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The Ultimate List of “What songs should I learn/play?”


As an aside to my usual posting, I thought I’d share some research (in the loosest possible sense of the word) I’ve done to try and find the definitive list of “what songs should I learn“/”what songs should I play” on the acoustic guitar for parties, around campfires etc. It is particularly focused on the “One man and his guitar” ideology.

I created a list songs by trawling through a number of sites that are listed in the references at the bottom. The sites matched the phrase “Top acoustic guitar songs“, and variations on this theme. The sites included big websites, small blogs and forums posts. I crawled these sites looking at the lists themselves and the comments below them suggesting additions to the list.

The 15 songs below were the songs that were repeatedly(4+ times) included in the Top 10s etc…

Bob Dylan – Knocking on heaven’s door
Bob Seger – Turn the page
Counting Crows – Mr. Jones
Foo Fighters – Everlong
Guns n Roses – Patience
Johnny Cash – Folsom prison blues
Simon and Garfunkel – Mrs. Robinson
Tenacious D – Tribute
Eagles – Hotel California
Eric Clapton – Tears in heaven
Don Mclean – American pie
Eric Clapton – Layla
Green Day – Time of your life
Oasis – Wonderwall
Bob Marley – Redemption song
Pink Floyd – Wish you were here

and the following came up 3 times in my search.

Cat Stevens – Father and Son
Death Cab for Cutie – I will follow you into the dark
Eagle Eye Cherry – Save Tonight
Eagles – Take it easy
Extreme – More than words
Harry Chapin – Cats in the cradle
James Taylor – Fire and rain
Neil Young – Heart of gold
Neil Young – Old man
Poison – Every rose has its thorn
REM. – Losing my religion
Radiohead – Creep
The Animals – House of the rising sun
Tom Petty – Free Fallin’
Tom Petty – Learning to fly
Van Morrison – Brown-eyed girl

I think it might also be worth mentioning that when I sorted the list by artist (not song), the Beatles ranked very highly (even though they don’t appear in either of the lists above!). Their most popular songs were:

A little help from my friends
Blackbird
Here comes the sun
Hey Jude

All in all, it think the list is fairly indicative of general opinion, but I would imagine personal opinion differs greatly. While I would like to think this would be an end to it, the sample size of the research could probably be expanded. As I find more sites I will continue to add to my stats, but in the meantime this will have to do! This is a link to my spreadsheet research if anyone else wants to use it. It contains more songs, if you know all the ones above!

I might go on and break down the guitar songs by theme; campfire, impressing girls, parties etc. If anyone would be interested such things, just comment below or email. Please feel free to comment below anyway! :)

thelifeandsoul will probably go on as usual, which is mostly me picking songs at random from personal preference, but I think I’ll be pulling from this list every few weeks!

Otherwise, here are the links that I pulled all the info from:

Ultimate Guitar Forum links:

Thanks to detritus for the pic.

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This entry was posted on October 16, 2009, 7:59 am and is filed under Misc. You can follow any responses to this entry through RSS 2.0. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

  1. #1 by Carlo on October 16, 2009 - 12:40 pm

    Nice research! And if anyone needs to learn how to play them, check this out: http://www.bravenewtraveler.com/2009/08/05/learn-how-to-play-the-greatest-campfire-songs-of-all-time-for-free/

    :)

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  2. #2 by eoin on October 16, 2009 - 11:00 pm

    Thanks Carlo, I was a little too lazy to go tracking down the chords for each of them myself! :)

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  3. #3 by AcousticBlog on October 21, 2009 - 11:38 am

    Well done! Great songs on that list.

    It looks like we had the same idea for a blog at around the same time.. I’ll try to keep up with you! Adding a link to here now.

    Best,

    Tyler

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  4. #4 by eoin on October 21, 2009 - 11:52 pm

    Great stuff, Tyler. By the looks of things, you’re already way ahead of me!

    Eoin

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  5. #5 by CoolHand on March 29, 2010 - 5:06 pm

    I really enjoyed the compilation of songs you put together here. Thanks for sharing!

    CH…

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    I have been gone for a while, but now I remember why I used to love this site. Thanks, I will try and check back more frequently. How often do you update your website?

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