Learn "Jukebox Money": a country number on the train two-step, taught as a whole song

What the song is. "Jukebox Money" is an original country number on the train beat, written for this course in the way the psychobilly course's catalog describes the Reverend Horton Heat's patter songs. No record was heard for it and no line of one is in it (see How this was made).^[1]

KeyA, at the nutTempo148 bpm, straightTime4/4Length62 barsWords3 verses, 1 chorus

The words are a man's case that the tears are the jukebox's, not his; the last verse lets the joke drop.

• You need: standard tuning, a flatpick with the middle finger free behind it for the pops, a clean bright tone and a slapback if there is one.
• You should already have: the open A, D, E7 and B7 grips, palm muting, hammer-ons and pull-offs, a whole-step bend, and reading tab.
• If the fills are new: from lesson 6 on, every section's card has an easy tab above it — the same bars with the boom-chick alone, the song's own figure — and so does the whole song's in lesson 11. Play the course through on those first, then as written.

The form. Nine sections, sixty-two bars, in this order:^[4]

the guitar alone — the kickoff, the solo, the ending   the boom-chick and the fills under the singer   ·   the numbers are the chords' places in the key of A

The verse is eight bars, the chorus eight with the II7 — the B7, whose D♯ is the one note outside A major in the song — and every verse and chorus alternates a bar of the boom-chick under the singer with a full bar of fill. The verse and the chorus are presets under Psychobilly in the Jam tab.

Tone and style. One guitar, two hands, over the train band:^{[1] [3]}

• The band: the kick on one and three, the brushes in sixteenths on the snare with the backbeat struck, the bass on root and 5th in two with a slap on the backbeats.
• The muted hand: the boom-chick — the heel on the strings by the bridge, the bass note thudding, the chick clicking.
• The ringing hand: the fills and the solo — the heel off, the notes popped by the middle finger behind the pick, short and dry.
• The switch between them, bar by bar, is the thing to practise. Slapback on everything.

The model, and the idiom. The psychobilly course's catalog puts the Reverend's country patter songs on the train two-step — "Bales of Cocaine", "the only English-language equivalent to narcotraficante corridas", at 148 bpm, and "Lonesome Train Whistle" — with Luther Perkins' Cash figure under them.^[1] This song is of that kind: a deadpan story at speed over the boom-chick, the fills answering the lines. It was drafted in the jam and a draft player first, and the owner shaped it there:^[4]

• It began as a honky-tonk shuffle at 132 bpm; the owner moved it to straight eighths, and it landed on this feel at the models' tempo.
• The owner supplied a tab image of the Reverend's sixteenth-note fills, read for its devices only.^[2]
• Two cuts from the owner's ears bind every written bar: no slur inside one sixteenth slot (it prints and plays as 32nd notes), and no 6ths climbing in parallel — a 6th is a single stab.
• On 19 September 2026 the owner called the A fill's steel bend impossible where the run leaves the hand and had it replaced by the unison bend, and had the solo redone on the fills' own devices with no scale runs.^[6]

The idiom, device by device — every one is in the song, and the notes and their order are this song's own:^{[1] [3]}

The boom-chick. The muted hand's job, the figure under every chord bar of the song.^{[1] [3]} One bar on A:

	1	&	2	&	3	&	4	&
Play	the low A	chick	echo		the low E	chick	echo
Strings	A string	G, B, e	G, B, e, lighter		low E	G, B, e	G, B, e, lighter
Stroke	↓ heel on	↓ short	↓ short		↓ heel on	↓ short	↓ short
Band	kick	brushes	snare, slap	brushes	kick	brushes	snare, slap	brushes

• The bass note thuds: the heel of the picking hand on the strings by the bridge, so it keeps its pitch and loses its ring.
• The chick is one short downstroke through the top three strings of the grip, the fret hand's pressure lifted a hair as the pick lands, so it clicks; the echo after it is lighter — "boom-chick-a".
• The 5th on three is the string below the root: the low E under the A, the open A under the D, the B under the E7.

