George Harrison My Sweet Lord

Written after the former Beatle had been inspired by an old gospel song, it’s remembered as much for the plagiarism legal battle it led to as it is for just being a lovely song.

- Bill DeMain

It was the mantra that took over the world. George Harrison’s first solo No.1 single stands alone in rock history for going against the secular grain as a full-on love song to the Creator. While there’d been some precedent with both the Beach Boys’ God Only Knows and Norman Greenbaum’s Spirit In The Sky, My Sweet Lord was different. The lyric offers nothing but praise – loaded with 40 ‘Lord’s 16 ‘hallelujah’s and nine ‘Hare Krishna’s.

Harrison started writing the song while he was on tour with Delaney & Bonnie in Sweden in late 1969. His main inspiration for it was Oh Happy Day, an old gospel tune rearranged into a hit that year for the Edwin Hawkins Singers. Responding to that record’s joyful call-and-response vibe, Harrison said: “It really just knocked me out… I just felt a great feeling of the Lord. So I thought: ‘I’ll write another Oh Happy Day, which became My Sweet Lord.”

Harrison knew the song was both a departure and a commercial risk, both in its spiritual theme and its specific references to the Hare Krishna movement, which back then was a favourite punch bag of comedians.

“I was sticking my neck out on the chopping block,” Harrison wrote in his autobiography I Me Mine. “I thought a lot about whether to do it or not, because I would be committing myself publicly and I anticipated that a lot of people might get weird about it.”