Song · Tab
Banjo in the Hollow
Banjo in the Hollow is one of the very first Scruggs-style tunes a new player learns, and for good reason. It is built almost entirely from forward and forward-backward rolls over three simple chords, so it teaches your right hand the sound of bluegrass without asking much of your left. Here are the chords, how the tune is built, and how to practise it clean.
A perfect first roll tune
Banjo in the Hollow is a traditional bluegrass instrumental that has become one of the near-universal early lessons for three-finger banjo. There is a good reason it earned that spot. It sits in open G tuning, so the banjo is already halfway playing it for you; it uses only the three most common chords in bluegrass; and it is built almost entirely from forward and forward-backward rolls. That means you can put nearly all of your attention on your picking hand — which is exactly the hand a new bluegrass player most needs to train.
The three chords you need
Banjo in the Hollow is a I–IV–V tune: it moves between G, C and D7, the three most common chords in bluegrass. Here they are in open G — the numbers are frets, 0 means play the string open, and the top line is your 1st string:
The progression itself is simple and repeats. The tune is mostly rolls sitting on top of these easy changes:
How the tune is built
Banjo in the Hollow is an AABB tune: two phrases, each played twice, sitting over a simple I–IV–V progression. What makes it such a good teacher is that the melody is carried by the roll itself — you keep a forward or forward-backward roll going in your right hand while your left hand makes the easy moves between G, C and D7. The roll never stops; the chord changes simply colour it. That is the core skill the tune is teaching, and why it is worth learning early.
The whole point of Banjo in the Hollow is to drill clean three-finger rolls, so resist the urge to rush it. If the roll is even and the changes are in time, the tune already sounds right — speed comes on its own. Our guide to how to play the banjo walks through the forward roll in detail if you want to shore up the right hand first.
How to learn it
How you practise matters more than how long. These four steps are the difference between a tune you can nearly play and one you actually own — and every one of them comes back to a clean forward roll.
Before you touch the melody, play a plain forward roll (thumb–index–middle) on the open strings until every note rings even and the pattern is automatic. Banjo in the Hollow lives inside that roll, so a clean roll is the whole tune. Two minutes of even rolls beats ten minutes of fumbling the changes.
It is an AABB tune: two phrases, each played twice. Do not try to swallow it whole. Get the A part clean and memorised on its own, then the B part, then join them. Most people can hold half a tune in their hands long before the whole thing.
With a metronome ticking slowly, just roll through the chord map — G to C to D7 and back — keeping the roll going as your left hand moves. If the roll stumbles at a change, that is the spot to slow down. Clean changes at slow speed always beat rushed ones.
There is almost always a single move — often into C or the D7 turnaround — that catches you. Isolate that one change, roll through it ten times cleanly, then stitch it back into the phrase. Running the whole tune to fix one bad bar wastes most of your practice.
Two things smooth the whole process. A set of finger & thumb picks give you the clean, bright tone a forward roll is built for, and a clip-on tuner on the headstock means every run at the tune starts in tune — an out-of-tune banjo trains your ear the wrong way.
Getting the full note-for-note tab
This page gives you the chords, the shape of the tune and how to practise it — everything you need to start rolling through Banjo in the Hollow. For a written, note-for-note arrangement of the rolls to read alongside it, a good banjo tab & chord book is the most reliable source — and the chords and chord map you have learned here will make that tab far quicker to read.