“THE STAR-SPANGLED BANNER”

Chris Stapleton

THIS TENDER PERFORMANCE of America’s national anthem by Chris Stapleton at Super Bowl LVII features the talented singer-songwriter softly accompanying his soulful, powerful vocal with a minimalist but tasteful and highly effective guitar arrangement. Stapleton foregoes many of the song’s traditional

3

4 chord changes and meter in favor of a

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4 more meditative approach, reworked in with a droning, simplified accompaniment, which he plays fingerstyle in drop-D tuning,

(“drop-C#”). transposed down a half step,

The guitarist enriches the ethereal vibe of his stripped-down part by dialing in a warm, clean tone with his Fender Telecaster’s neck pickup and Princeton amp and enhancing it with subtle tremolo and phaser effects.

Technically, there’s really not much to be concerned about in this transcribed performance, as it’s built around a handful of easily formed chord shapes. And while it’s not a stand-alone, chord/melody-style solo guitar arrangement, it does offer a coolly understated and satisfying way to accompany yourself or someone else singing the song, without having to navigate numerous complex, classical-style chord changes. You can find those in the two instrumental arrangements of the song I presented in the August and September 2018 issues.

It’s interesting how Stapleton instantly establishes a dreamy mood and purposefully sets up his vocal entrance in bar 1 with a rich-sounding, arpeggiated Dadd4 chord, with its open G note ringing with

F#. and rubbing against the fretted In bars 2 and 3, the guitarist departs from the song’s original progression by simply hanging on the I (one) chord, D, decorating his drone-y accompaniment with bluesy finger slides from the minor 3rd, F, up to the major 3rd, F#.

Equally cool is Stapleton’s use of gracenote hammer-ons on the A5 chords and his substitution of B5 for D in bars 8, 16, 22 and 24, which conveys a dramatically darkersounding relative minor chord (implying Bm), as opposed to the brighter, happier D major sound. And the final cadence — G5 F5 - Dadd4 — is a hauntingly beautiful twist.