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Piano sheet music for kids · Spiritual · Level 2: Left-hand chords
Michael, Row the Boat Ashore
Free beginner piano sheet music: C major, 4/4, 8 bars and a pickup. Press Play to hear it on a real piano, slow it down, or hear one hand at a time; click any note to start from there; print it for the music stand.
The chords in this piece
Your left hand plays four chords in this piece. The shaded keys are the notes of each chord, and the numbers under them are the left-hand fingers (1 is the thumb). Oom-pah: low C, then E and G together; low G, then B, D and F. Bar 3 holds F twice, and the last full bar goes C, then G. All the common piano chords, with diagrams →
C – E – G · Left hand 5 3 1
C, E and G: the home chord. Little finger on C, middle finger on E, thumb on G.
C – F – A · Left hand 5 2 1
C, F and A. The same three notes as F major, rearranged so the little finger stays on C; the thumb stretches up one key to A.
B – D – G · Left hand 5 3 1
B, D and G. The same three notes as G major, rearranged so the hand barely moves: the little finger slides down one key from C to B.
G – B – D – F · Left hand 5 3 2 1
G, B, D and F, the whole G7 chord. Little finger reaches down to the low G; the other three fingers play B, D and F together.
About this arrangement
A rowing song from the South Carolina islands, and an easy one: the whole tune sits in C position between C and A. “Mi-chael” is a two-note pickup before the first bar, and “row the” in bars 1 and 5 is a dotted crotchet and a quaver, long-short, like an oar stroke. “Hal-le-lu-jah” ends on a slurred pair of minims, E to D, before the final C. The left hand plays a bass note and a chord, with F under “lu” in bar 3 and G7 in bar 6.
Practice tip: Feel the pull of the oar on “row”: lean on it, then let “the” be light and quick. The first “Mi-chael” is C then E; the second, at the end of bar 4, is E then G.
The words
Michael, row the boat ashore, hallelujah! Michael, row the boat ashore, hallelu jah!
A short history
“Michael, Row the Boat Ashore” is an African-American spiritual from St Helena Island, off the coast of South Carolina. It was sung by the enslaved people who rowed the plantation boats, and it was first written down there during the Civil War, when Union forces held the islands; it appears in “Slave Songs of the United States”, published in 1867, the first printed collection of spirituals.
Michael is the archangel Michael, who in the song ferries souls across the river Jordan to the far shore, and the river is a picture of death and freedom at once.
The song was almost forgotten until the folk revival of the 1950s, when Pete Seeger and others sang it; a recording by The Highwaymen reached number one in the United States in 1961, and it has been a campfire and school song ever since.
Quick facts
- Tune
- Traditional (American spiritual, 19th century)
- Key
- C major, C position
- Time signature
- 4/4
- Length
- 8 bars and a pickup
- Tempo
- Rowing along, crotchet = 104
- Difficulty
- Level 2: Left-hand chords (piece 19 of 201)
- Type
- Spiritual
- Hands
- Both: melody in the right hand, chords in the left
- Chords
- C, F, G and G7 (diagrams above)
- Copyright
- Public domain tune; arrangement by Digital Greenhouse, free for personal and classroom use
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