Lauren Bateman leads a beginner-friendly YouTube guitar lesson teaching how to play John Denver's "Country Roads." She covers simplified chord voicings (G, C, D, E minor), two strumming patterns (a basic down/down/down-up-down-up and a bass-note embellished variant), chord progression orders for verses/choruses, and bridge simplifications that avoid barre chords by using F major 7 alternatives and an optional D7. The video includes play-along sections and points learners to her website for downloadable notes.
Chapters
Hey, guitar enthusiasts, I'm going to be showing you a simplified way to play John Denver's Country Roads. This is a beginner guitar lesson, and we're going to start off with the chords. Okay. I assume you already know how to hold your guitar, tune your guitar, and are probably familiar with some of these chords. So we have a G chord. Okay. You can play that with your third finger or your pinky. We also have the C chord, we have a D chord, and we have an E minor chord. Now, if you're someone who knows my synthesis, simplified chords. The easy G chord, the easy C chord, the easy D chord, and the E minor chord. You can use those chords for this song as well.
Now, in the bridge section, there's going to be a couple of trickier chords, but I'm going to show you how you can simplify it to play it at the beginner level. So let's get into the strumming pattern next, and when we get to that bridge section, I'll let you know what we're going to do. So I'm going to show you two different strumming patterns that you can use for this song. The first one's easier. The second one has a little bit of spice to it, if you're up for a challenge. But let's start with the simple strumming pattern first. All right, so I'm going to play a G chord here, and we're going to play 1, 2, 3, and 4. And it's going to be strums. Down, down, down, up, down, up. It's going to sound like this. 1, 2. Ready? And 1, 2, 3, and 4. And 1, 2, 3, And 4. And down, down, down, up, down, up.
Now, when we applied this to the chord progression. All right, the order of chords for this song, so we have two GS, two E minors, two Ds, and a C and a G chord. So if I play that strumming pattern over the chord progression for the song, it's going to sound like this. One, two, Here we go.
Almost Heaven.
West Virginia.
Blue Ridge Mountain, Shenandoah River.
So you can hear. It's a little bit peppier than how I just played it, but it'll work great for playing through this song on the verses and the choruses. Now, if you want to add a little spice, I think this sounds really, really great on this song. And all we're going to do is we're going to take that same strumming pattern you just learned. Right? You already get the timing. 1, 2, 3, and 4. And all we're going to do is we're going to change what we're doing on that first B. So instead of doing a full down strum, I'm just going to play the lowest sounding note of the chord. So for my G chord, that's going to be this top sixth string. Okay?
So it's kind of bass. Down, down, up, down, up, bass down, down, up. So I'm letting that bass note, that low note of the chord ring out. Let me do it without talking over it. Ready? You'll hear it.
And what I'm trying to do when I'm doing this strumming pattern is I'm trying not to hit that bass note again. I'm kind of staying on the low side of the strings. So for your G chord, it's going to be the top string. All right. For the C chord, it's going to be the fifth string. If you're using the easy C chord, you would use the fourth string, D chord both ways. It's going to be the fourth string and the E minor chord is going to be that top string. So if I played through that chord progression again, this is what it's going to sound like. Now. One, two. Ready?
And life is older Older than the chord Trees.
Younger than the mountains Blowing like a breeze the great thing about.
The chorus is we're using the same four chords. They're just in a slightly different order. So we have a double G, double D, E minor and double C. And again, you can always go to my website, laurenbateman.com to get the notes for this song. I'll put a link in the description below. So before I do a playlist playthrough for you guys to practice along with, I want to talk about the bridge section. Because remember, we have those chords that we've already learned. But John does something really interesting on the bridge. He kind of changes keys. And if you don't know what that means, don't worry about it. It just means that John's bringing in some different sounding chords that we haven't used yet in other parts of the song. So it gives the bridge of a really unique and dynamic sound. So while all the other chords we've used so far are in the bridge section, we have the introduction of an F chord and a D7 chord. And every time I work with beginners, they see an F chord in a song and they go, crap, now I can't play the song. Right. Not true. I'm going to show you what you can do instead of Playing an F bar chord, what you can do is we have this great chord called F major seven, okay? F major seven. And I'm going to show you two variations and you can play whichever one is more comfortable for you. If you know a C chord, do you know the three fingered C chord? You can just move the second finger down one and the third finger down one and you have F major seven. Beautiful. Okay, so again, if you go to your C major chord, okay, the three fingered one, move your second finger down a string, your third finger down A string, and that's F major seven. It'll work perfectly fine for this section. If you would like to get a little bit more sound, if you like more of that darker sound, what you can do is go back to your three fingered C chord, okay? Move your second finger down, leave the third finger in place and put your pinky right below the third finger. So you will need to use four fingers, but you get this lower bass note which has a little bit of a warmer sound. And some people prefer to play it that way. But whether you play it this way or this way, they both work and don't require you to play a bar chord. Now, on the very end of the bridge, we kind of hang out on these D chords, okay? And one of them is the regular D chord.
And then he switches over to a D7 chord chord, which I played miserably there. D7 chord, okay? See, even I still make mistakes, guys. It's okay. So we have D7.
Very twangy sounding chord. These are like your bluesy sounding chords. Now if you've never played a D7 chord before, you could just hang out on the D chord, no problem. It's just not going to have the dynamics and tenseness of of the bridge as John intended, But it will still work. Now if you're someone who wants to play a D7 chord from the D chord, we are going to lift up our first and third fingers and bring the second finger up two strings. Third finger goes on the bottom string, second fret, and the first finger goes on the first fret of that second string. So we've basically taken our D chord and we've reversed it. So instead of the point being in the fret front, we've now moved the point to the back, okay? And you'll get that twangier sound and you'll hear when I play through the bridge, why, if you can throw the D7 in, it's awesome. But if you need to work on it, playing the regular D chord is going to be fine. So just one more time to get from the D chord to the D7. Lift up your other two fingers. Okay? Second finger to the top, second finger to the third string, second fret. The third finger comes down, second fret, first string. And then the first finger goes. Boop, right there into the first fret of the B string and you get that twangy D7. So what I'm going to do for you all now is I'm going to play the. The second verse, the second chorus, and then I'm going to go into the bridge so that you can hear all three parts of the song and play along with me. Now, if I'm going too fast, you can always use the settings cog to slow things down. But we're going to get started. And the strumming pattern I'm going to be using is the bass. Down, down, up, down, up.
Let's get started. One, two. Ready?
And all my memories.
Gather round her.
Minus lady Stranger to blue water.
Dark and dusty Painted on the sky.
Misty taste of moonshine Teardrops in my eyes country road.
Take me home.
To the place.
I belong.
West Virginia.
Mountain my mile Take me home.
On the tree roads Here comes that bridge.
I hear a voice in the morning hours she calls to me Radio reminds me of my home far away I'm driving down the road I get a feeling I should have been home yesterday.
Yesterday.
Country road.
I hope you enjoyed this. Country roads Guitar lesson for beginners. If you are looking for another beginner, Easy John Denver. Sign that. I highly recommend you go check out my Leaving on a Jet Plane tutorial right over there. We'll go through it step by step.
