"Henry" Intro to Maggie May by Rod Stewart/Martin Quittenton| acoustic
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An acoustic guitar lesson on how to play "Henry", the classical guitar intro to Maggie May from Rod Stewart's 1971 album Every Picture Tells a Story.
I've had quite a few requests to do this one over the years so I finally got around to it! It was written and played by Martin Quittenton, one of Rod Stewart's guitar players at the time. Martin co-wrote Maggie May and You Wear it Well, two of my favorite Rod Stewart songs. Here's a quote from Rod on the track from a 2015 Wall Street Journal article: "For the album version, we added a short, 32-second intro to “Maggie May” called “Henry” that Martin wrote. Since there would be a gap between his intro and “Maggie May,” Martin would get paid separately for “Henry.” I wanted to give him an extra bonus. No matter how long a stand-alone song is, you still get credit and royalties for it. But I have no idea why Martin called it Henry.” Henry is very classical in nature and even though it's less than 30 seconds, it's very rigid and disciplined playing and I found it a lot more difficult to get down than it sounds. Although the piece is in a minor key, it ends on a major chord. This is known as a Picardy Third and was common in the Renaissance era. There are a number of YouTube videos out there on how to play it but most of them show some pretty clumsy ways of doing it. It's tough because there are no live videos anywhere to see where the fingering is. I went with the old guitar adage: "The closer to the nut you can play something the better." I'm pretty confident that my fingering is correct, but only Martin Quittenton could tell you for sure! Even if you don't plan on performing this piece, it's still excellent to learn as it will make you improve your technique. I loved working on this one. I hope that you get something from the video and that it helps you to learn this awesome little classical guitar piece. Cheers Andy |
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