Learn John Lennon's Versatile Clawhammer Technique | TAB

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In our August 2014 issue, folk singer Donovan revealed how, during their famous trip to India in 1968, he taught John Lennon and Paul McCartney “the clawhammer technique that became ‘Dear Prudence’ and ‘Blackbird.’” McCartney adapted a looser version of this one-bar fingerpicking pattern by incorporating brush strokes across two or more strings (think “Blackbird” and “Mother Nature’s Son”), but Lennon’s take on it was much more disciplined and rarely deviated from its strictly arpeggiated single-note approach. The first recorded examples of the pattern emerged on The Beatles (a.k.a. the White Album), prompting George Harrison to later remark that Donovan “is all over the White Album.”

John Lennon made a lot of beautiful music with only a handful of chords and this simple, one-bar fingerpicking pattern. (And, of course, those melodies, but that’s another story!) Let’s investigate how he was able to do so much with so little.

“CLAWHAMMER” VS. “TRAVIS-STYLE”
Using an open E chord and notated with traditional opposing stemming, FIGURE 1 demonstrates the basic one-bar, 4/4 picking pattern, which incorporates all six strings and features alternating four-on-the-floor bass notes played on the bottom three strings interspersed with three treble notes—the first string on beat one, the third string on the and of beat two, and the second string on the and of beat three. The main difference between this “clawhammer” style and the Travis-picking popularized by Merle Travis and Chet Atkins lies in the order in which the four alternating bass notes are played: Travis picking incorporates a sixth-fourth-fifth-fourth-string bass pattern, while the Lennon/Donovan clawhammer technique uses a fifth-fourth-sixth-fourth-string scheme. Let’s break it down.

FIGURE 1

PART IT OUT

FIGURE 2A isolates the thumb-picked bass notes—B-E-(low)E-E, or, in interval-speak, 5-root-(low)root-root. Grab an acoustic, set a reasonable tempo,