Bluegrass Guitar Tabs

Bonaparte Crossing the Rocky Mountains

Bluegrass guitar tabs -- free! -- for Bonaparte Crossing the Rocky Mountains. Standard treble clef notation for fiddlers along with free guitar tablature and chord symbols.

The video below doesn't feature a guitar player -- I couldn't find one playing Bonaparte Crossing the Rocky Mountains. The Fiddler's Fake book the fiddle player mentions is one I have, too... highly recommended! I have also played out of The Guitar Picker's Fakebook, which seems to have all the same songs in it, but with guitar tablature only.



This is a good ensemble piece. It sounds like Irish fiddle music to me, and there are other tunes about Bonaparte that come from over the sea... Bonaparte Crossing the Rhine, and Bonaparte's Retreat. I think Napoleon Bonaparte only ever crossed the Rockies in someone's imagination!



Download free bluegrass music Bonaparte Crossing the Rocky Mountains

Here is the very same arrangement, but spread over two pages to make it easier to read.





Download bluegrass sheet music Bonaparte Crossing the Rocky Mountains in two pages


Like Devil's Dream, this flatpicking tune has almost the entire melody made up of eighth notes.

Your students who are new to flatpicking melodies may struggle initially with the "down,up,down,up" motion of the pick. I like to get my students used to this technique by doing fret-by-fret scales up the neck of the guitar from string 6 to string 1, going "down, up" on each fret. I play along with them, singing the notes like this: "Open, open; one, one; two, two; three, three; four, four; open-open (that's the next string)," etc. Then, with my eyes watching their pick hand, I'll switch to singing, "Down, up; down, up..." Sometime we try it with a metronome to even out their strokes, and I'll assign metronome work at home, too.

Enjoy this beautiful, rhythmic guitar music!

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