Folk music is one really simple and enjoyable musical style which can be easily taken up by the beginner guitar player. The folk songs are so easy you can enjoy playing them right away, and you will find this is a great way to express your own personality and get your audience involved in letting off some steam. Folk songs are focused on daily life - work, love, betrayal and death. Sometimes the theme of a folk song can be about social change like If I Had A Hammer.



When you start playing folk songs on the guitar, remember that in playing for an audience you are leading an event where a room full of people are letting off steam by expressing themselves musically. We all know about passing the time on a bus trip singing 99 Bottles Of Beer. Yankee Doodle, Shoo Fly, This Old Man, She'll be Comin' Round the Mountain, Three Blind Mice, Buffalo Gals, Row, Row, Row Your Boat, Hush, Little Baby, Lazy Mary, Bingo, I've Been Working' on the Railroad, On Top of Old Smokey, London Bridge, The Farmer in the Dell, The Crawdad Song, The Itsy Bitsy Spider, Rock-A-Bye Baby, The Riddle Song, Oh! Susanna, Mister Frog Went A-Courtin' and Frere Jacques are all easy folk songs that invite audience participation and can be easily played on the guitar.

Another well-loved folk song is Banks Of The Ohio which is plaintive ballad concerning a young woman being killed by her rejected boyfriend. There are quite a few folk songs that are about murder and love gone wrong. Greensleeves is an old English folk song dating back to the sixteenth century and sung by people all over the world. It has a romantic mood but some folk music experts believe that it is a song sung to a lady of easy morals. Another immensely popular and easy folk song is House Of The Rising Sun which again, deals with a life wasted and ending in misery. In spite of its gloomy theme this song has great audience appeal. And it is very easy to play on the guitar.

To play these easy folk songs you might decide to use a plectrum to accompany your singing by strumming chords. But you can use easy fingerstyle guitar techniques that you will find to be quite effective. The easiest is to play the bass note of each chord followed by a down stroke with the first finger across the third, second and first strings. A variation on this technique is to pluck the treble strings instead of strumming them. In practice, you will probably find yourself employing a combination of these two methods. From here, with a little help from some internet research, you will find that you can expand your fingerstyle technique to using the thumb, first, second and third fingers to pick melodic accompaniment to your folk songs. A very popular and easy to play folk guitar style is called Clawhammer. In this technique your thumb plays a regular pattern while the fingers pluck a melody or accompaniment on the treble strings. To find some tabs and videos featuring these methods of playing folk songs, just try searching for "guitar finger picking".

For more inspiration for your search for easy folk songs to play on the guitar, try searching on the net for some famous folk artists like Burl Ives, The Weavers, Peter Paul And Mary, Joan Baez, Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger.