Flatpicking Guitar Magazine

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“Eight More Miles to Louisville”

Arranged by Orrin Star

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In this month’s newsletter we have reached into our archives to provide an arrangement of the tune ‘Eight More Miles to Louisville” that was presented in Volume 15, Number 4 of the magazine by our columnist Orrin Star. This arrangement is also featured in our new book from the Flatpicking Guitar Magazine archival series “Flatpicking Carter Style.” In this 200 page book, with 165 audio tracks, you will find arrangements to over 65 tunes played in the straight forward Carter Style and also the “super-charged” Carter Style. In this arrangement of “Eight More Miles to Louisville” Orrin has done a bit of “super-charging”. We hope you enjoy it!

Here is what Orrin had to say about this tune and his arrangement:

This is a great old tune that everyone knows but which I don’t hear played all that frequently. (Sam Bush is probably as responsible as anyone for keeping it in mind in recent years; he has often opened his shows with it.) And because the melody lends itself rather effortlessly to eighth-note elaborations, it is ready-made for flatpicking.

While lots of folks play this in G (as did Dan Huckabee in a 2007 column in these pages), I like how it scans in C. As with many of my arrangements this one features a healthy dose of double-stops, strums, and some overall Blake mojo.

Because key melodic phrases in the tune repeat several times, the challenge here was to avoid rote repetition by injecting subtle variations throughout. A few subtleties that bear noting: Measure 18: you’ve just moved your middle finger from its usual place in the C chord over one string to the second fret of the G string—and you hold it there for those first strums. Measure 19: this is not a simple open-D-string- to-C-note move but a transition to a full F-chord (that is, with your ring finger on the C, your pinky on the F, etc.). Measure 30: I intentionally leave the high E open when I’m strumming that F chord in order to get a different sound. Enjoy.