Level: 2
Tuning: Standard

In 1948, Woody Guthrie heard that a plane deporting migrant farm workers had crashed, killing everyone on board, and he wrote a heart-rending poem about the event, as a memorial. Ten years later, when Guthrie was too ill to perform, a schoolteacher added a beautiful melody and the song became a part of Pete Seeger's repertoire. It's in 3/4 time, so in this key-of-C arrangement, during the solo the thumb plays three ascending notes on each downbeat, starting with the root bass note, while the fingers pick the melody on the treble strings. There are two accompaniment patterns during the singing: most of the time, the thumb picks a bass note on the first beat, followed by two down-strokes on the high strings. But occasionally a fingerpicking pattern is interspersed; look at bars 5 and 9 during the back-up to the verse.