In this instructional YouTube lesson, Aaron Jaxon presents and teaches a seminal bluegrass flat‑picking guitar solo by David Grier from the Bill Monroe classic "Molly and Tenbrooks." He begins by framing the solo as a must‑learn piece for any aspiring bluegrass guitarist, likening it to the essential blues solos cited by Rick Beato. Jaxon explains the solo’s source—a 1990s compilation of Bill Monroe tunes featuring Grier’s rare guitar break on a traditional vocal song—and provides a brief demonstration of the tune’s basic melody and chord progression, noting the use of a capo on the 3rd fret (B‑flat) and the flexibility to play in other keys. He then walks through the solo slowly, highlighting key techniques: all‑downstroke picking for power, cross‑picking across the 5th‑to‑1st strings, slides from the 2nd to 4th fret, a D9‑style passage, hammer‑ons, and the characteristic jazz‑swing feel. Jaxon offers practical picking advice—keeping the wrist loose yet controlled to avoid tension—and suggests incorporating the D9 slide motif into a guitarist’s vocabulary for use over G‑C‑D progressions. Throughout, he points viewers to downloadable tabs and a backing track in the video description and pinned comment, invites suggestions for other Grier vocal‑tune breaks, and encourages further study of classic bluegrass solos. The lesson blends musical demonstration, technical analysis, and pedagogical tips to equip learners with both the specific solo and broader stylistic tools.
Chapters
Today I'm going to show you one of my very favorite David Greer bluegrass guitar solos. I think this solo should be required learning for anybody getting into this style or anybody wanting to get better at it. Stick around to learn this amazing guitar break. Hey there, it's Aaron Jaxon coming to you today, so I'm very excited to share this lesson with you today. So a while back I was watching Rick Beato's channel and he was interviewing one of my other favorite players, Joe Bonamassa, and he was asking Joe, he was like, Joe, what are like the required, you know, solos or ideas that people need to learn if they're really wanting to get into blues? And he went through and, you know, he talked about B.B. King and Albert King and Paul Kossoff from Free and, you know, Jimi Hendrix and Stevie Ray Vaughan. He just kind of named some of these specific ones that he thinks would be great for students of blues. Now, in my opinion, what I'm going to show you today is absolutely required learning for students of bluegrass guitar. So I'm going to be showing you a David Greer guitar break to the classic Bill Monroe tune Molly and Tin Brooks. Now, this comes from a compilation album. I think it came out sometime in the '90s, and it's just got just a bunch of different amazing bluegrass musicians playing the songs of Bill Monroe. And so that compilation album kicks off with Molly and Tin Brooks, and it has David Greer on it. Now, this solo is kind of special because we actually don't have a whole, whole lot of recordings where David plays guitar breaks to these old classic vocal bluegrass tunes. He does a lot of instrumental stuff. I mean, he kind of shines the best when he's playing his own original tunes, and he has a whole album of fiddle tunes called I've Got the House to Myself that is all incredible, incredible, incredible bluegrass flatpicking guitar work. He's just an amazing player and one of the best people that you can listen to and study in this style. But we don't have a whole lot of him playing guitar breaks on these traditional vocal tunes, but we do have this one, and that's what I want to show you today here. As always, you can get the tabs for this lesson down in the video description and in the top pinned comment. Real quick, so this tune is Molly and Tin Brooks. Um, if you're a fan of bluegrass and you've been listening to it for a while, you'll no doubt be familiar with this tune, but just in case you're not, if you will permit me to just play the chords and sing a verse of it here for you, that way you can get an idea for what we're working with here. So it's going to go like this. We'll do, uh, 1, 2, 3.
Run, oh Molly, run, run, oh Molly, run. Tin Roof's gonna beat you to the bright shining sun, to the bright shining sun, Lord, the bright shining sun.
