How To Play Blue Skies
By Willie Nelson

Welcome to this section of my website where I'll explain to you how to play Blue Skies by Willie Nelson on the acoustic guitar. Further down this page you'll see my demo clip which augments my explanation. There are also free lyrics and tabs that should also be beneficial in helping you learn this song.

Blue Skies of course is an old song that's been around since 1926 and was written by Irving Berlin, the famous American composer who passed away in 1989 at the age of 101.

Berlin wrote the song at the last minute for a musical called "Betsy". On opening night the song was a huge hit and the audience requested more than 20 encores from its star Belle Baker.

Its hard to image that this guy, before the age of 30, had written several hundred songs and was basically a legend. By the time he had passed on Berlin had over 1500 songs to his name.

You might recognize a few besides "Blue Skies" ... like "God Bless America", "White Christmas", "There's No Business Like Show Business", "Happy Holiday" and tons more.


This song starts on Bm up on the 7th fret. If you simply play the bottom 4 strings and then do a walking D string down 1 fret at a time for 3 additional positions, you'll have the most difficult part of the chords.

The others are the D chord, the bottom 3 strings on the 3rd, and an open D by lifting off the index and middle finger while playing D. We also have an A7 and Gb.

                 

Free Tab Available


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Full Tutorial - .wmv format - 14 min 18 sec

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And you thought you were safe so far on how to play Blue Skies by Willie Nelson. Well near the end, everything moves up one fret ... so the walking Bm becomes a walking Cm ... you'll also hit a G chord before you start this. And the rest of the chords now become D#, A# and a G# and G#m near the very end.



If you use the pattern Dn-Up-Dn ... Dn-Up-Dn ... Dn-Up-Dn ... Dn in the first intro movement on the D string as explained above, you'll see the same pattern on practically all chords except when you move to the chorus on the D, bottom 3 and lift. You can simply do a steady Dn-Up-Dn-Up etc shuffle as you move thru those 3 chord formations.

There is a bit of picking in this one in the beginning and for the break. All picking patterns of course are fully explained in the full version tutorial from the link above. Grab the free tabs in the right menu.


In 1927 a record producer by the name of Ben Selvin recorded Blue Skies and had a #1 hit song. Some trivia here - Selvin used different names to record for different labels during those early days of records, and has the world record for most recorded singles by one person .. over 13,000 on the old 78rpm records!
Al Jolson in 1927 sang the song in the film "The Jazz Singer".

And of course it doesn't hurt when Fred Astaire and Bing Crosby use the song title for their movie in 1946 and Count Basie and Benny Goodman record the song, both of whom had top 10 hits.

If you think Willie was the first country artist to record Blue Skies, you'd be wrong. Country swing was happening as far back as 1939 when Moon Mullican recorded his version of the song.

Jim Reeves also put the song on vinyl back in 1962.

Finally In 1978, Willie Nelson recorded his version, which became a #1 hit song on the country charts.

Apparently the video clip in the right hand menu is from a Wembley Stadium performance (in the UK) but I'm not exactly sure when. But as you can see, Willie looks quite young. I'd say this was in the mid 1980's.

I hope you found this How To Play Blue Skies by Willie Nelson useful and informative. Feel free to tweet about it (bottom of the page), like it on Facebook from the "Like" button above or below as that is also most welcomed.

Rtn to Willie Nelson Biography fm How To Play Blue Skies By Willie Nelson

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