Guitar Sessions 20: Play the Grateful Dead’s “If I Had the World to Give”
Learn an acoustic arrangement of the Grateful Dead’s “If I Had the World to Give,” from the band’s 1978 album Shakedown Street, in Episode 20 of Guitar Sessions.
Watch a full performance of the song below.
“If I Had the World to Give” is a gem from the Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter songbook that remains fairly obscure—mostly because the Dead performed it only three times, all in 1978, and then dropped it from the live repertoire. Blair Jackson, author of the Garcia biography, speculates that the song’s very wide, challenging vocal range may have been one reason Garcia steered away from it.
It’s a shame that we never got to hear Garcia and company stretch out on this song onstage, because it’s got a gorgeous melody and one particular chord change (to the bVI) that makes me swoon every time. Hunter has commented that he and Garcia were aiming to write an old-fashioned romantic ballad, and the song does feel classic in that way—a gesture toward the Tin Pan Alley tradition.
This guitar arrangement, played in dropped-D tuning with a capo at the fifth fret, incorporates instrumental riffs and a solo in addition to backing up the vocal. The complete tab and charts for the lesson are available on Patreon.
Learn more Grateful Dead classics for acoustic guitar in this Homespun video series.
Chord/lyric charts and guitar tab for every episode of Guitar Sessions are available on Patreon.
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