“The Mountain Road” for Ukulele – FREE TAB

Click here to jump straight to the TAB for “The Mountain Road.”

“The Mountain Road” is a relatively recent fiddle tune, composed in 1922 by Michael Gorman. According to The Traditional Tune Archive, the title of the song refers to a specific mountain road, a back road out of the town of Tubbercurry, Sligo County, where Gorman grew up.

Local bootleggers used the road to smuggle poitin, Irish moonshine, to avoid police on the main road, and they supposedly carried the spirits in fiddle cases to blend in with the musicians who also took the road to a local pub.

“The Mountain Road” Playing Tips

The sheet music for “The Mountain Road” probably looks a little different because it’s all one big section rather than being divided into the usual A and B sections with repeats. This tune is a single reel, meaning that it has two four-bar sections. We usually see double reels, which have two repeating eight-bar sections (and are typically just called “reels” because the form is so common).

So if the tune has two repeating four-bar sections, why have I arranged it as one 16-bar section? If you look at the music on The Traditional Tune Archive, you’ll see that the piece is actually a bit complex structurally. Each four-bar section has a two-bar variation that you play the second time through.

I thought this notation might be a bit busy for a beginner to interpret, so instead I used the form I’ve found on TheSession.org and elsewhere and arranged the tune as one big block without repeats.

Except I did include a repeat and a single bar variation at the end. What gives? Well, a lot of old fiddle tunes don’t really end in a satisfying way. They tend to be sort of open-ended so that you can transition right from one tune to the next without stopping. Again, I thought this would be disorienting for beginners, so I included a measure that ends on the tonic (G) so it sounds a bit more finished.

Low G and High G Versions

I’ve included two arrangements of this tune below, both low G and high G. The high G arrangement is in the key of D, which is how you’ll most often hear it played. If you want to play along with recordings, this is the one to practice.

However, the high G version also ranges up into the high frets of the A string. If you find that too difficult to play, the low G version stays in first position and should be much more manageable.

Click the download button below to download the sheet music if the embedded PDF doesn’t display properly. Happy picking!

“The Mountain Road” Low G Sheet Music Download

“The Mountain Road” High G Sheet Music Download