Sweet Home Alabama

Taken from 1974’s Second Helping, ‘Sweet Home Alabama’ is one of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s most enduring songs. Bizarrely, it’s still so popular that it makes frequent appearances on UK wedding band set lists (at least, the ones that I play with).

Written in response to Neil Young’s songs ‘Alabama’ and ‘Southern Man’, ‘Sweet Home Alabama’ opens with the signature guitar riff that outlines a chord progression of D, C, and G major:

Lynyrd Skynyrd – Sweet Home Alabama

“Sweet Home Alabama” bass perfomance notes

• There’s not too much to sweat over here in terms of the bass part, as the main verse groove is a pretty straightforward, root note-orientated affair.
• the only things in the chart that might need looking over are the bass approximation of the guitar riff that follows the first verse, and the fill at the last bar of verses 2 and 3 – I like to play it in open position, using open strings in combination with hammer-ons and pull-offs to match the articulation on the recording.
• My favourite section is the bassline that underpins the second guitar solo (this also gets recycled in the piano solo). Notice that we’re treating the G major chord as G7 here to lend it a bluesy feel. – There’s a further nod to blues/soul/R&B influences in the turnaround (F – C – D), which doesn’t really belong in the key; this same turnaround appears in Otis Redding’s ‘Hard to Handle’ and Tina Turner’s ‘Proud Mary’. In fact, what key are we even in? D feels like home, but there aren’t any C#s to be found anywhere, and C major chords are everywhere. My vote is for D mixolydian, which is a mode of G major, with the G chord really being treated as G7, a secondary dominant. Confused yet?