How to Play ’Peggy Sue’ - Buddy Holly - Play Along Lesson - Jez Quayle

A great way to learn many guitar songs is to dispense with wordy explanations and simply strum along with someone else with the lyrics and chords in front of you. This great Buddy Holly composition is one of those songs. It’s presented here with the full lyrics, chords and suggested strumming patterns, so you can play or sing along with me and learn how to perform this classic tune. Watch my strumming hand and chord hand and try to reproduce what you see and hear. I’m play my electric guitar here (a Fender Stratocaster, like Buddy’s), but ’Peggy Sue’ sounds great on acoustic guitar too. A song sheet containing the lyrics and chords can be viewed or downloaded from my songbook blog here: Buddy’s songs are ideal for guitar beginners ...and life-long strummers too! Buddy played songs like this one with almost entirely down-strums, but if that proves too difficult (it can be hard work!), more conventional down-up strumming works well too. Buddy originally called this song ’Cindy Lou’, after his niece, but changed the name to ’Peggy Sue’ on the request of Jerry Allison’, who was Buddy’s best friend and also The Crickets’ drummer. Jerry had recently broken up with his girlfriend Peggy Sue Gerron, and thought that putting her name into a song might help them to patch things up. I guess it may have helped, as Jerry later married Peggy Sue, prompting Buddy to write a sequel song (’Peggy Sue Got Married’). ’Peggy Sue’ was released as a single in July 1957 following the success of Buddy and The Crickets’ first hit record, ’That’ll Be The Day’. The classic song ’Everyday’ was the B-side ...just a B-side! The real Peggy Sue stated that she first heard the song at a live performance at the Sacramento Memorial Auditorium in 1957, and that she was “so embarrassed, I could have died“. I got my first guitar when I was 14 years old (over 40 years ago), and this is one of the first songs I learned to play. Buddy is probably my biggest musical hero.