“Even Though Subconsciously Accomplished”: How George Harrison’s “My Sweet Lord” Became Music’s Most Famous Lawsuit

In December 1969, George Harrison slipped away from a press conference in Copenhagen, went upstairs to a quiet room, and picked up a guitar. He was on tour as a guest artist with Delaney & Bonnie, still officially a Beatle, still rationed to two songs per album by the Lennon-McCartney machine. Upstairs, alone, he started vamping on some chords and alternating two phrases — “hallelujah” and “Hare Krishna” — over and over, trying to fuse a Christian gospel shout with a Hindu chant. He had been knocked out by the Edwin Hawkins Singers’ “Oh Happy Day,” a funky gospel reworking of an eighteenth-century hymn that was a worldwide hit that year, and he thought: I’ll write another “Oh Happy Day.” What came out, instead, was “My Sweet Lord.”

Eleven months later, that upstairs-room improvisation was the biggest single in the world — the first number-one by an ex-Beatle, the biggest-selling single of 1971 in Britain, a hymn of devotion sung by millions. And three months after that, it became the most expensive song George Harrison ever wrote. On February 10, 1971, the publishers of a 1963 girl-group hit called “He’s So Fine” sued him for copyright infringement, setting in motion a legal battle that would last twenty-seven years, produce one of the most quoted phrases in music law — “subconscious plagiarism” — and end with Harrison, incredibly, owning the very song he was accused of stealing.

This is the story of “My Sweet Lord”: the hymn, the hit, the lawsuit, the betrayal by his own manager, and the verdict that changed copyright law forever.

Copenhagen, December 1969

The full story of the song’s creation is worth telling, because Harrison himself told it — under oath. The setting was Copenhagen, Denmark, in December 1969. Harrison was there with Billy Preston and Eric Clapton as guest artists on Delaney & Bonnie’s European tour, a rootsy, soulful revue that was the hottest live ticket of that winter. The tour’s final stop was a three-night residency at Copenhagen’s Falkoner Theatre, December 10 through 12.

According to Harrison’s 1976 court testimony, the song was conceived during a backstage press conference. While the band members sat answering reporters’ questions, Harrison ducked out, went upstairs to a quiet room at the theatre, and started vamping chords on a guitar, alternating sung phrases of “hallelujah” and “Hare Krishna.” He had been, in his words, knocked out by the Edwin Hawkins Singers’ “Oh Happy Day” — a gospel reworking of an eighteenth-century hymn that had been an international smash in 1969 — and he wanted to write something in that spirit: a genuine gospel song, but one that fused the Christian and Hindu devotions he was studying. “Hallelujah and Hare Krishna are quite the same thing,” he would later explain. The idea was to erase the sectarian line — to write a prayer that belonged to everyone.

He brought the sketch back downstairs, and the Delaney & Bonnie crew helped develop it. Band leader Delaney Bramlett’s later account adds color: Harrison asked him how to go about writing a genuine gospel song, and Bramlett demonstrated by scat-singing “Oh my Lord” while his wife Bonnie and singer Rita Coolidge answered with gospel “hallelujah”s. Billy Preston bashed out chords on a backstage piano. The chorus grew into a four-part harmony, half church choir and half ashram chant.

At the time, Harrison had no plans for a solo album — the Beatles were still officially together, and he was still rationed to his two songs per record. He reportedly intended to offer “My Sweet Lord” to Edwin Hawkins himself. Instead, after the tour, he decided to record it with Billy Preston, for whom he was co-producing a second Apple Records album, “Encouraging Words.” They cut it at Olympic Studios in London in January 1970, and Preston’s version — with Harrison co-producing — appeared on “Encouraging Words” in September 1970, a full two months before Harrison’s own single. Think about that: the most famous song of George Harrison’s solo career was first released by someone else, as a friendly production favor. He gave away his signature before he knew it was his signature.

The Quiet Beatle’s Loud Debut

To understand what “My Sweet Lord” meant in 1970, you have to remember who George Harrison had been. For seven years, he was the quiet Beatle — the lead guitarist, the youngest member, the songwriter allowed two tracks per album while Lennon and McCartney filled the rest. He had written great songs in that straitjacket: “Something,” “Here Comes the Sun,” “While My Guitar Gently Weeps.” But the world had never heard what he could do with a full canvas.

