Aaron Jaxon breaks down Tony Rice's solo from "How Mountain Girls Can Love," dividing it into two sections with close-up hand footage and tablature. He isolates the "monster lick" in bars 8-9, a D-focused phrase that resolves to G, and shows how to play each segment slowly.
Hey there, it's Aaron Jaxon coming to you today with a little masterclass around Tony Rice's epic and classic solo to How Mountain Girls Can Love from the Tony Rice Plays and Sings Bluegrass album. I've actually plucked this lesson from my Flatpicking Mastery 2.0 program, which you can check out down in the video description. So while I have taught this solo on this channel before, this lesson is going to go into much more detail. You'll not only get the close-ups of my picking and fretting hands, but you'll get the scrolling tabs that are going to go across the screen in key places as I'm going to go through and divide this solo section section and really analyze all of the classic phrases that Tony plays in this solo. I've got everything organized into chapters and timestamped, and you can check that out down in the video description. You can also get the tabs for this solo in the video description and in the top pinned comment. Mostly, I hope that this lesson will make these classic and epic phrases, licks, and passages that Tony plays in this solo— I hope it makes it accessible to you and that you can get get these ideas under your fingers and use them in your own play. All right, let's jump into the lesson. But before I jump into the solo and teach you the solo here, let's go over just the melody and the chords to what the solo is going to be played over here. And that's just going to be the verse here to How Mountain Girls Can Love. This is an old Stanley Brothers classic. A lot of people have recorded this, but just real quick, I'll give you a verse and a chord— or just, just a verse here. So it's like 1, 2, 3, 4.
Riding the night in a high cold wind on a trail of the old lonesome pine. Thinking of you, feeling so blue, wondering why you left me behind.
And then the chorus.
Get down, boys, go back home, back to the girls you love. Treat her right, never wrong.
How many girls can love Okay, but again, this solo is just going to be played over the verse. So one more time. Chords on the verse. 1, 2, 3, 4. Okay, so just G and D here. Okay, and so, um, let's go ahead and jump into the solo. Okay, so real slow here, I'll go through the whole thing and I'll count it in here for us. So we'll go 1 and 2 and 3 Okay, okay, so a ton of great ideas in here. So much good and classic Tony Rice stuff here. So one more time, I want to take it from the beginning and we're gonna put the tabs back up on the screen and I'm going to play it from the beginning of the solo through the 9th note of bar 5. Okay, the 9th note of bar 5. So that's gonna go like this. 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and 1. Okay, so now we need to go from the 10th note of bar 5 all the way through the end of the solo. And again, I'll throw the tabs up on the screen here for you, and that's going to go like this. Okay, so many great phrases here on the second half of this solo. Okay, so one more time from the 10th note of bar 5 up to the end of that phrase.
All right.
And then we're going to end with the monster lick here. And what this is, um, it's 1 bar of D. We're playing over 1 bar of D going into G, and then he signals that it's about to go into C because we go into the chorus after that. Okay, so this last little phrase, this is just bar 8 and 9, and I'll throw the tabs back up on the screen here, and that'll go like this. Okay, also one more time. Okay, and again, all he's doing right there— we're playing over one bar of D, so this whole lick, that's all D, right? But then after that, we're back at G, and then he goes into C. So this is just a brilliant phrase here. But one more time, let me take it from the second half of this solo all the way through the end. We'll throw the tabs back up on the screen. Okay, so we're going to do 3 Okay, so before I play it up to tempo again here, let's go through the whole thing, whole thing nice and slow here for you, throwing those tabs back up on the screen. And that's going to look like this. 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and 1. Okay, so one more time, let's hear it a little more up to tempo to give it some context.
