Ben E. King’s career as a singer, both with The Drifters and as a solo artist, sits on top of arrangements that featured horn sections and string parts you’ll never play on a single acoustic guitar. That sounds like a barrier for a beginner, but the underlying chord progressions are some of the simplest in popular music: classic doo-wop loops like I-vi-IV-V that repeat through entire songs.
Stand by Me is on this site already and is the song to start with. The progression (G, Em, C, D) and the bass line are the entire harmonic content of the track. Once that’s in your fingers, you can play Spanish Harlem, which uses three open chords (D, A, G) over a slightly busier rhythm. Both songs reward the same approach: keep the strum quiet, let the bass note ring, and put the energy into the timing rather than into volume.
Where it gets interesting is when you arrange one of these songs for solo voice and guitar. King’s original recordings filled space with horns and strings; without those, you have to think about how to fill the gaps. Light arpeggiation between strums, an occasional walking bass note, a held chord at the end of a phrase. These small additions are what separate a chord-chart performance from a real arrangement, and the simplicity of King’s harmony makes his catalog the right place to practice them.
The thing worth borrowing from King’s work isn’t a guitar technique. It’s the sense of how much weight a singer can put on simple changes. Three chords plus the right voice is enough for a song that lasts sixty years. If you can internalize that, you’ll stop worrying about needing fancy chord vocabulary and start focusing on what actually makes a song land.