The Ziggy Marley song, “Love is My Religion,” with chords and lyrics. I played this in the key of E like the original recording, but it’s just a 3-chord song and can easily be transposed to an easier key (for playing or singing). Instead of the E-D-A chords, play G-F-C for the key of G or D-C-G for the key of D, or C-Bb-F for the key of C.

If you want to play along with me to learn it, I’m playing the E chord by barring the 4th fret with my ring finger and muting the 1st string.

STRUMMING PATTERN

The song structure follows a simple pattern:

1 measure of E
1 measure of D
2 measures of A

Those 4 measures just keep repeating.

The song is in 4/4 time so there are 4 beats in each measure. I’m strumming DOWN on all of the DOWNBEATS (that’s the count) and UP on some of the UPBEATS (that’s the “and”). So broken down into into eighth notes, each measure has 4 downbeats and 4 upbeats (a total of 8 possibilities of where you can strum… 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and

There are many variations on what you can do, and what I played was just something that sounded right to me at the time, so don’t take it as gospel, but generally, I played a pattern like this:

First 3 measures: Down-Down-Down-Up-Down-Up
Fourth measure: Down-Up-Down-Up-Down-Up-Down-Up

For a better understanding of how these quarter notes and eighth notes work with strumming, please spend some time with my Strumming Tutorial.