Flatpicking Guitar Magazine

Free Lesson - June 2019

“Molly Bloom”

By Alan Munde

Arranged by Mickey Abraham


Download pdf | Download mp3

Hello and welcome once again to Flatpicking Guitar Magazine’s free lesson portion of our monthly newsletter. I’d like to take a moment to thank those of you who contributed to my Kickstarter last month!. We did make our goal and “Voices: A Folk Opera” has been fully funded! I can’t wait to get to work on recording this concept album and then sharing the finished product with all of you!

Now onto this month’s tune. This month I offer “Molly Bloom,” a wonderful fiddle tune written by the legendary banjo player Alan Munde. “Molly Bloom” has enjoyed quite a bit of popularity and has made its way into the standard flatpicking repertoire. You know your original tune has made it when it’s recorded by Tony Rice and Norman Blake. I encourage you to listen to Tony and Norman’s version of “Molly Bloom” off their iconic album “Blake and Rice 2.”

This lesson version is very straight forward and not to difficult to learn. The backup is perhaps more challenging than picking the melody. The chords to “Molly Bloom” often change every two beats and involve quite a bit of chord switching. There is also a pesky B minor chord in the A section. In the future I’d love to do an entire lesson about different ways to play B minor. I recognize Bm is a tough chord for lots of folks. Luckily for this tune it only lasts for two beats and then its gone :)

I hope you enjoy working on this arrangement of the classic Alan Munde tune “Molly Bloom” and adding to your list of flatpicking tunes. This one is truly a classic. As always should you have any questions or comments on this lesson just drop me a line at [email protected]

Editor’s Note: If you’d like to learn another arrangement of this tune, plus nine more Alan Munde classic tunes, check out Tim May’s book Alan Munde Banjo Tunes Arranged for Guitar at this link: https://www.flatpick.com/product_p/5920.htm