The Beatles were effectively over by the autumn of 1970, though the corpse was still warm. Harrison had spent the year stockpiling songs, and when he finally got his chance, he didn’t make an album — he made a triple album. “All Things Must Pass,” released on November 27, 1970, was a sprawling, Spector-produced cathedral of sound, and its lead single, released four days earlier on November 23, was “My Sweet Lord,” backed with “Isn’t It a Pity.”

The record was a wall-of-sound prayer. Produced by Harrison with Phil Spector, it piled guitars, voices, and echo into a gleaming edifice of devotion, with Harrison singing his longing for the divine over a melody of almost insolent catchiness. The lyric did something radical for a pop single: it blended the Hebrew “hallelujah” with the Sanskrit “Hare Krishna,” alternating Christian and Hindu devotions as if they were, as Harrison later put it, “quite the same thing.” It was a call to abandon religious sectarianism disguised as a singalong — spirituality you could hum.

The world responded instantly. “My Sweet Lord” reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100 in the chart dated December 26, 1970, and stayed there for four weeks. In Britain, where it was released on January 15, 1971, it spent five weeks at number one and became the biggest-selling single of 1971. It topped charts around the world. It was certified gold in America by December 14, 1970 — barely three weeks after release — for sales of over a million copies. And it made history: the first number-one single by a former Beatle, and the biggest-selling solo Beatles single of the 1970s. The quiet Beatle had, at a stroke, outsold them all.

There was even a delicious footnote to the song’s birth: Harrison had originally given “My Sweet Lord” to his friend Billy Preston. Harrison co-produced Preston’s version, which appeared on Preston’s Apple Records album “Encouraging Words” in September 1970 — two months before Harrison’s own single. Harrison then took the song back for “All Things Must Pass.” It was a mark of how little he initially grasped what he had: he gave away his future signature song as a friendly gesture, then reclaimed it when he realized it was the key to his solo career.

The Wall-of-Sound Prayer

The recording of “My Sweet Lord” for “All Things Must Pass” was a summit meeting of rock royalty, wrapped in Phil Spector’s cathedral of echo. Spector, fresh from producing the Beatles’ “Let It Be” (with Harrison and Lennon’s blessing, over McCartney’s objections), co-produced the track with Harrison, and the sessions drew a staggering cast: Billy Preston on keyboards, Ringo Starr on drums, Eric Clapton on guitar, and the members of Badfinger — the young Apple Records band — filling out the sound. It was, in effect, the cream of the post-Beatles world, gathered to launch the quiet one’s solo career.

Spector’s wall-of-sound treatment was the perfect vehicle for the song’s ambition. Where the Copenhagen sketch had been intimate — a man and a guitar in an upstairs room — the record was vast: layers of acoustic guitars, massed backing vocals chanting the hallelujahs and Hare Krishnas, Harrison’s slide guitar crying over the top, all of it bathed in the cavernous reverb that was Spector’s signature. The effect was to make a personal prayer sound like a congregational one, as if the whole world were singing along. Which, within weeks, it was.

“All Things Must Pass” itself was a statement of abundance: a triple album, the first triple studio album by a solo rock artist, stuffed with the songs Harrison had been stockpiling through the Beatles’ final years. Critics would later argue it was the finest solo album by any ex-Beatle, and “My Sweet Lord” was its shining portal — the track that announced, unmistakably, that the quiet Beatle had been the one holding back the most.

“He’s So Fine”

The trouble started, as trouble so often does, with someone listening closely. “He’s So Fine” was a 1963 hit for the Chiffons, an American girl group, written by a young songwriter named Ronald Mack and produced by the Tokens (of “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” fame) for their Bright Tunes production company. It was a monster: a number-one single in the United States, built on a bouncy, ascending melody and the Chiffons’ bright harmonies, with a signature “doo-lang, doo-lang” backing figure. Mack died in 1963, shortly after the song became a hit, at just twenty-three years old. Bright Tunes Music Corporation owned the copyright.

