How to Play ’Sweet Little Sixteen ’ - Chuck Berry - Play Along Lesson - Jez Quayle

This great Chuck Berry song -- about a female, teenage rock ’n’ roll fanatic -- is presented with the full lyrics, chords, and instruction on how to play Chuck’s intro lick, so you can play or sing along with me and learn how to perform this great tune. A song sheet containing the full lyrics and chords can be viewed or downloaded from my songbook blog here: Rock ’n’ roll songs like this are pretty easy to play: just three, easy chords (D, G and A in this case) ...or four chords, if you count the D7 I throw in at one point (but you don’t have to). As I say in the video, you could play this song in a number of different ways. On this occasion I use the Chuck Berry style riff I teach in my tutorial #2: (), but its also sounds good with plain open chords, or using the rock and roll chord riffs I teach in my tutorials #1 () and #4: () Unlike most early rock and roll songs, this song doesn’t use a 12-bar blues chord progression, but a more country style, ’three chord trick’. Watch out for the stops that appear in the verses! ’Sweet Little Sixteen’ was originally released in 1958. A few years later, The Beach Boys borrowed (or you might say ’stole’) the melody for their song ’Surfin’ USA’. Rolling Stone magazine ranked the song number 272 on its list of the “500 Greatest Songs of All Time“ in 2004.