It's mid-morning and Rodney Godwin is on his pontoon in Seven Lakes, doing a sound check as the sun dances on the water.

"Testing 1, 2."

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Again.

"Testing 1, 2, 3."

He tinkers, sighs, mutters.

"Why is my mike not working?"

He finally pulls the plug on his efforts. No big loss — sound waves travel farther on water anyway, and he has a voice that carries. Godwin cranks up the boat before breaking into a rendition of "Cheer Up Sleepy Jean" as he strums his ukulele.

"Cheer up, sleepy Jean,

Oh, what can it mean,

to a Daydream believer,

and a Homecoming queen?"

Cruising toward a cove, he performs before a flotilla of fans. One woman is on a paddle board, two others are on kayaks. Families watch from pontoon boats. Godwin struck up his one-man-band performance in April as a way to navigate the COVID blues. On a whim, he posted an announcement on Facebook.

"If you want to hear some good live acoustic music, social distancing style, come by boat in front of my house and I'll play some songs," he says. "And I had five or six boats."

His ukulele riffs have created quite the ripple effect across his lakefront community in Moore County.

"It's helping get people's mind off of everything that's going on that we really can't control," he says. "But all we can control is what we put into our minds and our brains."

Godwin puts on a couple of concerts a week, usually in the evenings but whenever the mood strikes. Sometimes he makes no announcement; he just hops aboard with Cayman, his lab mix, and reaches into his repertoire.

"I probably play part of 500 songs and all of 200 songs," he says. "if I heard it, I'll dig it up and play it."

Between shows, Godwin, who's 50, works from home as a college financial aid coach. He also cares for his wife Tonya, who has multiple sclerosis and often joins Rodney for his pontoon performances.

"It gets my mind off all the negativity in the news and everything else that's going on in the world today," he says. "And so we're just trying to spread a little joy."

He even wrote a little number about the virus, set to the tune of Bobby McFerrin's 1988 song "Don't Worry Be Happy."

The chorus goes something like this:

"We're out of toilet paper oh my, stop hoarding, coronavirus"

Godwin says he's been singing since childhood and began playing the guitar during his senior year in high school. He took up the ukulele four years ago and uses it to play everything from Sinatra to the Bee Gee's to "This Little Light of Mine."

"I like to do songs that motivate people to be happy, to do positive things," he says. "I don't want to sing songs that are bringing us down, I want to sing songs that lift us up."

Infuse the happy sounds of a ukulele into a summer day at the lake, and the cares of a COVID-afflicted world drift away.

You can see more of Godwin's performances on his Facebook page.