When “My Sweet Lord” conquered the airwaves in late 1970, the people at Bright Tunes heard something familiar. The melodic architecture of Harrison’s chorus — the ascending figure, the rhythmic phrasing — bore a striking resemblance to “He’s So Fine.” Bright Tunes pointed specifically to the similarity between the Chiffons’ “I don’t know how I’m gonna do it” and Harrison’s “I really want to see you” — the same melodic shape carrying different words. On February 10, 1971, barely two months after “My Sweet Lord” hit number one, Bright Tunes Music Corporation filed suit against Harrison for copyright infringement.

Harrison’s position was straightforward: he hadn’t copied anything. He testified that his conscious inspiration had been “Oh Happy Day,” the Edwin Hawkins Singers’ gospel hit — a song built on an eighteenth-century hymn, long out of copyright — and that “My Sweet Lord” had been largely improvised, “not so fixed” in his mind, as he put it. “I wasn’t consciously aware of the similarity between ‘He’s So Fine’ and ‘My Sweet Lord’ when I wrote the song,” he said. He admitted he knew “He’s So Fine” — it had been a ubiquitous hit during his formative years, inescapable on British radio in 1963 — but knowing a song and copying it are different things. He had, he insisted, written his own melody out of his own head.

He tried to settle. At one point, Harrison offered Bright Tunes $148,000 in damages to make the case go away — a substantial sum, and a sign that he wanted the matter ended. But Bright Tunes wasn’t interested in a payoff. They wanted what plaintiffs in these cases almost never get and almost always demand: a complete surrender of Harrison’s copyright in “My Sweet Lord.” They wanted the song. Harrison refused. And so the case ground on — for five years before it even reached a courtroom.

The Trial: February 1976

The case finally went to trial in February 1976, in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, before Judge Richard Owen. What followed was one of the strangest spectacles in music history: a federal judge, aided by expert musicologists from both sides, dissecting two pop songs note by note, motif by motif, in open court.

The analysis was meticulous and, for Harrison, devastating. The experts broke both songs into their component melodic cells and laid them side by side. The ascending three-note figure that opens the “He’s So Fine” chorus. The answering phrase. The rhythmic structure. Heard in isolation, stripped of production and lyric, the melodies were — in the judge’s eventual phrase — “virtually identical.” Harrison’s own testimony, honest and unguarded, may have hurt him most: he admitted his familiarity with “He’s So Fine,” admitted it had been all over the radio in his youth, and could offer no conscious account of where his melody had come from, precisely because, on his account, it had come from nowhere — from improvisation, from the air.

On August 31, 1976, Judge Owen issued his ruling, and it contained a phrase that would echo through music law for the next half-century. “Did Harrison deliberately use the music of ‘He’s So Fine’?” the judge wrote. “I do not believe he did so deliberately.” And then the hammer: “Nevertheless, it is clear that ‘My Sweet Lord’ is the very same song as ‘He’s So Fine’ with different words, and Harrison had access to ‘He’s So Fine.’ This is, under the law, infringement of copyright, and is no less so even though subconsciously accomplished.”

Subconscious plagiarism. The court had found that Harrison’s subconscious mind had retained the melody of “He’s So Fine” from years of exposure, and that it had surfaced, unlabeled, when he sat down to write — his own creativity serving back to him, as one commentator later put it, a tune that felt like his own but wasn’t. Intent, the court held, was not an element of copyright infringement. Copying was copying, whether the mind knew it or not.

The ruling sent a chill through the music industry that has never fully lifted. Every songwriter absorbs influences; every melody is built from fragments of things heard before. The “My Sweet Lord” decision meant that the law would not excuse you for not knowing you were copying. Your subconscious was no defense. It remains the origin case for the subconscious-copying doctrine in American copyright law, cited in casebooks and argued over in law schools to this day.

“This Song”

Harrison took the verdict the way he took most things: with dry, cosmic amusement, and then with a song. In 1976, stung but undefeated, he wrote “This Song” — a wry, rollicking commentary on the lawsuit, complete with lyrics about the whole absurd business of being sued for a melody. The record’s promotional video mocked the court proceedings outright, with Harrison and friends staging a parody trial. “This Song” reached number 25 on the Billboard Hot 100 — a Top 25 hit about a copyright lawsuit, which may be the most George Harrison sentence ever written.

