"My Sweet Lord" is a song by English musician and former Beatle George Harrison, released in November 1970 on his multi-platinum triple album All Things Must Pass. Also issued as a single – Harrison's first as a solo artist "My Sweet Lord" topped charts worldwide and was the biggest-selling single of 1971 in the UK. The song was originally given to fellow Apple Records artist Billy Preston to record and was released on Preston's Encouraging Words album in September 1970. In America and Britain, the song was the first number 1 single by an ex-Beatle.
Harrison wrote "My Sweet Lord" in praise of the Hindu god Krishna, while at the same time intending the lyrics to serve as a call to abandon religious sectarianism, through his deliberate blending of Hebrew "hallelujah"s with chants of "Hare Krishna" and Vedic prayer. The recording features co-producer Phil Spector's Wall of Sound treatment and heralded the arrival of Harrison's much-admired slide guitar technique – described by one biographer as being "musically as distinctive a signature as the mark of Zorro".
Later in the 1970s, "My Sweet Lord" was at the centre of a heavily publicised plagiarism suit, due to its similarity to the Ronnie Mack song "He's So Fine", a 1963 hit for the New York girl group the Chiffons. In 1976, Harrison was found to have subconsciously plagiarised the earlier tune, a verdict that had repercussions throughout the music industry. He claimed to have used the out-of-copyright "Oh Happy Day", a Christian hymn, as his inspiration for the song's melody.
Harrison performed "My Sweet Lord" at the Concert for Bangladesh in August 1971 and it remains the most popular composition from his post-Beatles career. He reworked the song as "My Sweet Lord (2000)" for inclusion as a bonus track on the 30th anniversary reissue of All Things Must Pass. Numerous artists have covered the song – including Andy Williams, Peggy Lee, Edwin Starr, Johnny Mathis, Nina Simone, Julio Iglesias, Richie Havens, Megadeth, Boy George, Elton John, Jim James, Bonnie Bramlett and Elliott Smith. "My Sweet Lord" is ranked 460th on Rolling Stone magazine's list of "the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time". The song reached number 1 in Britain for a second time when re-released in January 2002, two months after Harrison's death. As of 2014, "My Sweet Lord" remains the last number 1 hit by a former member of the Beatles.
George Harrison began writing "My Sweet Lord" in December 1969, when he, Billy Preston and Eric Clapton were all in Copenhagen, Denmark, guesting on Delaney & Bonnie's European tour. By this point, Harrison had already written the gospel-influenced "Hear Me Lord" and "Gopala Krishna", and (with Preston) the African-American spiritual "Sing One for the Lord"; he had also produced two religious-themed hit singles on the Beatles' Apple Records label – Preston's "That's the Way God Planned It" and Radha Krishna Temple (London)'s "Hare Krishna Mantra". The latter was a musical adaptation of an ancient Vaishnava Hindu mantra which rose to prominence about 500 years ago, performed by members of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON), colloquially known as "the Hare Krishna movement". Harrison was now looking to fuse the messages of the Christian and Gaudiya Vaishnava faiths, into what musical biographer Simon Leng terms "gospel incantation with a Vedic chant".
The Copenhagen stopover marked the end of the Delaney & Bonnie tour, with a three-night residency at the Falkoner Theatre on 10–12 December. According to Harrison's 1976 court testimony, "My Sweet Lord" was conceived while the band members were attending a backstage press conference and he had ducked out to an upstairs room at the theatre. Harrison recalled "vamping" chords on guitar and alternating between sung phrases of "hallelujah" and "Hare Krishna"; he later took the idea to the others, and the chorus vocals were developed further. Band leader Delaney Bramlett's more recent version of events is that the idea originated from Harrison asking him how to go about writing a genuine gospel song, and that Bramlett demonstrated by scat singing the words "Oh my Lord" while wife Bonnie and singer Rita Coolidge added gospel "hallelujah"s in reply. British music journalist John Harris has questioned the accuracy of Bramlett's account, however, comparing it to a fisherman's "It was this big"-type bragging story.
Using as his inspiration the Edwin Hawkins Singers' rendition of an eighteenth-century hymn, "Oh Happy Day", Harrison continued working on the theme and soon completed the song, with some input from Preston.
Composition[edit]
The lyrics to "My Sweet Lord" reflect Harrison's often-stated desire for a direct relationship with God, and were worded with a simplicity that made them identifiable to all believers, regardless of religious denomination. Author Ian Inglis observes a degree of "understandable" impatience in the verse-one line "Really want to see you, Lord, but it takes so long, my Lord". By the end of the song's second verse, Harrison declares a wish to "know" God also and attempts to reconcile this impatience:
I really want to know you
Really want to go with you
Really want to show you, Lord, that it won't take long, my Lord ...
Following this verse, in reply to the main vocal's repetition of the song title, Harrison devised a choral line singing the Hebrew word of praise, "hallelujah", common in the Christian and Jewish religions. Later in the song, after an instrumental break, these voices return, now chanting most of the sixteen-word Hare Krishna mantra, known more reverentially as the Maha mantra:
These Sanskrit words are the principal mantra of the Hare Krishna faith, with which Harrison identified, although he did not actually belong to any spiritual organisation. In his 1980 autobiography, I, Me, Mine, he would explain that the blending of gospel "hallelujah"s with chanted "Hare Krishna"s was intended to show that the two phrases meant "quite the same thing", as well as to get listeners chanting the Maha mantra "before they knew what was going on!"
Following the Sanskrit lines, "hallelujah" is sung twice more before the mantra is repeated, along with an ancient Vedic prayer. According to Hindu tradition, this prayer is dedicated to a devotee's spiritual teacher, or guru, and equates the teacher to the divine Trimurti –Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva (or Maheshvara) – and to the Godhead, Brahman.
Gurur Brahmā, gurur Viṣṇur
gurur devo Maheśvaraḥ
gurus sākṣāt, paraṃ Brahma
tasmai śrī gurave namaḥ.
A former ISKCON devotee, author Joshua Greene translates the lines as meaning: "I offer homage to my guru, who is as great as the creator Brahma, the maintainer Vishnu, the destroyer Shiva, and who is the very energy of God." The prayer is the third verse of the Guru Stotram, a fourteen-verse hymn in praise of Hindu spiritual teachers.
Writing in the October 1987 issue of Popular Music, Mark Sullivan observed that various Christian fundamentalist anti-rock activists objected to the chanting of "Hare Krishna" in "My Sweet Lord" as anti-Christian or satanic, while some born-again Christians had adopted the song as an anthem. A number of commentators have identified the mantra and the simplicity of Harrison's lyrics as central to the song's universality. "[The] lyrics are not directed at a specific manifestation of a single faith's deity," Inglis writes, "but rather to the concept of one god whose essential nature is unaffected by particular interpretations and who pervades everything, is present everywhere, is all-knowing and all-powerful, and transcends time and space ... All of us – Christian, Hindu, Muslim, Jew, Buddhist – can address our gods in the same way, using the same phrase ['my sweet Lord']."
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