Hone Your Cross-Picking Skills with the Classic Fiddle Tune “Soldier’s Joy”

“Soldier’s Joy” is a well-known traditional tune, particularly favored by fiddle and mandolin players because much of the melody can be easily played in one position across two strings. However, on guitar it can be a lot more difficult. A two-string passage on a fiddle becomes a four-string cross-picking workout for us. Cross picking is a tough feat even at slow tempos, and “Soldier’s Joy” is almost always played fast. In this lesson I present two versions that offer options for navigating this tricky melody.

Example 1 shows what many teachers call the skeleton, a simplified version of the melody using quarter and half notes and all downstrokes in the picking hand. Learn this version inside and out, memorizing it so you don’t need the notation, before moving on to Example 2. Here are some ideas that can help with that process. First, find some recordings of the song—those on the Rice Brothers’ self-titled album and Doc Watson and David Grisman’s Doc and Dawg are two great examples—and listen many times to get the general sound of the tune in your head. Second, be able to sing or hum the melody to yourself. Third, play the chords using a boom-chuck rhythm, and have the melody going in your head while you strum the chords.

Memorizing Ex. 1 and playing it cleanly may take time, perhaps a few weeks or more. The skeleton melody is a fine way to play “Soldier’s Joy,” and it will give you a stable foundation for internalizing the tune and being able to play it with others. Furthermore, even Ex. 1 can be a tough version to play when things get speedy, so take the time to work it into your fingers.

When you’re ready, turn to the eighth-note arrangement in Ex. 2, played using alternating picking, with downstrokes on the beats and upstrokes on the upbeats. After a two-note pickup, the tune enters a cross-picking gauntlet. Note how much of the A part of the tune (bars 1–8) is played out of the C chord shape, and therefore very little work is required of the fretting hand. The B part (bars 9–16) moves to the upper two strings and involves a quick position shift in measure 10—a slide from fret 1 to 3 moves the fretting hand up the neck, and then the open E string at the end of the measure gives an opportunity to move your hand back down to first position for measure 11. This pattern appears again in measures 12 and 14.

Once you can play both versions of “Soldier’s Joy” cleanly and from memory, you can start to mix and match them. For example, if you struggle with cross picking at higher speeds, you can replace bars 1, 3, and 5 of Ex. 2 with the corresponding measures from Ex. 1. Or if you have the opportunity to play two solos, your first solo can be the skeleton melody, and the second can be the eighth-note version. The variations are endless; all are valid ways to explore creativity and improvisation.