But the humor masked a real wound. Harrison later admitted that the case gave him a kind of creative paranoia — a fear, when writing, that some buried melody might surface and cost him another fortune. For a songwriter whose gift was melodic invention, it was a cruel affliction: the very faculty the court had punished was the one he needed to do his job. Friends said he became cautious, second-guessing his own tunes, hearing lawsuits in every chorus. The man who had written “Something” without a second thought now wrote with a lawyer on his shoulder.

And the case was far from over. The 1976 ruling had decided liability — Harrison had infringed. But the question of damages was scheduled for a separate proceeding in November 1976, and that proceeding would be delayed for years. What happened next introduced the strangest character in an already strange story: Allen Klein.

The Klein Twist

Allen Klein was the hard-nosed American businessman who had become the Beatles’ manager in 1969, over Paul McCartney’s bitter objections — the man at the center of the band’s final breakup. By the mid-1970s, Harrison had broken with Klein, as had the other ex-Beatles, in a haze of lawsuits and recriminations. But during the first phase of the “My Sweet Lord” case, Klein had been Harrison’s manager and legal adviser — the man in Harrison’s corner.

Then, in 1978, Klein did something extraordinary: he purchased Bright Tunes Music Corporation — the plaintiff — for $587,000. Overnight, Harrison’s former manager became his legal adversary, the owner of the very claim he had once helped defend against. The conflict was so brazen that it became a case study in legal ethics: the man who had advised Harrison on the lawsuit now owned the lawsuit.

The damages trial finally took place in February 1981. By then, the posture of the case was surreal: Klein, through Bright Tunes, was demanding $1.6 million — the full measure of damages, a figure the court had computed at $1,599,987. Harrison argued, with considerable justice, that Klein had bought the claim cheap precisely because of his insider knowledge, and that awarding Klein a windfall would reward disloyalty.

The court’s solution was elegant and devastating. The judge ruled that Harrison would satisfy the judgment by purchasing Bright Tunes itself from Klein — for $587,000, the exact amount Klein had paid for it. In other words: Harrison would pay no windfall. He would simply buy the company, at Klein’s cost, and thereby acquire the copyright to “He’s So Fine” — the song he had been accused of stealing — along with the rights to “My Sweet Lord.” The plagiarist, if plagiarist he was, ended up owning both songs.

It was a remarkable outcome, but it didn’t end the litigation. Appeals and accounting disputes — the ABKCO Music v. Harrisongs proceedings — dragged through the federal courts in 1983 and again in 1991. The matter did not formally conclude until March 1998, twenty-seven years after Bright Tunes filed suit. It remains one of the longest-running copyright cases in American music history.

Twenty-Seven Years in Court

Step back and look at the full timeline, because it is genuinely staggering — a lawsuit that lasted longer than the Beatles’ entire recording career:

February 10, 1971: Bright Tunes files suit, two months after “My Sweet Lord” hits number one. Harrison is twenty-seven years old, at the absolute peak of his solo fame.

1971–1976: Five years of pre-trial maneuvering. Settlement talks collapse when Bright Tunes demands Harrison’s entire copyright rather than the $148,000 he offers. The song, meanwhile, keeps selling, keeps playing, keeps earning — with the royalties effectively frozen in legal limbo.

February 1976: The liability trial. Experts dissect the melodies note by note.

August 31, 1976: Judge Owen rules — “subconscious plagiarism.” Harrison is thirty-three.

1976: Harrison answers with “This Song,” a Top 25 hit that laughs at the whole affair, because what else can you do?

1978: Allen Klein buys Bright Tunes for $587,000, switching sides from Harrison’s adviser to Harrison’s adversary.

February 1981: The damages trial. Harrison is ordered to buy Bright Tunes from Klein for $587,000 — Klein’s cost, not the $1.6 million demanded. Harrison ends up owning “He’s So Fine.”

1983 and 1991: Appeals grind through the Second Circuit (ABKCO Music v. Harrisongs Music), over accounting and the terms of the buyout.

March 1998: The case formally ends. Harrison is fifty-five. The song is twenty-eight years old — older than he was when he wrote it.

Twenty-seven years. Think about what that means for a human life: Harrison lived with this lawsuit from his late twenties to his mid-fifties, through the rest of his recording career, through marriage and fatherhood, through illness. It outlasted record labels, managers, marriages, and fashions. It became, in a real sense, the background music of his adult life — a legal drone underneath everything he did. And through it all, the song itself never stopped being what it was on the day he wrote it in Copenhagen: a prayer. The lawyers owned the paperwork. Nobody owned the feeling.

