She’ll Be Coming ’Round the Mountain

About this arrangement

A song made of repeated notes and rests. Every line begins with a two-note pickup (“She’ll be”) and ends on a long note followed by a rest, so counting the empty beats matters as much as the notes. The range is wide: the thumb starts on G, the top note of C position, the first line sits on the C above it, and the second line (“coming round the mountain when she comes”) jumps up to E and G, an octave above the starting note. In bars 11 and 12 the tune drops onto repeated As over the F chord, and the last line comes back down through G, G, G, G. The left hand plays oom-pah bass on C, F and G7, walking in crotchets under the long notes.

Practice tip: Count out loud through the rests: “comes, 2, She’ll be”. Then practise the jump in bar 4 to 5, from the C up to the E, so the hand lands without a gap.

The words

She'll be coming round the mountain when she comes. She'll be coming round the mountain when she comes. She'll be coming round the mountain, she'll be coming round the mountain, she'll be coming round the mountain when she comes.

A short history

“She’ll Be Coming ’Round the Mountain” is an American folk song that grew out of a 19th-century spiritual, “When the Chariot Comes”, which looked forward to the Second Coming. By the 1890s railway workers in the Midwest and Appalachia were singing it with new words about a train, or a woman, coming round the mountain, and Carl Sandburg printed a version in The American Songbag in 1927.

Nobody knows who “she” is. One guess is Mother Jones, the union organiser who travelled the Appalachian coalfields; another is simply the train itself.

The song is a classic of the campfire and the school bus, partly because the shape invites new verses (“she’ll be driving six white horses”) and actions. Its shape, call and response on repeated notes, is the same one that drives dozens of other American work and camp songs.

Quick facts

Tune

Traditional (American, 19th century)

Key

C major

Time signature

4/4

Length

15 bars and a pickup

Tempo

Lively, crotchet = 120

Difficulty

Level 5: A wider range (piece 143 of 201)

Type

Folk song

Hands

Both: melody in the right hand, chords in the left

Copyright

Public domain tune; arrangement by Digital Greenhouse, free for personal and classroom use

Questions and answers