You Are My Sunshine has been sung by grandmothers, cowboys, kindergarten teachers and a suspiciously large number of Johnny Cash impersonators. It is the kind of song everyone thinks they know until they try to play it and sing it at the same time and discover their brain has exactly one job slot available.
So this little clip cheats gloriously: instead of splitting the work between your mouth and your hands, one guitar plays the melody on top and the chords underneath, all at once. That is the whole MelodyChords idea — a fingerstyle chord-melody arrangement where the tune sings from the high strings while the harmony hums along below, and there is a full tab so you can steal the whole thing note for note.
How a MelodyChords arrangement actually works
The trick is deciding who gets the top. In a chord-melody arrangement the highest note you play is almost always the melody, so your job is to build each chord shape underneath that melody note rather than on top of it. You Are My Sunshine lives comfortably in a major key with a simple I–IV–V backbone, which means most of the harmony is friendly open chords — but the moment the tune climbs, you have to voice those same chords so the melody stays the loudest thing in the room. That usually means dropping a note or two from the full grip and letting an open string cover the bass, exactly the kind of chord-trimming I nerd out over in how to play the same chord in different ways.
Concrete takeaway: play the melody first, alone, and sing nothing. Then, for each melody note, ask which chord tone it is and slide the rest of the shape below it. Your thumb keeps a steady bass on the low strings while your fingers pluck the melody on top — pinch them together and the chord and the tune arrive in the same instant. Do that slowly with the tab and the arrangement basically builds itself, the same approach behind Can't Help Falling In Love.
Warning: once you can make one guitar sound like a whole front porch, family gatherings will never let you put the thing down again. If you want the Guitar Pro file and the original videos, that is what my Patreon is for — think of it as sunshine, but with tabs.