Johnny Cash & June Carter Cash
Jackson chords
Jackson by Johnny Cash & June Carter Cash is a beginner song in Db, played with a capo on fret 1. The whole sheet is 4 chords (C, C7, F, G7) across 2 sections: Intro riff → Verse. 3 of the 4 shapes are open chords and F is the one that needs a barre.
By Chiye · Updated
Hardest change in the sheet: C → F, 2 times.
- Difficulty
- Beginnerbarre shape F
- Key
- Dbwith a capo on fret 1
- Tuning
- Standard (E A D G B E)low to high
- Chords
- 43 open, 1 with a barre
- Sections
- 2each with its own progression
Chords in Jackson
Frets read low E to high E, x means leave that string out.
Chord sheet
One chord per bar, four beats to the bar: the shape lands on beat one and the dots mark the beats after it, so you can see where the change falls without any lyrics. Where a section has no strumming pattern written, play one chord per bar. Tap a bar to hear it.
Lyrics are not reproduced for this song: they are still in copyright and this site has no licence to publish them. The chords, structure, strumming and sing-along timing are all here. Songs whose words are public domain →
Intro riff♩=90
Verse♩=90
Printable one-page chord chart
How to play Jackson
Capo on fret 1 puts this in Db, and then you only need four shapes: C, C7, F and G7. The whole song is a two-person conversation over a riff, so the guitar part never gets busy — it just has to keep the boom-chicka-boom going while the two voices trade lines. That means the difficulty here is not the chords at all; it is keeping a steady pulse and leaving space in the right places, which is exactly what a duet demands.
The C7 is the hook. Play the four-beat riff as C, C, C, C7, ending each pass by lifting the finger off the D string so the open string rings — that tiny change is the sound everybody recognises. From C7 the song walks to F, so a good exercise is to loop just C, C7 and F for two minutes and listen for the bass note moving down and then up. G7 appears only at the end of each verse as the push back to C, and it is played with the same shape as G with the top E string dropped a fret.
Practise at 90 BPM with the intro riff, then the verse, and only then try to sing along; this song is much easier to play once you have internalised where the chords change, because they never move while a line is being sung. Finish by playing the verse five times in a row without stopping, which is how many times the record goes round before the final tag.
How to practise Jackson
Four steps computed from this sheet: the order the shapes are easiest to learn in, the changes that really occur in the progressions above, where each chord turns up, and the tempo ladder up to the recorded speed.
Learn the shapes easiest first
C (x-3-2-0-1-0, beginner) → C7 (x-3-2-3-1-0, beginner) → G7 (3-2-0-0-0-1, beginner) → F (1-3-3-2-1-1, intermediate, needs a barre)
3 of the 4 shapes are open chords, so start there and leave F until the others change cleanly.
Drill the changes this sheet actually uses
C → C72×C → F2×F → C1×F → G71×
These counts come from the progressions on this page, so they are the changes you will actually play, not a generic list of pairs to practise.
Know where each chord turns up
- Cevery section
- C7every section
- FVerse
- G7Verse
Climb the tempo ladder
This sheet does not list a tempo, so pick one where every change is clean and use the metronome to move up in 4 BPM steps.
The section to leave until last is Verse (12 bars in this sheet).
Playing Jackson with a capo
This sheet is written with a capo on fret 1. Each card shows what you would finger at that capo position so the song still sounds exactly as written. Useful when the shapes above are awkward, or when you want to sing it higher without learning new chords.
No capo
C# C#7 F# Ab7
no open shapes left, all barre
Fret 1as written
C C7 F G7
3 of 4 stay open
Fret 2
B B7 E F#7
2 of 4 stay open
Fret 3
Bb Bb7 Eb F7
no open shapes left, all barre
Fret 4
A A7 D E7
4 of 4 stay open
Fret 5
Ab Ab7 C# Eb7
no open shapes left, all barre
Fret 6
G G7 C D7
4 of 4 stay open
Fret 7
F# F#7 B C#7
no open shapes left, all barre
Working out a different key? The capo calculatordoes the same arithmetic for any chord set.
More songs built on the same chords
If Jackson clicks, these use the closest set of shapes, so the chords you just learned keep working.
More beginner songs to learn after this one: Wonderwall, Let It Be, Creep, Hallelujah.
These chords across the songbookHow often each chord in Jackson turns up across all 80 songs on this site, and what it most often moves to next. The counts come from the sheet library itself, not from theory.
363bars of this chord across the songbook
54songs use this shape
Most often followed by G, 115×.
9bars of this chord across the songbook
5songs use this shape
Most often followed by F, 6×.
106bars of this chord across the songbook
24songs use this shape
Most often followed by C, 31×.
33bars of this chord across the songbook
13songs use this shape
Most often followed by C, 11×.