Paul | Guitar Lessons and Performance - Paul Elwood

Help me Make it Through The Night

Help me make it through the night chords and lyrics

Help Me Make It Through the Night” is a country ballad written and composed by Kris Kristofferson and released on his 1970 album Kristofferson. It was covered later in 1970 by Sammi Smith, on the album Help Me Make It Through the Night. In 1982, Kris did a re-recording with Brenda Lee for the compilation album The Winning Hand. It has been covered since by many other artists from Tammy Wynette and Johnny Cash to Elvis Presley, Joan Baez, Bryan Ferry, Mark Eitzel, Tyler Childers and Engelbert Humperdinck also as a duet between Michael Bublé and Loren Allred.

Smith’s recording of the song (in May 1970) remains the most commercially successful, and best-known, version in the United States. Her recording ranks among the most successful country singles of all time in terms of sales, popularity, and radio airplay. It topped the country singles chart, and was also a crossover hit, reaching number eight on the U.S. pop singles chart. “Help Me Make It Through The Night” also became Smith’s signature song.

In May 2024, Rolling […]

Paul2026-05-09T13:24:20-04:00

How to play “Fools Fall in Love”

“Fools Fall in Love” is a song by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller. It was originally recorded by the Drifters, who took it to number 10 on the R&B chart in 1957. The song reached number 69 on the Billboard Hot 100.

In 1977, “Fools Fall in Love” was recorded by Jacky Ward. His version reached number 9 on the US country music chart, and number 16 on the Canadian country chart.

Sammy Turner recorded a version in 1960.
Elvis Presley recorded a more up-tempo version on May 28, 1966. His rendition, charting in tandem with “Indescribably Blue“, reached number 11 in Australia. Elvis’s cover also reached number 102 in the U.S. as a separate B-side.

“If you’re into what you’re playing, that’s the most important thing.” – James Hetfield

Paul2026-03-10T15:50:33-04:00

White Christmas

White_Christmas tabs and chords

C | F C | F | G7 F | G7 | C | C
I’m dream-ing of a white Christmas. Just like the ones I used to know

C CM7 | C7 | F | Fm C | C | Dm7 | G7
Where the tree tops glisten and children listen. To hear sleigh bells in the snow

C | F C | F | G7 F | G7 | C | C
I’m dream-ing of a white Christmass With ever Christmas card I write

C CM7 | C7 | F | Fm […]

Paul2026-04-13T08:33:38-04:00

How to play “Bye Bye Blackbird”

C A7
Pack up all my cares and woe,
Dm7 G7 C
here I go singing low,
C C Dm7 G7
Bye Bye Black bird.
Dm Dm7
Where somebody waits for me
Dm7 G7
sugar’s sweet, so is she.
Dm7 G7 C7 C
Bye Bye Black bird.
C7 A7
No one here can love and under stand me,
Dm […]

Paul2026-03-10T06:59:53-04:00

Dock of the Bay on guitar

Dock of the bay lead sheet

“(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay” is a song co-written by soul singer Otis Redding and guitarist Steve Cropper. It was recorded by Redding twice in 1967, including once just three days before his death in a plane crash on December 10, 1967. The song was released on Stax Records’ Volt label in 1968, becoming the first ever posthumous single to top the charts in the US. It reached number 3 on the UK Singles Chart.

Redding started writing the lyrics to the song in August 1967, while sitting on a rented houseboat in Sausalito, California. He completed the song in Memphis with the help of Cropper, who was a Stax producer and the guitarist for Booker T. & the M.G.’s. The song features whistling and sounds of waves crashing on a shore.

“We do not believe in ourselves until someone reveals that what is deep inside us is valuable, worth listening to, worthy of our trust, sacred to our touch. Once we believe in ourselves we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight, or any experience that reveals the human spirit.” -E. E. Cummings

Paul2026-04-20T15:54:09-04:00

Cry Me a River

Cry Me A River

Arthur Hamilton later said of the song: “I had never heard the phrase. I just liked the combination of words… Instead of ‘Eat your heart out’ or ‘I’ll get even with you,’ it sounded like a good, smart retort to somebody who had hurt your feelings or broken your heart.” He was initially concerned that listeners would hear a reference to the Crimea, rather than “..cry me a…”, but said that “..sitting down and playing the melody and coming up with lyrics made it a nonissue.”

