Sweet Home Alabama Guitar Lesson – Lynyrd Skynyrd

About this lesson

With our guitar tutorial on Sweet Home Alabama, you will learn these guitar skills: Hammer-ons, Open chords, Pull-offs, String bending.

Sweet Home Alabama is an immensely popular song that people love listening to, so they’ll love listening to you playing it. This lesson will also improve your lead guitar technique since you’ll be using single-string plucking to play the song. It’s based on a D - C9 - G chord progression, so chords you’ll most likely be familiar with already.

The most difficult part of this song is probably the hammer-on, pull-off sections, you’ll need to practice those for a while if you haven’t been playing the guitar for too long, but consequently, it will give you a great chance to practice these techniques. Don’t worry though, it’s easier than it seems, the point is to keep on practicing, and your skills will improve with time.

So to sum it up, the Sweet Home Alabama guitar lesson will give you a chance to develop a wide array of lead guitar techniques, which you’ll be using later on in tons of other songs, and with time, in improvised licks. Once you're finished with this song, have a go at another one of our guitar lessons for beginners.

Sweet Home Alabama song details

Sweet Home Alabama was released by Lynyrd Skynyrd in 1974 on their second album, Second Helping. Few people know that the band’s name inspired by a gym teacher the founders had in high school, Leonard Skinner.

The song deals with racial segregation, so it was pretty controversial at the time of release. As of 2009, the U.S. state of Alabama has actually started using the phrase "Sweet Home Alabama" on vehicle license plates, as an official slogan of the state. The funny thing is that none of the three writers of the song were originally from Alabama.

The song has been covered by several musical artists and used in many commercials and movies since its release.

 Sweet Home Alabama awards and chart rankings

• US Top 100: #8 (1974)
• National Review  - 50 greatest conservative rock songs : #4
• County Music Television - 20 Greatest Southern Rock songs: #1
• Rolling Stone's Magazines list of The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time: #398

Skills you'll learn