Tonight I’m sharing a transcription of Nancy Blake’s marvelous tune, Hangin’ Dog. I remember the first time I heard Norman & Nancy perform this tune in a video I discovered on YouTube … I was blown away! I was a newbie to the mandolin, and I thought, wow! if I could learn to play like that I’d be stoked.
Well, I can’t play like the Blakes, but I soon set out to learn and transcribe this tune. It was the first mandolin tune I set my hand to transcribing, after I’d learned to hack out a few fiddle tunes on the mandolin. Once I learned it, I used it to monitor my own mandolin progress to see if I could someday get some musicality out of the instrument.
I still have a long way to go. But now I have this cool website to use to share lessons, transcriptions, etc. So this will be the first full tune transcription I add here, which is fitting as it was my first tune to transcribe for myself on the mandolin. If you haven’t heard the original, you need to hear it. I am going to link it at the end of this lesson.
Here is my 2017 rendition of it, and below that are the notation, tabs and abc file of my transcription.
Practice Performance, 2017
Download Sheets
Watch the Masterful Nancy Blake, backed by Norman
