Home Sweet Home — Mandolin Tab

Mandolin tab and sheet music with synced audio · Henry Bishop · Key of D · 120 BPM · 4/4 time · Bluegrass · Advanced

Chords used in this arrangement: D, G, A.

This song is a special one for me as I played it at Tamworth, Australia, on stage in front of a big audience with my dad when I was 10 years old! It was such a special moment, but back then we didn't even have cameras, so I only have it in my memory. I tabbed this out from memory so some notes from the version I learned from the Bill Monroe bluegrass book might be slightly different.

This song uses a cross-picking method, which can be difficult get used to if you haven't done it before. It involves you doing one down pick and then two up in quick succession.

Most people assume "Home Sweet Home" is an old folk tune that drifted into bluegrass naturally, but it started life as a showstopper in a London opera. Henry Bishop composed the melody for Clari, or the Maid of Milan, which premiered in 1823, and he later admitted he hadn't written it as something entirely new: he had already published essentially the same tune in 1821, labeling it a "Sicilian Air" in a collection of national melodies he edited. In other words, the melody Bishop quietly claimed as a traditional folk air turned out to be his own composition all along. The song became a Civil War favorite on both sides of the conflict, and the melody even turns up woven into the final scene of The Wizard of Oz as a counterpart to "Over the Rainbow." Its bluegrass life got a major boost from Earl Scruggs's 1961 recording on Foggy Mountain Banjo, and a later version with Béla Fleck has shaped how many contemporary players approach it.

I mostly remember this as a Bill Monroe song because that was where I got most of my bluegrass songs as a kid!

This page includes mandolin tablature, standard music notation, and a chord chart — printable as PDF and playable in sync with the original recording. Change the key, slow the tempo down, and loop the bars you want to practise.