The chicken pickin'. The ringing hand's job is the opposite of the boom-chick's: the heel off, the notes popped, everything from one box at the nut.^{[1] [3]}

• The pop: the middle finger, behind the pick, pulls the string up and lets it slap back — short and dry. The pops sit on the tops of the phrases and are marked in the tab.
• The pull-off: the C♯ on the B string's 2nd fret picked and the finger flicked off, so the open B carries the second sixteenth; only the first note is picked. Never inside one sixteenth slot: a slur is two sixteenths.
• The box: A major pentatonic on the top strings, the ♭3 hammered through and the ♭7 popped, drawn below. The two A fills come straight out of it.

The grips. Four open chords, and the chick alone:

• The verse: A, D, E7.
• The chorus: B7, the II7 — the Ray Price lift — the one new grip.
• The sign-off: the open A6, the only ringing chord in the song.

Every grip is played the same way under the singer: the bass note on the beat, the top three strings chicked on the "and". A line under each diagram says which strings the bass alternates on.

The two forms. The chords under the singer, bar by bar, with the fill that answers each:

The two cards below are the verse's and the chorus's changes with the boom-chick in every bar and no fills — deterministic, the same every time. They come back as the easy tabs of the verse and the chorus.

The four fills. Each fill is one bar, written note for note, and each is drilled after a full bar of the boom-chick, the way the song plays it — the chord bar, then the fill:

The A fill's bar, a cell a sixteenth:

The unison bend. The A fill's run ends on the high e's 5th fret under the pinky. The bend that follows was the steel bend — the G string's 4th fret bent to the C♯ under the open e — two strings away from where the run left the hand, mid-beat at 148 bpm; the owner called it impossible, and it became the unison bend:^[6]

The kickoff. Four bars before the singer, the guitar alone in front:

The runs and the walks live on the bass strings, drawn below: the run up from the A to the octave, the G, G♯ walk into every A, the sign-off's E, F♯, G♯, A.

The verse. The song's habit at full length: the singer patters a line in every odd bar over the boom-chick, and a fill answers in every even one. Two bars a row:

The singer's line is a patter, not a melody — a syllable a sixteenth on one or two notes with the blue ♭3 for colour, each line inside its chord bar, the fills answering. Over the A it sits on the root with the ♭3 leaned on; over the D it rides the D and falls to the A; over the E7 it ends low on the E; the last line climbs through the 5th and comes home. It is one note to a syllable in a baritone's range, D3 to F♯4 (a woman sings it an octave up); each verse to its own words.

The chorus. The same call and answer until the hook needs the room:

The B7 bar holds the D♯ under "somebody else's name" — the II7's own note, the one outside the key. The hook runs over the last two bars — "I'm just listening to my change" — with the scoop up a whole step on "change", and the tag bar walks G, G♯ back to the A.

The ending. Two bars after the last chorus:

The sign-off is the band out: E, F♯, G♯, A walked up the bass strings, muted, and the open A6 — the index laid across the 2nd fret — struck on three and held, ringing, the only unmuted chord in the song.

The solo, and its three figures. Eight bars over the verse's changes in the open position, all chicken pickin', on the fills' own devices grown one size — and none of the other songs' solos': no box up the neck, no tremolo, no scale runs.^[6] Three figures of its own, each heard more than once:

The roll — A, B, E, B on the G string's 2nd fret, the open B, the open e and the open B, in sixteenths: two fretted notes and two open, the banjo roll the country players borrowed:

The cluck — the pop alternating two strings next to each other, four sixteenths, the second and fourth lighter; over the D on the 3rd and the root:

The cascade — the 6th, the 3rd and the root each pulled off to the open string under it, one after another, down to the walk into the next verse:

Between the figures come the fills' own marks: the pull-offs to the open B, the unison bend twice, the 6th stabbed, the hammer, the pops. Bar by bar:

The owner's two rules hold in every bar: no slur inside one sixteenth slot, and no 6ths climbing in parallel — the 6th in bar 3 is struck twice on the same pair, not walked.

Three ways through the song. All sixty-two bars are on one card, in order, the same every time. Take it three ways:

1. Listen first, with the guitar up, until the form is in your ear.
2. Play along with the band and the guitar, a section at a time with the looper, up the ladder 112124136148 bpm.
3. Play it yourself with the guitar part silent and the band and the singer up, so every bar is yours.

