This is Amazing Grace (“Amazing grace, my chains are gone”), and the four-stringed litlle guitar thingy is the cavaquinho, a Brazilian variant of an instrument with Portuguese roots, ubiquitous in samba and other local genres. Looks a hell lot loke an ukulele, right? That’s because the ukulele came from a variant of the cavaquinho introduced by Portuguese expatriates in the Hawaiian islands more than a century ago. The main difference is that the ukulele has nylon instead of steel strings, and also the cavaquinho is tuned like a standard guitar, sans the two lower strings A and E and obviously an octave higher, while the ukulele is tuned a fourth lower, except for it’s lowest string which is a fifth higer.
