Lynyrd Skynyrd
Sweet Home Alabama chords
Sweet Home Alabama by Lynyrd Skynyrd is a beginner song in G, played with no capo. The whole sheet is 4 chords (D, C, G, F) across 3 sections: Intro → Verse ×2 → Chorus. 3 of the 4 shapes are open chords and F is the one that needs a barre. It sits at roughly 98 BPM.
By Chiye · Updated
Hardest change in the sheet: F → C, 2 times.
- Difficulty
- Beginnerbarre shape F
- Key
- Gwith no capo
- Tempo
- 98BPM
- Tuning
- Standard (E A D G B E)low to high
- Chords
- 43 open, 1 with a barre
- Sections
- 3each with its own progression
Chords in Sweet Home Alabama
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♩=98
Verse× 2 · ♩=98
Chorus♩=98
Printable one-page chord chart
How to play Sweet Home Alabama
Sweet Home Alabama is three chords (D, C, G) in the verse and four in the chorus (G, F, C, D), driven by one of the most famous riffs in rock. If you can change chords in time, you can hold down this song at any jam.
The verse riff sits over D, C and G — play the chords as driving downstrokes first, then add the signature single-note line on the D and B strings as your confidence grows. The chorus walks G → F → C → D, and the F is the one half-barre to watch: play it as the four-string shape (x-x-3-2-1-1) if the full barre is still developing.
Keep everything on the beat, slightly swung, and don’t rush — the groove is lazy even when the band is loud. The G-to-F change is the core workout; loop those two chords alone for five minutes and the song falls into place.
How to practise Sweet Home Alabama
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
D (x-x-0-2-3-2, beginner) → C (x-3-2-0-1-0, beginner) → G (3-2-0-0-0-3, 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 → G3×D → C3×C → D2×F → C2×
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
- Devery section
- Cevery section
- Gevery section
- FChorus
Climb the tempo ladder
Start at 59 BPM and move up only when a full pass is clean: 59 → 74 → 88 → 98 BPM. The recorded feel is around 98 BPM, and the last step is the one that always feels like a jump. Stay at 88 for longer than feels necessary.
The section to leave until last is Chorus (8 bars in this sheet).
Playing Sweet Home Alabama with a capo
This sheet needs no capo. 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 capoas written
D C G F
3 of 4 stay open
Fret 1
C# B F# E
1 of 4 stay open
Fret 2
C Bb F Eb
1 of 4 stay open
Fret 3
B A E D
3 of 4 stay open
Fret 4
Bb Ab Eb C#
no open shapes left, all barre
Fret 5
A G D C
4 of 4 stay open
Fret 6
Ab F# C# B
no open shapes left, all barre
Fret 7
G F C Bb
2 of 4 stay open
Working out a different key? The capo calculatordoes the same arithmetic for any chord set.
More songs built on the same chords
If Sweet Home Alabama 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, Oh! Susanna.
These chords across the songbookHow often each chord in Sweet Home Alabama 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.
248bars of this chord across the songbook
44songs use this shape
Most often followed by G, 40×.
363bars of this chord across the songbook
54songs use this shape
Most often followed by G, 115×.
418bars of this chord across the songbook
59songs use this shape
Most often followed by C, 80×.
106bars of this chord across the songbook
24songs use this shape
Most often followed by C, 31×.