PlaysoloistStringsGuitarSongsRow, Row, Row Your Boat
guitar song · Strings
Row, Row, Row Your Boat Guitar Tab
- Composer
- Traditional
- Year
- 1852
- Key
- C
- Time
- 6/8
- Tempo
- 150 BPM
- Difficulty
- Beginner · ★
- First note
- C4
Row, Row, Row Your Boat on guitar
The full melody, rendered as six-string guitar tab in standard tuning you can read on screen or print for the stand — free, and never truncated.
Lyrics
Bar 1 — Row, row, row your boat
Bar 3 — Gently down the stream
Bar 5 — Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily
Bar 7 — Life is but a dream
Trad. American round, 1852 — public domain.
How to practise this on guitar
Row, Row, Row Your Boat is in C and the tab opens on C4 — find that fret, settle your hand there, and notice how little it has to move: the arrangement is worked out with a fret-hand position economy, so consecutive notes stay under your fingers instead of leaping up and down the neck. Read the numbers, not the note names: string line plus fret is the whole instruction, and an open string costs you nothing.
Play it well under around 150 BPM with a metronome and let each note ring into the next — the tails under the numbers show you how long. When your take review marks a bar, loop just that bar until the fret-hand shift inside it feels automatic, then rejoin the line. Speed is the last thing you add, never the first. By the numbers, this setting runs 27 notes across 8 bars, from C4 up to C5 in 6/8 time.
Also playable on
The same melody is graded across 7 Playsoloist instruments. See every version, with difficulty and provenance, on the Row, Row, Row Your Boat cross-instrument hub.
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