No Woman No Cry Guitar Lesson – Bob Marley

About this lesson

With our guitar tutorial on No Woman No Cry, you will learn these guitar skills: Arpeggios, Open chords, Strumming without a pick.

Wow, No Woman, No Cry is one of my favorite songs and a great song to develop your guitar skills with. It uses fingerpicking, so you won’t be needing your plectrum with this piece.

You’ll be learning several chords with this guitar lesson, so it’s important that you get your chord changes fluent before you progress with the rest of the lesson, where you’ll be arpeggiating the chords and strumming them later on. You’ll learn a really funky strumming technique in this lesson, which is exciting first of all since you won’t be using a pick, second of all because it has a cool syncopated rhythm that will really advance your strumming skills. Strumming without a pick is not the easiest guitar skill, so you’ll want to spend a lot of time practicing it.

All in all, this is one of my favorite beginner guitar lessons, a great song that’ll really improve your fingerpicking and no-pick strumming skills, as well as give you a chance to practice several chords, and changing in between chords. Once you get the basics down, you’ll love playing this song.

No Woman No Cry song details

No Woman, No Cry became world-famous with its release on the 1974 studio album, Natty Dread by Bob Marley and The Wailers. The song was written by Bob Marley and Vincent Ford, who was a friend of Marley’s in Trenchtown, the ghetto of Kingston, Jamaica where Bob Marley has his roots. The song became a real crowd-pleaser at live concerts very quickly.

In Now Woman, No Cry, Bob Marley is actually singing to his wife (or another woman) in this song, and there are several versions of why and whom he’s singing to. The first is that he’s comforting his wife not to cry because of the hardships of life in Trenchtown, so with this version, the song focuses on life in the Ghettos of Jamaica. The second version is that he’s singing to his wife, who is crying because she just found out that he cheated on her. Either way, it’s an epic song.

The song has been covered by tons of popular artists, including Wyclef Jean, The Fugees, etc.

No Woman No Cry awards and chart rankings

• Rolling Stone's Magazine’s 500 Greatest Songs of All Time: #37
• Billboard Charts Top Ten

Skills you'll learn