Mandolin Song Breakdown: Arkansas Traveler

Arkansas Traveler is a great traditional tune from the 1860’s. Like many fiddle tunes, there are also lyrics though honestly, I’ve never heard anyone sing the original lyrics. I’ll include them here for fun though. Aside from the original lyrics, there’s a lot of songs that use Arkansas Travelers’ melody as their base. One of my favorites is Sis Draper by Guy Clark. If you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment or reach out to me here.

Sheet Music for Arkansas Traveler

Here’s the sheet music for the Arkansas Traveler breakdown.

• Basic Melody Chart
• Basic Harmony Chart

Listen to Arkansas Traveler

As always, the first step to learning is listening. So here’s a few versions to check out

• Norman Blake
• Bryan Sutton
• David Grisman & Jerry Garcia
• Peter Seeger

Arkansas Traveler Tune Form

Not surprisingly, the form is a very traditional AABB form. As a reminder, AABB means you’ll play the first part (or A Part) twice, then the second part (or B part) twice before repeating the form.

The chords on this song move quickly (similar to songs like Blackberry Blossom and Whiskey Before Breakfast), so you’ll need to be up on your chord changing game! The good news is it’s mostly simple changes

I like to split songs like this up into multiple parts. Rather than just “Verse” and “Chorus” or “A” and “B” parts. I find breaking the tune up into smaller parts (namely A1, A2, B1, and B2) really helps me to memorize the parts faster. In addition, I feel it helps me when I’m taking a melodic solo break.

A Part

B Part

Arkansas Traveler Main Melody

Arkansas Traveler’s main melody is a pretty fun bouncy one in my opinion. Similar to before, we’ll break this up into parts to keep this simple.

Alternate Melody Voicing

Below is the same melody just a bit higher up the neck. This is a way little more advance way to play this tune. Learning how to play melodies in multiple positions is a great way to better learn your fretboard and open up a ton of soloing ideas.

Arkansas Traveler Harmony

Fiddle tunes like Arkansas Traveler are great for harmony lines because there’s not a ton of regional variations. Generally, I hear most people play the same (or really similar) melodies without much change. As always, you need to keep your ears open if you’re going to try a harmony line on the fly at a jam, but in this case, it’s likely going to line up fine.

I’ve chosen to write out a harmony a 6th above the original melody. This is a pretty straight forward harmony with little changes to accommodate the melody but there’s a few spots I had to tweak to fit the harmony.

In Measure 3, I chose to use a static harmony (i.e sticking on the A note for the whole measure) but you could do a few different things. You could play an E note for the first two beats and follow with the A note for beats 3 and 4. Alternatively, you could keep the A notes for beats 1 & 2 then play a D note of beats 3 & 4. There’s a few other spots like that in the harmony. Play around and see what sounds good.

Wrap up

Arkansas Traveler is a great basic tune you can learn a lot from. Whether you play it straight or make some tweaks, it’s worth spending some time with this tune to unlock some cool ideas.

If you found this topic interesting, drop a comment below with any questions or feedback. For a deeper exploration, click here for more information on private coaching.

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