A bluesy jazz ballad, “Cry Me a River” was originally written for Ella Fitzgerald to sing in the 1920s-set film Pete Kelly’s Blues (released 1955). According to Hamilton, he and Julie London had been high school classmates, and she contacted him on behalf of her husband, Jack Webb, who was the film’s director and was looking for new songs for its soundtrack. After the song was dropped from the film, Fitzgerald first released her version on Clap Hands, Here Comes Charlie! in 1961. The song was also offered to Peggy King, but Columbia Records A&R chief Mitch Miller objected to the word “plebeian” in the lyric.

The song’s first release was by actress and singer Julie […]

Paul2026-03-30T12:36:40-04:00

How to play “Ain’t Misbehavin'” on guitar

aint misbehavin chart

How to play “Ain’t Misbehavin'” on guitar

ain’t misbehavin’. First performed at the premiere of Connie’s Hot Chocolates in Harlem at Connie’s Inn as an opening song by Paul Bass and Margaret Simms, and repeated later in the musical by Russell Wooding’s Hallelujah Singers. Connie’s Hot Chocolates was transferred to the Hudson Theatre on Broadway during June 1929, where it was renamed to Hot Chocolates and where Louis Armstrong became the orchestra director. The script also required Armstrong to play “Ain’t Misbehavin‘” in a trumpet solo, and although this was initially slated only to be a reprise of the opening song, Armstrong’s performance was so well received that the trumpeter was asked to climb out of the orchestra pit and play the piece on stage. As noted by Thomas Brothers in his book Louis Armstrong: Master of Modernism, Armstrong was first taught “Ain’t Misbehavin'” by Waller himself, “woodshedding” it until he could “play all around it”; he cherished it “because it was ‘one of those songs you could cut loose and swing with.'”

“If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph: the only proof he needed for the existence of God was music.” – Kurt Vonnegut

Paul2026-04-15T08:02:19-04:00

Upside Down in the Boneyard

Upsidedown in the boneyard Chart

Upside-down in the Boneyard

Our visit inspired me to write some music. This is “Upside Down in the Boneyard” and the name comes from a story our Uber drive told us on the way out of town, regarding a drunk driver and St. Louis Cemetary #1.

These were written with musescore btw which is FREE! and pretty easy to get a handle on. If you like music and you want to look under the hood a little I highly recommend it!

Here’s what Chat AI says about it, lyrically:

This song uses dark humor, vivid imagery, and a sudden musical irony to tell a story about the consequences of reckless living.

Here is a breakdown of the meanings and themes behind the lyrics:

1. The Fake Mourners and Premature Burial

Crocodile Tears: […]

Paul2026-06-15T10:00:19-04:00

Power chords!

If you think about a scale as having eight notes – do re me fa so la ti do- and then assign numbers to the notes, you’d get one through 8, right? So your first note would be 1 and your last note would be 8 The one note is the “root” note in the scale and the other notes all different jobs to do when we play them as chords.

For instance a major chord has the scale notes 1, 3 and 5. For a C scale, which has no sharps or flats, the notes corresponding to the numbers 1 through 8 are C, D, E, F, G, A, B and C. So for our major C chord, 1,3 and 5 are the notes C, E and G. That makes a C major chord.

When you take the 3rd out though, something interesting happens. Playing the 1 and the 5 makes a very beefy, crunchy sort of chord, and playing a simple 1/4/5 pattern with that power chord is like the basis for tons of rock’n roll songs.

Conveniently for us as guitar players it doesn’t matter if you play the 5th note above or below the 1st note, and we have two strings in standard tuning, the D string and […]

Paul2026-03-09T19:49:12-04:00

C and his excellent minor relative, Am

We know the C scale has no flats or sharps and we can play it in the first position using D, G and B open strings.
We can play, as shown here: C, D, E, F, G, A, B and C

Also the C scale continues both below and above the two Cs, so we can actually start playing that scale from the open E and above the C on the B string, as far as we want. Let’s go to G (third fret of the E string) so we’re using the C scale notes on the first 3 frets including open strings.A Minor (Am) is the relative minor of C and it doesn’t have any sharps or flats either! You can spell the Am scale just like the C scale just starting on the A! Try it out! What this means is, we can play these notes over changes like Am, G, F and Em which would be 1, 7, 6 and 5.