Music Lesson: "Fireball Mail"

This next song uses the forward rolls and those forward roll concepts.

Overview

We just talked about the melody. This song is called Fireball Mail. It's a Roy Acuff song, but in bluegrass, a lot of times, people just play it as an instrumental.

Melody

The melody goes like this:

We could even add some rhythm to it. There were a couple of places in there where the melody left us with a space right there. The last melody note goes where a pinch would go, so we're left without something to do in that space.

Tag

There's actually something that works really well for that. It's a short tag that takes up one beat. It would sound like this:

• There's another one.

So that happens twice in that song, and you can try playing it with that.

Learning the Song

Now, let's learn the song with all the forward rolls and other rolls. We'll start with a slow version.

Notes on Forward Rolls

Little things you might want to note about how the forward roll works with this melody:

• There's the melody.
• There's the forward roll.

You can hear the beat change here:

• Fingers: thumb, 1, 2.

So the beats go thumb, 1, 2, and then the roll changes up. This happens a few times in this song. The same thing occurs again here.