The Song Everybody Sang

Lost in the legal saga is a simpler fact: “My Sweet Lord” was one of the most covered songs of its era, because it was one of the most singable. Aretha Franklin, Nina Simone, Johnny Mathis, Peggy Lee, Richie Havens, Julio Iglesias — artists across every genre and generation took it on, drawn to a melody so natural it felt like it had always existed. (Which, as the lawsuit established, it sort of had.) The covers are a reminder of what the court case obscured: whatever its melodic ancestry, the song as Harrison made it — the lyric, the arrangement, the devotional ecstasy of it — was unmistakably his.

The most poetic cover, though, came from the unlikeliest source. In 1975, in the middle of the lawsuit, the Chiffons themselves recorded a version of “My Sweet Lord” — the women whose 1963 hit was at the center of the case, singing the song accused of copying them. It is hard to imagine a more graceful gesture, or a stranger one: the alleged victims embracing the alleged theft, turning a courtroom battle into a harmony. If there is a single image that captures the absurdity and the beauty of the whole affair, it is the Chiffons, a decade past their own heyday, singing “my sweet Lord” back to the man being sued for their melody.

The Song Outlives the Lawsuit

Here is the final irony, and the most Harrison-like thing about the whole affair: the lawsuit never diminished the song. Not for a moment. “My Sweet Lord” remained what it had always been — a hymn, a singalong, a prayer — while the lawyers argued over who owned the notes. Harrison himself seemed to understand this. In a 2000 interview with Billboard, looking back on the decades of litigation, he said simply: “After 20 years, eventually the judge awarded the song to me — and the money that had been taken for ‘My Sweet Lord.’”

He revisited the song, too. For the 2001 thirtieth-anniversary remaster of “All Things Must Pass,” Harrison re-recorded “My Sweet Lord” as “My Sweet Lord (2000),” stripping out some of the elements that had figured in the court’s analysis — a quiet, musical answer to the verdict, made on his own terms. And after his death on November 29, 2001, the song was re-released as a single in Britain in January 2002, where it went to number one once again — “My Sweet Lord” topping the charts in a new century, with proceeds going to the Material World Charitable Foundation, the charity Harrison had founded in 1973.

The Chiffons, for their part, had the last laugh of a different kind: in 1975, in the middle of the lawsuit, they recorded their own version of “My Sweet Lord” — the alleged victims covering the alleged theft, a gesture of such perfect pop absurdity that it belongs in the story’s hall of fame.

What endures, though, is the song and the phrase. “Subconscious plagiarism” entered the language because a federal judge needed words for what George Harrison had done: absorbed a melody so completely, in youth, that it came back to him decades later feeling like inspiration. Every songwriter since has lived under the regime that case created — the knowledge that your own musical memory can betray you, that the tune you think you invented might be one you merely remembered. It is a frightening doctrine and, in a way, a profound one: it treats the musical mind as a palimpsest, layered with everything it has ever heard, and holds the artist responsible for all of it.

There is a philosophical sting in the verdict that goes beyond law. If Harrison was telling the truth — and the judge believed he was — then “My Sweet Lord” was an honest act of creation that the law called a theft. The melody felt like his because, in the only way that mattered to him, it was his: it had lived in him so long, through so many listenings, that his subconscious had made it part of his musical vocabulary, the way a writer’s vocabulary is made of every book they’ve ever read. The court’s answer was that vocabulary has owners. It is a defensible legal position and a slightly heartbreaking human one — and it is why musicians still talk about this case with a shudder. It suggests that originality, the thing artists prize most, might be partly an illusion, and that the law will charge you for the illusion anyway.

Harrison never stopped writing melodies. The paranoia faded; the gift didn’t. But he carried the case with him, the way you carry a scar — visible, instructive, part of the story. He had set out, in a quiet room in Copenhagen, to write another “Oh Happy Day.” He wrote, instead, the most consequential three minutes in the history of music copyright: a prayer that became a hit, a hit that became a lawsuit, and a lawsuit that became a law. The Lord he was singing to, one suspects, would have appreciated the cosmic joke. “My sweet Lord,” indeed.