Old Crow Medicine Show
Wagon Wheel chords
Wagon Wheel by Old Crow Medicine Show is a beginner song in A, played with a capo on fret 2. The whole sheet is 4 chords (G, D, Em, C) across 3 sections: Intro → Verse ×2 → Chorus ×2. Every shape is an open chord, so nothing here needs barre strength. It sits at roughly 150 BPM.
By Chiye · Updated
Hardest change in the sheet: G → D, 6 times.
- Difficulty
- Beginnerno barre needed
- Key
- Awith a capo on fret 2
- Tempo
- 150BPM
- Tuning
- Standard (E A D G B E)low to high
- Chords
- 4all open shapes
- Sections
- 3each with its own progression
Chords in Wagon Wheel
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♩=150
Verse× 2 · ♩=150
Chorus× 2 · ♩=150
Printable one-page chord chart
How to play Wagon Wheel
Capo on fret 2 and you are in A with nothing but G, D, Em and C under your fingers, which is why this is the song that gets handed to every new player at a session. The shape of it never changes: one bar each of G – D – Em – C, then G – D – C, and the last C is held for two bars while the melody resolves. Verse and chorus use the same eight bars, so you learn one loop and you effectively know the whole song.
The trap is the Em bar, because it comes third in a fast four-bar cycle and players tend to arrive on it late. Keep your middle and ring fingers in the Em shape (A string fret 2, D string fret 2) while you play the D before it — the D uses the same two fingers, just one string higher — and the change costs you almost no movement. Strum with a driving boom-chuck: a single bass note on beat one, then a down-up on the top strings, which imitates the fiddle-and-banjo feel of the original better than a full six-string strum.
Practise at 110 BPM with one chord per bar and a bass note on every downbeat; the song only works when the low note leads. Then move to 130 and finally to 150, which is roughly where it sits on the record. Do not stop at the chord changes — a dropped beat is much more obvious here than a muted string. When it is comfortable, try the intro lick on the top two strings over the G and D bars, returning to plain chords for the singing.
How to practise Wagon Wheel
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
G (3-2-0-0-0-3, beginner) → D (x-x-0-2-3-2, beginner) → Em (0-2-2-0-0-0, beginner) → C (x-3-2-0-1-0, beginner)
4 of the 4 shapes are open chords, so nothing here needs barre strength yet.
Drill the changes this sheet actually uses
G → D6×D → C3×D → Em3×Em → C3×
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
- Gevery section
- Devery section
- Emevery section
- Cevery section
Climb the tempo ladder
Start at 90 BPM and move up only when a full pass is clean: 90 → 113 → 135 → 150 BPM. The recorded feel is around 150 BPM, and the last step is the one that always feels like a jump. Stay at 135 for longer than feels necessary.
Every section here uses the same set of shapes, so there is no section to single out. Whatever you can play once, you can play all the way through.
Playing Wagon Wheel with a capo
This sheet is written with a capo on fret 2. 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
A E F#m D
3 of 4 stay open
Fret 1
Ab Eb Fm C#
no open shapes left, all barre
Fret 2as written
G D Em C
4 of 4 stay open
Fret 3
F# C# Ebm B
no open shapes left, all barre
Fret 4
F C Dm Bb
2 of 4 stay open
Fret 5
E B C#m A
2 of 4 stay open
Fret 6
Eb Bb Cm Ab
no open shapes left, all barre
Fret 7
D A Bm G
3 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 Wagon Wheel 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 Wagon Wheel 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.
418bars of this chord across the songbook
59songs use this shape
Most often followed by C, 80×.
248bars of this chord across the songbook
44songs use this shape
Most often followed by G, 40×.
113bars of this chord across the songbook
30songs use this shape
Most often followed by C, 27×.
363bars of this chord across the songbook
54songs use this shape
Most often followed by G, 115×.