PlaysoloistStringsGuitarSongsTom Dooley

guitar song · Strings

Tom Dooley Guitar Tab

Composer
Traditional
Year
Key
C
Time
4/4
Tempo
110 BPM
Difficulty
Beginner · ★
First note
C4

Tom Dooley 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.

Tuning: E A D G B e (standard) · Strum: D - DU DU

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Trad. North Carolina folk song, 1860s — public domain.

How to practise this on guitar

Tom Dooley 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 110 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 30 notes across 9 bars, from C4 up to G4 in 4/4 time.

Also playable on

The same melody is graded across 6 Playsoloist instruments. See every version, with difficulty and provenance, on the Tom Dooley cross-instrument hub.

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Play Tom Dooley — and hear every note graded.

Soloist Guitar reads this six-string guitar tab in standard tuning under the notation and grades your take on-device, note by note — free on iPhone, no ads, no account.

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