Song · Chords
Big Rock Candy Mountain banjo
A bouncy, singable hobo folk tune that O Brother, Where Art Thou? brought back to life. Big Rock Candy Mountain sits in easy open G and uses just three chords — a textbook I–IV–V — so it is a perfect step up from your first two-chord tunes. Here are the chords, how they move, and how to practise it up to speed.
The hobo folk tune O Brother made famous
Big Rock Candy Mountain is an old hobo folk song — a wandering daydream of a place where the hens lay soft-boiled eggs and the cops have wooden legs. Harry McClintock recorded it around 1928, and it has been public domain and widely sung ever since; a whole new generation met it through O Brother, Where Art Thou?. On the banjo it is a joy: it sits in open G tuning, so the instrument is already halfway there, the melody is instantly singable, and the whole thing runs on three simple chords. That makes it a natural next step once two-chord tunes feel comfortable.
The three chords you need
Big Rock Candy Mountain is a I–IV–V tune: you lean on G, step up to C, and use D7 as the tension chord that pulls you back home. Those are the only three chords in the whole song. 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. Each line sits on G, touches C or D7, and falls back home:
How the chords move
The whole tune is the I–IV–V relationship in action. You spend most of your time on G (the I chord, home), lift up to C (the IV chord) to open the sound out, and lean on D7 (the V chord) whenever the phrase needs to feel like it is pulling back to G. Once your ear knows that shape — home, away, tension, home — you will hear it in a hundred other folk and country tunes, which is exactly why this progression is worth learning properly.
Big Rock Candy Mountain is at its best as a relaxed, bouncy singalong rather than a hard-driving bluegrass breakdown. Keep the rhythm loose and springy and let the vocal lead; the banjo is there to carry the bounce. Our guide to how to play the banjo walks through the right hands so you can find a strum or roll that fits this easygoing feel.
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.
Before you play a note of the song, get G, C and D7 under your fingers until each one lands cleanly without looking. Big Rock Candy Mountain is really just these three chords moving in a loop, so a fumbled shape is a fumbled tune. Two minutes of clean chord changes beats ten minutes of guessing.
Strum a steady bounce and move G → C → G → D7 → G on the beat, slowly. The whole song is these transitions, so make the changes themselves the thing you rehearse. Most people can hold the shapes long before they can switch between them smoothly — that switch is the real work.
Play it slow enough that you never trip, with the bouncy feel intact, and hum or sing along. The tune is a singalong, so pairing voice and hands early locks the timing in. Speed is a by-product of clean repetition — nudge it up only once the current tempo feels effortless.
There is almost always one move — often into or out of D7 — that catches you. Isolate just that change, play it ten times cleanly, then stitch it back into the tune. Running the whole song to fix one bad change wastes most of your practice.
Two things smooth the whole process. A set of finger & thumb picks give you a clean, bright tone as you switch chords, 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. For a written arrangement to read alongside the chords, a good banjo tab & chord book is worth having on the music stand.
Getting the full note-for-note tab
This page gives you the chords, how they move and how to practise the tune — everything you need to start playing and singing Big Rock Candy Mountain. For a written, note-for-note arrangement to read alongside it, a good banjo tab & chord book is the most reliable source — and the chords and progression you have learned here will make that tab far quicker to read.