Songs · Banjo · Intermediate
Soldier’s Joy (clawhammer)
Traditional (Scottish, then American) · Reel or country dance, printed in Britain from the late 1700s; an old-time standard in the American South
Banjo · old-timeclawhammerD major4/4 time16 barsopen D tuning
Arranged: Teddy Rook Book: clawhammer in open D tuning, an octave below the fiddle; the 5th string’s high F♯ stands in for the low F♯ between the beats.
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About this piece
One of the oldest and best-loved fiddle tunes, played at Southern dances for well over a century. In open D tuning (f♯ D F♯ A D) the A part falls under the hand: strike the melody on the beat and let the thumb answer on the 5th string between strikes (double thumbing). The B part climbs the 1st string with hammer-ons and pull-offs, and the thumb drops to the 2nd string for a few notes.
What it practices
- open D tuning
- double thumbing
- drop-thumb
- hammer-ons and pull-offs
- D and A chords
Chords in this song
Each link opens the chord finder with more ways to play that chord.
Where the notes come from
Melody checked note by note against “The Soldier’s Joy; or, Milanese Contre Dance” in Köhler’s Violin Repository, vol. 2 (Edinburgh, 1885), as transcribed in ABC by John Chambers at MIT (trillian.mit.edu); the book itself is on archive.org. Played an octave lower, starting on the downbeat. Every melody note is in our tab at its time; between the beats in the A part the 5th string plays the same note name an octave higher. History from Wikipedia and the Library of Congress’s Folklife blog.
How to practice with it
- Listen first. Press Play and follow along. The note being played lights up in the tab, in the notation and on the fretboard, and the chord being played lights up in the row of chord diagrams.
- Learn the chords. Press each diagram to hear it, then practice changing between them slowly.
- Slow it down. Use − and + to set the tempo. 60% is a good place to start; the notes keep their pitch.
- Loop the hard part. Under More…, turn on Loop, pick the bars, and play them a few times in a row. Count-in gives you a bar of clicks before it starts.
Click a bar in the music to start from there. Space plays and pauses. Left-handed? Turn on the left-handed view: the chord diagrams and the fretboard are mirrored to match your instrument. Tab reads the same either way: the top line is always the first (highest) string.