Song · Tab
Boil Them Cabbage Down banjo tab
If you have never played a tune on the banjo before, this is the one to start with. Boil Them Cabbage Down is the most common first tune there is — a short, familiar melody in G that walks you through the three basic chords and teaches your hands to change between them in time. Here are the chords, how the tune is built, and how to practise it.
Why Boil Them Cabbage Down is the tune to learn first
Boil Them Cabbage Down is the tune most teachers hand a beginner before anything else — even before Cripple Creek. There is a good reason. It sits in open G tuning, so the banjo is already halfway playing it for you; the melody is short and everyone knows it; and your very first chord is simply every string played open. What it adds over a two-chord melody is the thing you actually need next — it uses all three basic chords, so it is usually the first tune where you learn to change cleanly between every core shape and keep the melody moving in time.
The three chords you need
Boil Them Cabbage Down is a I–IV–V tune: you sit on G, step up to C, and touch D7 before resolving home. Those three are the whole tune — and they are the three chords every banjo player has to own. 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. You lean on G, step up to C, and only reach for D7 at the turnaround before falling back home:
How the tune is built
Boil Them Cabbage Down is one short eight-bar phrase that simply repeats. You spend most of it on G, rise to C in the third bar, and touch D7 at the turnaround before landing back on G. There is no high B part to climb into and no fast roll to master — the entire lesson is here in those three changes and keeping them in time. Get comfortable moving G → C → G → D7 → G on the beat and you have not just learned a tune, you have learned the backbone every other beginner tune is built on.
The reason this one comes first is not the melody — it is the changes. Most players learn a two-chord tune, then hit a wall the moment a song wants a third chord. Boil Them Cabbage Down gets you over that wall early. Our guide to how to play the banjo walks through the right hand alongside these shapes so the whole thing hangs together.
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 tune, get G, C and D7 under your fingers on their own. G is every string open, so the real work is C and D7. Fret each one, strum it, lift off, and put it back — until each shape lands in one motion. The tune is only as clean as your slowest chord change.
Holding a chord is easy; moving between them in time is the whole skill. Set a slow count and switch G → C → G → D7 → G on the beat, over and over. It will feel clumsy at first — that is normal and it is exactly the thing this tune exists to fix. Smooth changes come from repeating the move, not the shape.
Play through the progression with a plain, steady strum and sing or hum the melody over it. Keeping a rock-steady pulse while your left hand changes chords is more important than any roll or fill early on. If the beat stays even, you already have a real version of the tune.
There is almost always a single move — often into C, or the jump to D7 — that snags. Isolate just those two chords, switch between them ten times cleanly, then drop 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 strum through the changes, 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 playing Boil Them Cabbage Down and changing chords in time. For a written, note-for-note arrangement to read alongside it, a good banjo tab & chord book is the most reliable source — and the three chords you have learned here will make that tab far quicker to read.