Born On The Bayou by Creedence Clearwater Revival


Alright, here is the main riff for Born on the Bayou, and we’re going to be forming a chord here that we can use pretty much throughout 90% of the song. Your third finger on the seventh fret of that A-string, your second finger on the sixth fret of the D, your fourth finger on the seventh fret of the G, and your first finger fifth fret of the B-string.

A lot of the song is using that chord. We might have a couple of extra chords that are thrown in, but they’re really just passing. Really, much of the song is done over this chord.

How To Play It

Now in the intro, we’re not going to strum, we’re going to arpeggiate this chord out. When we begin you want to get that chord kind of form. We’ll slide up from the second fret to the seventh fret, and then we’ve already got the chord formed, so we’re ready to roll.

So we’re going to slide up from second to the seventh fret. And then we begin to pick this. The picking pattern is pretty similar throughout. You see here, we hit both notes, and here’s we’ll just hit one note, instead of both notes at the same time, but the idea is really kind of similar. So you can either just the B-string or you can hit a combination of B and G there. But the idea is kind of like this, where you hit the A-string, D-string, B, and then G.

Then there were two measures that kind of reset the riff, by starting out on that A-string. And then, as the song progresses we revert to a kind of strum, a basic strum. We’ll cover that in our next lesson. But that’s how the intro is played, arpeggiated. There’s something you can play around with but that is a general idea. So that is the main riff for Born on the Bayou, thanks for watching!

Born On The Bayou Tab

Download the full transcription to “Born On The Bayou”:

Born On The Bayou