About This Song

Big Country is an instrumental by banjo player Béla Fleck. It comes from the album Left of Cool by Béla Fleck and the Flecktones, which came out in 1998. On the Live at the Quick DVD, Fleck tells how the melody came to him and he called his answering machine and sang it so it would not be lost. Many players also know the long live version on Live at the Quick, released in 2002.

Count carefully in the chart above. The A part opens with E, A, E and G#m, and each is written as a six-beat bar. The part runs 11 bars and ends on two held bars of E. The B part is 9 bars long. It moves between C#m and G#m, climbs through B and finishes on two bars of A, so it doesn't land back home on E. The G#m (iii) shows up in both parts, and many bars change chord halfway through.