Boil Them Cabbage Down

Boil Them Cabbage Down is the tune most people get handed first, and it has earned the job. It was a song before it was a fiddle tune, with comic verses about raccoons and possums and whatever else the singer felt like adding, and new verses have been bolted on for as long as anybody has been keeping track. Verse and chorus are the same eight bars over the same loop of I, IV, I, V. That is why it teaches so well. Learn one strain and you have learned the form.

Jams call it in A. Teaching charts often print it in D, a comfortable first key for a violin beginner, so a fiddler raised on the printed version and a jam calling it in A are both playing the tune they know. Ask which one before you count it off. The second strain here is the same melody moved up onto the fifth. That is how old-time players usually vary it. It is not a separate part with ideas of its own.

On a mandolin this is one hand shape's worth of tune. The C sharp at the fourth fret of the A string gets hammered in a shuffle, steps up to the D at the fifth over the D chord, and drops to the B at the second fret over the E. The high strain moves the same idea to the E string, rocking between the open E and the F sharp at the second fret. The hand never moves and never stretches. That makes it the easiest page on the shelf to strum along with, and a fine first tune to trade at speed with somebody else.