, (he died in 1922), his son Julius Nunes, who had taken over as general manager in 1915 after a brief stint on his own, (though I have never seen a Ukulele attributed directly to him?), continued the firm into the 1930's, (though it may be the case that the Southern California Music Co. brought the name in the late teens?)

M Nunes & Sons made Soprano scale Ukuleles and Concert scale Taropatches with the usual Hawaiian levels of decoration, (though M Nunes was keener on making completely undecorated style 0 Ukuleles than most of the other Hawaiian makers) and before the mid 'teens, they had plain headstocks; they went back to plain headstocks in later years too.

Another son, Leonardo Nunes started with the company but left in 1914 to start his own company and moved to Los Angeles before 1920.