Back in 2016, twelve year old Grace VanderWaal turned up on America’s Got Talent with her ukulele in hand and stunned the audience with her original song I Don’t Know My Name.
Grace went on to win America’s Got Talent and subsequently signed a record deal with Columbia Records.
Today we’re going to learn how to play the song that she debuted on America’s Got Talent back in 2016 ‘I Don’t Know My Name’.
Let’s do it.
The Chords
The good news is this is a very time song that uses just four chords and those four chords are very likely the first four chords you ever learned. Yep, you guessed it: C, F, Am and G.
In Grace’s original performance on America’s Got Talent she actually plays with a capo at the second fret which would give us D, G, Bm and but for the purpose of this lesson we’re going to run with the chords above.
Here are the chord boxes for the song.
Strumming
Grace does us even more favours with the strumming as she uses the old faithful D DU UDU pretty much throughout the entire song. The only real exceptions to those are when Grace drops to a single strum per chord and also to an all down strum variation.
This is a pretty smart move as strumming D DU UDU across the entire song using the same four chords does get a little boring.
Grace has another trick up her sleeve too in order to help with the variation. She switches up to strumming double speed, it’s the same pattern but it gives the song a little something else.
Song Structure
Here’s the chords alongside the lyrics so you can play at your own leisure…
The Next Level
If you’ve got this one down pretty well (and I’m very confident that you will), then you could take a look at this solo fingerpicked version of the song. It’s definitely a step up and as it combines the melody and harmony you can leave the singing behind.
The tab for this version is available over at my Patreon page alongside a lot of other songs too.