Folsom Prison Blues Guitar Lesson Acoustic

Hey, guitar enthusiast Lauren Bateman here. And we're going to be going over a really cool song by Johnny Cash, Folsom Prison Blues. I love performing this song live with my band. It was so much fun. So let's get into how we're going to do this song. There are three chords we're using. We're going to be using an A chord, a D chord and an E chord. Just like my Walk the Line tutorial. And we're going to be doing a lot more strumming in this video. So let me just show you really briefly what we're going to do and then I'll get into how we're going to go about playing it.

All right, so you see in this version of the song that we're actually going to be cooking this pretty good. So we're going to be using a 16th note strumming pattern and we're going to be doing kind of like a play on the boom chuck pattern that I taught in my walk the line lesson. Now if you're interested in learning that kind of simplified boom chuck pattern, put a link to that below in the description to my Johnny Cash Walk the Line tutorial. You can go check that out after this video. So like I said earlier, we're going to be using three E major, A major and D major. And what we're going to be doing is we're going to be strumming really fast here. 16th note strumming pattern. 1e and a, 2e and a, 3e and a, 4e and a. The cool thing that I'm going to be doing is I'm going to be accenting a couple of these strums. This is a great way to work on dynamics. Alright, so let's talk about this 16th note straight strumming pattern. We're going to start on an E chord here and then we'll go into the chord progression and how the song is played. Basically the strumming pattern is going to be all down, up, down, up, 1E and 2E and 3E and 4E. And so we're just going to be doing down, up, down, up, down, up, down, up with our strumming hand. Nothing too crazy, and I know I played it fast in the demonstration, but we can always start it very slow and build up speed from there. And that's what I recommend. So what we're going to do, we're going to be doing that, like I said, 16 down strumming pattern. 1e and a, 2e and a 3e and a 4e. And we're going to accent all the ands. All right, so we're going to be accenting the ands, which will be a downstrom. 1e and a, 2e and a, 3e and a 4e and a. So it's down, up, down, up, down, up, down, up, down, up, down.

And how I would recommend practicing this, if you again want to work on dynamics, is to do all your other strums as quietly as you can do them.

Now, I recommend watch my strumming hand here when I do that. It's a whip. It really whips down on those. Those down strums.

So let me play a little bit faster so you can.

So you can see this whipping action that I'm referring to to get this really cool kind of accented, boom, Chucky type sound on this song. All right, so let's talk about the chord progression, because now that we have the strumming, we can actually apply that to the song. So most of the song is A major, and it's very repetitive, which a lot of songs during this time period were, which is great. So what we're going to be doing is once we get through one chord progression, we're going to just repeat that for all the other verses in the song. We start with four A chords. So that's going to be four measures of A. So you really get to hang out on that A chord. Then we've got two measures of D followed by two measures of A, two measures of E, and two measures of A. So if we were going through and we were starting.

One, two, three, four. One, two, three, Four, D, two, three, four. 1, 2, 3, 4. A, 2, 3, 4. 1, 2, 3. Then to e, e, 3, 4, to a, 2, 3, 4. One, 2, 3, 4. I think I might have cut that E just a little bit short, but we're doing two times through that strumming pattern on each of these chords. So 1e and a, 2e and a. 3e and a 4e and a. We're doing that twice per chord. I hope you guys enjoyed this Folsom Prison Blues tutorial. Don't forget to, like, comment and subscribe, and I'll see you guys in the next lesson. It.