Lauren Bateman teaches a simplified way to play You Are My Sunshine using just three chords: G, C, and an easier F built from a C-shape. She shows two strumming patterns, straight and country-style, then walks through the full progression.
Questions this video answers
An "F sharp major 7" voiced as an open variant derived from the three-string C shape: keep first and third fingers in place, place the pinky below the third finger, and move the second finger down to the 3rd string, 2nd fret.
G C, F C, F C, G C (the same progression repeats for the whole song).
Chapters
You are my sunshine, My only sunshine. You make me happy.
Alright, so I'm going to show you an easier way to play you are my sunshine. And I know some of you are probably saying, well, Lauren, it looks like this song has an F chord in it, but I'm going to show you how to play an easier version of the F chord if you guys want to play this song.
So before we get into the strumming pattern, let's go over how we're going to simplify this F chord. And if you guys don't know me, my name is Lauren Bateman and I make the guitar make sense. And I take things that are sometimes difficult and I make them easy for you so that you can have fun on the guitar. Because that's the most important part is have fun. So there's a couple ways to go about this F chord. If you do know a bar chord, go right ahead and play a full F bar chord. But if you're someone who maybe only knows your C and G chord, I'm going to show you how to play what we call an F sharp major 7 chord, which works really well. So if we take our C chord, okay, our three string C chord here, what I'm going to have you do, I'm going to have you leave your first and third fingers in the same position. So if you look at my fingers, the third finger is going to stay. I'm going to take my pinky and my pinky is going to go right below the third finger and I'm going to take my second finger and move it down one string. So the second finger is going to the third string, second, second fret. So it looks like this and it sounds like this. It's a little bit more of an open chord versus full F bar chord. So if you look at the transition back to a C chord, it's pretty easy. You're going to lift up your pinky, okay. And you're just going to move your second finger up. Okay? Pinky down, second finger down. Pinky up, second finger up.
So if this is a new movement for you might want to take a second and pause the video to try. Practice going between that C chord and that F major 7 chord. And of course the last chord is an open G chord. I like playing mine with the third finger on the bottom. But if you like playing with the pinky on the bottom, that's totally fine as well. So I'm going to show you a couple different strumming patterns you can use for this one is more Just a straight pattern. And the other is a little bit more of like a country stylized pattern. Okay. If you want to do it kind of in the vein of almost like J. Okay. So we're going to start off with our C chord. And what I would do, I would just go 1, 2, and 3 and 4. And 1, 2, and 3 and four.
Down, down, up, down, up, down, up.
Down, down, up, down, up, down, up.
So if we apply this over the chord progression of the song and the chord progression is the same for the entire entire song, it's going to sound like this. It's going to be gc, fc, FC gc. So we go and C.
C.
F.
C.
F.
C.
G.
C.
So what we're going to do is we're going to be accenting some bass lines here. Okay. And not really bass lines. We're just going to be accenting the lowest note of each chord. So for your C chord, it would be the fifth string. For your F chord, it's also going to be that fifth string. So we're not going to have a lot of movement in our bass line here. If you play the full bar chord, it's going to be the top string. And then the same for the G, it'll be that top string. So what's it going to sound like? It's going to be bass note and then strum down.
Okay. So 1 and 2, 2 and 3 and 4. And.
Now if we go to The F major 7.
Back to C.
Okay. And then the G chord would be top string.
And C.
You are my sunshine, My only lovely sunshine. You make me happy when skies are gray. You'll never know, dear, how much I love you.
Please don't take my sunshine away.
Hope you guys enjoyed this guitar lesson. If you're looking to apply more of this bass drum style pattern, then go check out my Johnny Cash walk the line lesson right over there where we're going to be applying this to the A, D and E chords. I'll see you in the lesson.
