3 Folk Songs From the 70s That Are Actually Hard To Play on Guitar

It’s fun, even relaxing sometimes, to listen to folk music, but playing it can be quite the challenge. Joni Mitchell even invented her own guitar tuning system back in the day. That’s how you know folk songs are no joke. Here are a few from the 70s that sound like music to our ears but definitely require some serious guitar skills.

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“Amelia” by Joni Mitchell

For one, this song is played in Open C, which is pretty different from standard tuning. There’s also an intricate fingerpicking part that Mitchell uses when she plays this song live.

If you’re listening to the lyrics of “Amelia”, you’ll notice that there are a lot of plane references. That’s because, yes, Mitchell was singing about Amelia Earhart.

“I was thinking of Amelia Earhart and addressing it from one solo pilot to another…” Joni Mitchell once said of the song. “Sort of reflecting on the cost of being a woman and having something you must do.”

“The Boxer” by Simon & Garfunkel

This song, as beautiful as it is, can be deceptively difficult to master on guitar. There are different ways to play “The Boxer”, but a lot of them involve an alternate tuning of some sort, like C standard. This song also uses a Travis picking pattern, meaning a steady bassline is played on the bottom strings with the thumb, while other fingers alternate on the higher strings.

There’s also a special lick at the beginning of the original recording. This piece was added by Fred Carter Junior, a guitarist who helped record the song.

“Steamroller Blues” by James Taylor

This blues-influenced folk tune appears on Taylor’s album Sweet Baby James. When you listen to the recording, Taylor makes this one sound easy, but in reality, that guitar part is not for the weak. The song is written in that classic 12-bar structure. Taylor might have written this one to make fun of blues songs (he was sick of them at the time), but he still pulls off a pretty accurate parody.

Fun fact, Elvis Presley actually did his own version of this song for his album Aloha from Hawaii: Via Satellite in 1973.

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