This Ol’ boy……

This ol’ boy was traveling through the Ozarks with his rucksack and fiddle strapped across his back. As he stopped to catch his breath he looked across the expanse of forest and mountains. With a head full of fresh mountain air he sat down, pulled out his fiddle, tuned the strings, and composed this little tune he named Arkansas Traveler. That’s probably not completely accurate, but that’s how I like to imagine it. Anyhow….

Up to this point we’ve been working out cross-picking arrangements using songs. Now we’re going to start working with fiddle tunes. The biggest challenge with fiddle tunes is that the melodies are much more active, meaning that they have more notes than a song would. With songs you have to have time to breathe in order to sing the lyrics, but with a fiddle tune, hopefully you’re breathing, but you’re not relying on your breath to create the notes, so they tend to be much more active melodically, or more note-y.

Because they have more notes, the challenge is trying to find the main notes that really form the character of the melody, and paring it down to those essential notes in order to work them into a cross-picking pattern. In order to do that you have to know the melody inside and out, and it bears repeating, learn the melody, and learn the chords.

We’re going to start with an old classic called Arkansas Traveler. This song was composed on fiddle by Colonel Sanford C. ‘Sandy’ Faulkner, and was later adopted as the Arkansas state song for a time. Here’s the basic melody as I know it:

The range of the melody offers the opportunity to play it in the lower register as well. This is something I look for in all melodies. If you learn it in the higher register see if it can be transposed down an octave, and vice versa. Here is the basic melody again, but in the lower register:

Notice that there’s a slight variation (especially in the last measure) compared to the previous version. This is what happens when you don’t have the same range in the lower register as the higher register. This is great because it forces us to get creative and find a new way to play it. The more ways you can play a melody the better, so learn the melody, and next time we’ll be getting into the essential notes of the melody, and then using them to create a cross-picking arrangement.

Here are easy to print PDFs basic melody, and basic melody low.

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For anyone interested here are the lyrics from the Arkansas.gov website:

The Arkansas Traveler

Lyrics by the Arkansas State Song Selection Committee, 1947
Music by Colonel Sanford (Sandy) Faulkner, about 1850

On a lonely road quite long ago,
A trav’ler trod with fiddle and a bow;
While rambling thru the country rich and grand,
He quickly sensed the magic and the beauty of the land.

Chorus
For the wonder state we’ll sing a song,
And lift our voices loud and long.
For the wonder state we’ll shout hurrah!
And praise the opportunities we find in Arkansas.

Many years have passed, the trav’lers gay,
Repeat the tune along the highway;
And every voice that sings the glad refrain
Re-echoes from the mountains to the fields of growing grain.

Repeat Chorus