There we go. Okay, so, um, that melody— okay, that's our basic melody here, and the chords just 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, And on this version, um, it is out of B-flat, so I've got the capo on the 3rd fret here. But you can play, you know, you can play this tune in any key. You can take the capo off, play it out of G, move it up, play it out of B, however you want to do it. So anyway, that is enough rambling for me. Let me go through, and what I want to do is just go through the whole solo nice and slow here for you, and that is going to sound like this. Okay, so fairly short, um, and it's, it's pretty simple, but there's some really cool ideas contained in here. So at the beginning on this little— so for that little part right there, I like to just use all downstrokes. You could alternate pick that if you want.
You could do—
but to me it sounds just a little bit more powerful if you do that with all downstrokes. Okay, so one more time, that first little phrase here. Okay, and then we'll go into this next part.
So we've got—
okay, so that first phrase one more time here. And now we're gonna do— so again, our melody, um, run, oh Molly, run, Timbrook's gonna meet you. And so what he's playing over that Okay, so again, it's, it's not like a simplistic melody. He's not just— but he's nodding to it in certain places while playing around it, almost in, you know, the way that like a banjo player would.
Okay, we'll keep going here.
So that little part—
Tin Roof's gonna meet you.
Okay, um, I think he picks all of that.
You could do like a hammer-on if you wanted 2.
Okay, so before we go on here, let's just take it from the beginning of the solo up until that point.
So we'll do—
okay, and then we'll do—
okay. We'll do—
okay, so what he's doing right there, because it goes to a quick little—
and he's doing—
so we're sliding from this, again speaking relative to the capo, the 2nd to the 4th fret, and then kind of going into this little like D9, and then the bright shining sun.
Okay, see how cool that is? To the bright shining sun.
I love that. And that little— I would recommend taking that little passage and adding that to your vocabulary because it's, it's great because you can use that over any bluegrass solo. Like if you're doing G, C, and D, or G shape, G shape, C shape, and D shape, and you get to the D shape there, you can throw that in so many places. You can do it in Nine Pound Hammer like, um, And it gives it just a touch, just a little bit of like a jazz swing feel. Anyway, great little— and then from there we'll do—
okay, in the melody there. To the bright shining sun, Lord, to the bright shining sun.
Okay, see how cool that is? And, and it's got all of these elements that David is so well known for— the cross picking and these like little slides. All of that great stuff. That's why, in my opinion, I mean, you know, David's one of the most influential players in this style, and this, this solo just has so many of his classic elements in it there. But so one more time here, let me go through, uh, just the whole thing nice and slow here for you. Okay, so again, so many cool things happening in that solo. Which, by the way, if you want your favorite new picking exercise, there it is. And the reason is we're cross-picking from the, from the 5th string through the 1st. We're doing straight alternate picking, but we're doing it across adjacent strings. And where that's such a kind of a wide range we go from like, you know, not the lowest string but the next to lowest string to the highest string. In order to play that cleanly, you can't have tension in your picking hand. You can't be like— it's just not going to work. So you've got to keep— you got to keep that tension, that wrist nice and loose. I mean, still enough, um, tight enough for it to be accurate but loose enough to play it cleanly. And that's a fine line that kind of all of us struggle with, I think. But that little passage is great for working on that.
All right, and then that little—
I love that last little— Okay, so one more time, let's hear that solo upped tempo and with a backing track. Okay, so again, one of my absolute favorite, um, David Greer solos. And we actually don't have a whole, whole lot of these where he's playing, you know, this kind of a guitar break on like a traditional kind of Bill Monroe vocal tune. We have a lot of recordings of him playing amazing instrumental stuff, but there's not a whole lot of these kinds of breaks on these kind of traditional vocal tunes. Which, by the way, if any of y'all know of any that I should check out, feel free to let me know in the comments, and I'll check those out and maybe try to do some lessons on those in the future. So I want to thank you so much for hanging out. Remember that you can get the tabs for this lesson in the video description and in the top pinned comment. Check out some of these other videos for some classic solos, some classic guitar breaks that you need to know that are great for developing your vocabulary and your repertoire in this style. As always, thank you for hanging out, and I will see you next time.
