Dan Scanlan began seriously playing ukulele in 1961 and taught folks how to play it since 1984. He returned the ukulele to its ancestral home of Madeira Island, Portugal has the American coordinator of the "Father and Son Reunion: The Braguinha Meets the Ukulele" Project in which he taught Madeiran folk musicians to play the ukulele and they taught him to play the braguinha, one of the forerunners of the ukulele. The project culminated in a concert by the Reunion group at the World's Fair in Lisbon (1998). He cofounded the Ukuhooley group in Ireland and several of his students have gone on to create ukulele groups in Califronia and New Mexico. He authored "How to Play Ukulele" published by Simon and Schuster in 2018. For the last two decades he has directednearly  the Strum Bums of Grass Valley CA, a ukulele group that performs some 60 gigs a year and has been featured in festivals in New York, Honolulu, Santa Cruz, Auburn and elsewhere. He recently began ukulele lessons at his home town library in Nevada City CA where they loan ukes like books.