My, Sunshine, You Are Cross

“You Are My Sunshine” is a song that is near and dear to my heart. My wife and I sang this to our middle daughter when she was born; she is our sunshine. This song was also popularized in the film O’ Brother, Where Art Thou? , which is one of my all time favorites, and put Bluegrass style music on the map for many people. When I was asked to give a cross-picking tutorial for this song I was more than happy to do it.

Where do we start? If you’ve been following so far, you know that we start with chords and melody. Then we move onto a Carter style arrangement, which is then transformed into a Cross-Picking arrangement. So let’s get started. It’s best to figure out the melody by ear, because it’s a great way to train your ear to play what you’re hearing, but I’ve also provided the melody and chords. So let’s take a look at the basic melody:

Now that we have that, the next step is to arrange the song in Carter style. The way to do that is to place a strum of the chord after any note that is being held for two beats or more. Here’s what I came up with:

Now we have all the pieces to put together a wonderful cross-picking arrangement of “You Are My Sunshine.” In place of the chord strum we pick through the chord using the forward roll, so here it is:

Now I’ll do the whole process using the Not So Carter, Carter Style, so I’ll start with the basic melody:

From here we apply the Not So Carter, Carter Style technique:

Then I can easily transition into cross-picking wonderfulness:

There you have it, four arrangements of “You Are My Sunshine”. If you’ve been following along hopefully you’re starting to get the hang of how this is done. Maybe you’ve even experimented with some tunes yourself, and if not start here.

Next up we’ll be looking at how we can start to add more pizzazz to the arrangements, and ways of creating variations from what we’ve covered already, so stay tuned for Pizzazz My Sunshine.

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Happy Picking!