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People of a certain age can remember seeing Tiny Tim on the Tonight Show singing Tiptoe Through The Tulips in an amazing falsetto voice while strumming a ukulele. The inspiration for that awe inspiring performance, and for Tiny Tim’s only top twenty hit record, was Nick Lucas, who sang Tiptoe Through The Tulips in the 1929 Warner Brothers film Gold Diggers of Broadway, another in a long series of movies about people putting on a Broadway show. Tiptoe Through The Tulips became Lucas’ signature song. He sang it at Tiny Tim’s wedding, on the Tonight Show in 1969. Nick Lucas lived until 1982 and continued to perform most of his life.

Nick Lucas, born in 1897, played banjo, ukulele, mandolin and guitar and appeared in vaudeville with his brother, Frank, and friends, as Lucas Ukulele Trio and the Lucas Novelty Quartet, before 1920. He became a popular solo performer, playing intricate arrangements on a concert sized, Gibson guitar, later sold as the “Nick Lucas Special,” and singing in a style that resembles crooners like Bing Crosby. Lucas was also one of the earliest musicians to use a steel stringed guitar, in place of a tenor banjo, in a jazz band and probably the first to play single note melody on the guitar with a band. He has been called “the grandfather of jazz guitar.”

For comparison, here is Tiny Tim singing the same song:

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