Greensleeves is roughly 500 years old, which means people were nursing dramatic heartbreak over lutes long before anyone invented the sad Instagram story. And yet here it is, still the melody your brain hums the second autumn arrives and someone lights a candle that smells like regret.
This is a one-minute MelodyChords arrangement of the old English folk song for solo fingerstyle guitar — the melody sung by the top notes while the harmony quietly holds everything together underneath. One guitar, no backing track, and full tabs so you can be melancholic in the correct key.
How this chord-melody arrangement works
The trick behind MelodyChords is voice separation: your thumb plays the bass, your fingers hold the inner harmony, and the highest note is always the tune itself. Keep the melody notes slightly louder than everything below them and the illusion holds — one guitar suddenly sounds like a little three-part choir. The concrete takeaway: practise the top-line melody completely alone first, so your ear knows exactly which note must ring loudest before you add the chords under it.
The other reason Greensleeves refuses to age is its harmony. It lives mostly in A minor but keeps borrowing a raised leading tone (G#) to build an E major chord — a proper dominant that yearns back home. That's the same pull you get from harmonic minor, and it's why the tune sounds simultaneously sad and hopeful. All of it rides on a lilting 6/8 feel, so count in two big pulses of three, not a stiff one-two-three-four.
Play it slowly, let it breathe, and if someone in your household mysteriously starts crying — that's Tudor songwriting doing its job across five centuries. Want the Guitar Pro file and the original video? It's all on my Patreon.