Loop the one section that is not clean rather than the whole song; the switch between the hands at every bar line is the usual one.

How to make a song in this style. This lesson is six assignments, each played with the band, and each says exactly what to play. They draw on the six habits a song in this style is made of:

1. One bar of chords, one bar of fill: the boom-chick under the singer, the answer ringing in the next bar, the heel on and off in turn.
2. The fills are one box: A major pentatonic at the nut with the ♭3 hammered through and the ♭7 popped, the pops on the tops of the phrases.
3. A walk into every change: G, G♯ up the low E into the A; the bass leading B, C♯ into the D.
4. The bend is a unison: the D pushed to the E under the open e, where the run leaves the hand.
5. A solo is the fills grown one size, on figures that stay put — the roll, the cluck, the cascade — with no scale runs, no slur inside a sixteenth, no 6ths in a row.
6. The words patter a syllable a sixteenth inside the chord bar and leave the fill bar to the guitar; the song moves keys with the same shapes a string over.

Every card in the assignments is the song's own bars — the verse, the box, the solo and its figures — with some bars left to you, and the verse in E below. The assignments say what to do with them.

The terms. The words this course uses, one line each:

• The boom-chick is Luther Perkins' figure: the bass note on the beat under the heel, the muted chord — the chick — on the "and" with its lighter echo, the 5th on the next beat.
• The heel is the side of the picking hand resting on the strings by the bridge, the tab's "x".
• Chicken pickin' is the ringing hand: the notes popped — snapped by the middle finger from under the pick — the 2nd pulled off to the open string, the ♭3 hammered to the 3rd.
• A fill is the one bar the guitar answers a sung line with; the turnaround is the fill on the form's last bar that leads into the next section.
• The unison bend is a fretted note pushed up to the pitch of the open string beside it, both ringing: the D to the E under the open e.
• The 6th, stabbed is one pair — the note and the 6th under it — struck once and held, never walked.
• A walk is two muted eighths up the bass string into the next chord's root: G, G♯ into the A.
• The roll is A, B, E, B in sixteenths — two fretted notes and two open — the banjo's roll on a guitar.
• The cluck is the pop alternating two strings next to each other, four sixteenths.
• The cascade is three pull-offs in a row, each to the open string under it: e, B, G.
• The kickoff is the four bars the guitar plays alone before the singer; the sign-off is the walk into the A6 with the band out.
• The patter is the singer's line: a syllable a sixteenth on one or two notes, inside its chord bar.
• A box is the frets one hand position covers, and the notes of the scale inside it.
• I, IV, V7, II7 name chords by their place in the key: in A they are A, D, E7 and B7.

The song was written the way every part in this app is written (docs/STYLES.md), the course the way the courses are (docs/COURSES.md), and the prose to docs/WRITING.md.

• Every bar is written note by note in the data module's event language — the kickoff, the verses and choruses with their fills, the solo, the ending, and the boom-chick bars of the easy tabs. Every card is the song's own bars, the same every time it is opened: before 19 September 2026 the plain verse, the two changes cards, the mixed verse and the "your bars" study were the psychobilly course's train part realized by the engine from a seed; now nothing on the page is the engine's invention.
• The solo was redone on 19 September 2026: the runs down the box gone, three figures that stay put in their place — the roll, the cluck and the cascade — with the fills' own marks kept where they were. The bar-by-bar record of what changed, and the bend's, is in docs/JUKEBOX-RESEARCH.md §3.
• The singer's line is written the same way, a syllable a note of each verse's words (the other verses fitted to their own counts by the shared rule, sing in js/dive-realize.js), in a baritone's range, D3 to F♯4. The engine's voice sings it — a tone with no words — on a bus of its own, and the appendix draws it as tab.
• The data has no DOM in it (js/jukebox-guide-data.js), so node tools/dive-check.js jukebox --print realizes every card as the page does. Every card was read that way against the research: every note in the open position, every slur two sixteenths, every 6th a single stab, the unison bend where the steel bend was, the three figures where the solo has them, and the sixty-two bars in order, stitched from the section cards.
• A test loads the page in a frame and holds all of it, and the course's shape. It was broken on purpose once and seen to fail.

The sound is the app's own recorded guitar and synthesized band. Tempos are the song's.