Chords for Son Of A Son Of A Sailor Acoustic Guitar Lesson - Jimmy Buffett

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[F] _ _ [C] _ _ [G] _ _ _ _
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[F] _ _ [C] _ _ [G] _ _ _
As the son of a son of a sailor I [F] came out [C] on the sea [G] for adventure _ _
_ [C] Expanding the view [G] of the captain and crew [D] Like a man just released from a _ [G] denture
As a dreamer of dreams and a traveling man I [F] have chalked [Em] up many [G] a mile _
[C] Read dozens of [G] books about heroes and crooks And I [D] learned much from [G] both of their stymies _ _
[F] Son of a son, _ [C] son of a son [D] Son of a son [G] of a sailor _
Son of a gun, [D] load the last gun One [G] step ahead of the jailer _ _
_ _ _ _ Another _ [E] fun Jimmy Buffett song to sing, Son of a Son of a Sailor.
Now this was his follow up album to his really big hit album in 1977, Changes in Latitudes.
This was a course called Son of a Son of a Sailor.
And like a lot of his songs, it's got a fairly basic chord progression,
but with just one or two really interesting things that we can do [Eb] to dress it up.
So the picking on this, what we're going to do in this lesson is play it with a flat pick,
and it's mostly arpeggios, keeping a steady down up down up pattern [B] going.
We're hitting down on the beats and up on the ands, and just picking out a _ _ series of notes
on every chord.
It's mostly in the key of G, but does have some F chords in there.
We'll talk about that, what _ is going on with the mixolydian mode.
We'll probably get to that.
But mostly going to work [G] on keeping a steady alternating pattern,
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and hitting the strings cleanly, or adding in a little bit of strumming. _ _ _ _ _ _
[D] So sometimes what I call focused [N] strumming, but this is a little bit more focused picking.
And then the intro.
Now they do this on a 12 string, well with a couple of guitars,
but as you heard me play there a second ago, we can kind of [G] hint at what it does. _
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[C] _ _ _ [G] _ _ _ So that's [N] all stuff we'll be taking a look at in this lesson.
Just run through the chord progression.
I'm going to _ recommend that you be sure to listen
to the album to get all the singing parts down, and get the phrasing the way Jimmy does it right there.
But there's of course an attachment of tablature that has the picking the way we're going to be
working on it, and then of course another attachment that is the chart with the chords
at the top, the words at the bottom.
And we will be working on Son of a Son of a Sailor. _ _
_ _ _ _ _ I want to talk a little bit about the chord progression to Son of a Son of a Sailor,
because it's on one hand it's really basic, really simple, uses three chords in a major key.
But it actually uses a fourth chord that is not in the major key,
and that kind of gives us [F] a hint at the mixolydian mode.
So we're in the key of G.
[D] The G scale is G, A, B, [E] C, D, [Gb] E, F sharp, [G] _ and G.
Chords numbers 1, 4, and 5 in that key would of course be G, [C] 4 would be C, and 5 would be D. _ _ _ _
_ _ _ _ Chords we're going to use in Son of a Son of a Sailor are pretty basic.
We're going to play a lot of G chords with just our second, third, and fourth fingers.
And most of the [Gb] time in this song I prefer to use the little F's,
played with a partial bar across the first and second strings,
and your second finger on the third string, your third [F] finger on the fourth string. _
_ And that's [G] because I like the sound of our G chord going [F] up to an F in the bass,
[G] rather than down to an F in the [G] bass. _ _ _
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_ _ _ _ _ _ [N] This is one of the standard strums we use in all kinds of songs.
I sometimes refer to it as the folk strum.
Down, down, up, up, down, up.
The whole song could be played [G] with that. _ _ _ _
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[G] _ _ _ [N] But what I like to have people do in here is work on a single string arpeggio technique,
where keeping the exact same motion with your hand, you're hitting just one string at a time.
So rather than [G] this, down, down, up, up, down, up,
every one of those strokes is only going to be one string. _
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So I'm going to go down first [D] on the sixth string, up on the fourth string.
I'm playing a G chord.
Down on the third string, and then up on the second string.
At that point I'm going to miss the next down,
and then I'm going to come back with three more eighth notes.
Up on the third string, [D] down on the fourth string,
and [Gm] _
possibly another up on the third string.
Now the last two strokes could be [G] light brushes. _ _
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_ _ [N] Let's take a look at the tablature and the chord chart.
Not necessarily as important to have the chord chart right now,
but because we're going to just kind of sort of walk through every measure.
The introduction, what we hear on the original recording,
is really a couple of guitars, one of which is a 12-string guitar.
So we hear a lot of notes, and the best thing we can do to
_ come close to duplicating that sound is by breaking up our [G] chord,
because we really need to hear this high D.
There's a few things you could do to get this.
We could play it as a harmonic on the fifth fret of the fourth string,
[Bb] but I really like the [Bm] ringing sound up here,
[E] because I'd like to play the second string along with it.
So if you look at the first measure of the tab,
_ play that G in the bass [G] with your first finger.
That'll let you keep it, that'll give you the best shot
at getting up to the tenth fret with as little delay as possible,
because what you're trying to do is hang [N] on to that G in the bass as long as [G] possible.
You don't want to do this and cut it off like that.
You want it to ring at least through the next two notes,
if possible, until you've hit that third eighth note as a down. _
Go, _ _ and then move very quickly.
Don't come up here and play it with your first finger.
That was way too much [N] trouble.
My hand had to travel this far.
I'm going to start with my first finger on the low G,
[Bm] but when I come up to the high D, [B] I'm going to use my little finger,
so my hand really only has to move [G] a little distance. _ _
_ And catch that note as an up, just let it [G] ring.
Then we're going to drop into the second measure, back to the eighth fret. _ _ _
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_ I'm going to slow it down, play it with the metronome.
I'm not going to worry about singing it.
You can listen to the album to get how all the words fit together and stuff,
but I just want to try to get the picking as exactly as I can,
even though that's not important.
In the way I have it written out in the tab, I've got the metronome set at [Ab] 72,
and I'm just going to follow along with the music and hope I can get it right.
Let's see what happens.
Two, three, [G] four. _ _ _ _ _ _
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[F] _ _ [E] _ _ [C] _ _ [G] _ _
_ _ _ Next line. _ _
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