We Shall Overcome by Traditional Acoustic Guitar - Digital Sheet Music

SKU: A0.1787822

I offer an arrangement of the Spiritual “We Shall Overcome” for solo fingerstyle acoustic guitar.

The Spiritual was what might almost be called an anthem for the Civil Rights Movement in the USA during the late 1950’s and 1960’s. I heard it many times on different occasions during my teenage years. Mostly being sung at rallys of some sort where Pete Seeger or Joan Baez was leading a crowd-chorus in singing the song.

I started working with the arrangement in connection with my ‘Playing with Scales’ instruction publication, where I found that when I had arrived at the highest note in a scale I could come back down the scale in descending major chords which reminded me of a sequence of chords from this Spiritual. I thought at the time that it was ironic, but also appropriate given that the scale exercises were meant to enable and enhance mastery of the fretboard of the guitar!

Although the sequence of descending major chords could be played from the highest note of any major key, I chose the key of G major for the arrangement as it offers some really nice possibilities with open string harmonics at the twelfth fret. There is also a beautiful hammering on with a C major chord from the G major chord that gives the arrangement a definite folk-blues character. When the C major chord is hammered on, the base C note of the chord gives rise to a sort of ‘ghost note’ which is barely perceptible but adds extra body to the music.

Most of the finger-picking in the arrangement is done over broken chords with the thumb alternating with the index and middle fingers, with the occasional ring finger. I give fairly extensive left and right hand fingerings to go with the tabs so that the arrangement is within reach of advanced beginners or intermediate students of fingerstyle guitar.

There are some unexpected dissonant chords in the arrangement. They add, I think, to the defiant “protest” nature of the song. Alluding to Woody Guthrie’s “This machine kills fascists” written on the face of his guitar, I would like to think that my arrangement of the song in some small way gives hope and courage in the continuing struggle against racism, bigotry, and fascism.