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You are here: Home / Free Lessons / Boil Them Cabbage Down – Free Fiddle Lesson – Montana State Old-Time Fiddlers

Boil Them Cabbage Down – Free Fiddle Lesson – Montana State Old-Time Fiddlers

Teacher: Vi Wickam

Find more lessons, music, and sheet music at:
https://www.montanastateoldtimefiddlers.org/
https://www.myTalentForge.com
http://www.vithefiddler.com

Hi I’m Vi Wickam with myTalentForge.com. This is a lesson for the Montana State Old-Time Fiddlers Association sheet music book of fiddle tunes.

I’m really glad to be a part of this project and that I get to make this lesson video for you.

The first lesson we’re going to learn is Boil Them Cabbage Down. Now Boil Them Cabbage Down is a great old fiddle tune. And it’s usually one of the first “real” fiddle tunes that we learn when we’re learning to play a fiddle.

The melody of Boil Them Cabbage Down is:
“Boil them Cabbage down boys / Turn them hoecakes round / The only song that I can sing / Is boil them cabbage down…”

And when we play it on the fiddle, we add a shuffle bowing pattern, which the single shuffle, or the common shuffle, that we do with this- is a long-short-short, long-short-short…

For the whole A-part here, we’re going to do a shuffle, shuffle, shuffle, shuffle. And the fingering is going to be [2, 3, 2, 1, 2, 3, 2, 1, 0]…

We’ll slow it down a little bit to add the shuffle […]. So that’s our basic melody.

We’ll play two times through that because twice through the A-part and twice through the B-part is kind of a common form in fiddle tunes.

We have Boil Them Cabbage Down- and when we’re singing this tune, generally speaking, there will be a verse followed by a chorus. And the chorus is… […]. Then there will be a verse, and we usually follow that same melody:
“Bought my gal a bicycle / She learned to ride it well / Till she rode it into a telephone and busted it all to… pieces…”

And then we come back to that melody again- to the chorus.

[…]

As often happens when a singing song becomes a fiddle tune, the singing song is simpler than the fiddle tune. So we fiddlers like to make up our own extra verses. Or our own variations. So this B-part is a fiddlers variation- it’s a fiddle version that’s added onto that basic melody.

We’ll call this the B-part, and it’s the fiddle B-part. It goes […]. [0, 1, 0, 2 – 0, 1, 0, 2 – 0, 1, 0, 2, 1, 1 – 0, 1, 0, 2 – 0, 1, 2, 0, 2, 2, 2, 1, 1, 1, 0, 0 , 0, 0…]

We’ll play the B-part twice too. We have A-A, B-B. Two A’s and two B’s. Let’s see what that sounds like together:

[…]

Of course, because it’s a fiddle tune- we can end with “a shave and a hair cut”!

That’s Boil Them Cabbage Down. I hope you’ve had a great time with this lesson, and I’ll see you next time!

About Vi Wickam

Vi Wickam of Loveland, CO has been performing fiddle and writing music since before he could read. Along with his brothers and dad, The Wickam Family Band performed regularly on Blinky’s Fun Club, a nationally syndicated TV program.

Vi’s fiddling can be heard on numerous CD recordings, including two of his own. He’s played with many different bands throughout the United States, and even briefly in England.

Among his fiddling honors, Vi has won the Colorado State Championship twice, and been a finalist four times at the Grand Masters’ Fiddler Championship. He has judged fiddle contests throughout the US, and directed regional and state level fiddle contests.

Join Talent Forge to learn tunes from Vi.

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