In late 1970, George Harrison finally stepped out from behind the Beatles and into the center of the radio. “My Sweet Lord,” the first single from All Things Must Pass, was a slide-guitar hymn dressed as a pop single: Hare Krishna chants braided into a gospel refrain, a prayer you could dance to. It became the first No. 1 hit by a former Beatle on the Billboard Hot 100. Then the lawyers arrived.
The complaint did not come from the Chiffons as a group. It came from Bright Tunes Music Corp., the New York publisher that owned “He’s So Fine,” the 1963 smash written by Ronald “Ronnie” Mack and recorded by the Chiffons. Bright Tunes filed suit on February 10, 1971, while Harrison’s single was still on the charts. The claim was simple and brutal: Harrison had taken Mack’s song, changed the words, and made a fortune.
That is how a girl-group record from the Kennedy years became the decade’s most famous music lawsuit.
Two hits, seven years apart
“He’s So Fine” was a New York street-corner record that went national. Mack, a young Bronx songwriter, brought it to Bright Tunes, a company tied to the Tokens. The Chiffons — Judy Craig, Patricia Bennett, Barbara Lee, and Sylvia Peterson — cut it, and in the spring of 1963 it sat at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 for five weeks. In Britain it reached No. 12. Harrison later admitted he knew the record. Almost anyone who listened to pop radio in the early Sixties did.
Mack never lived to see the lawsuit. He died at 23, not long after the song’s success. The copyright, and the fight over it, stayed with the publisher.
Harrison wrote “My Sweet Lord” in December 1969 while on tour in Europe with Delaney & Bonnie. He said the spark was not the Chiffons at all, but the Edwin Hawkins Singers’ 1969 gospel hit “Oh Happy Day.” He offered the song first to Billy Preston, who recorded it for Encouraging Words. Harrison then cut his own version with Phil Spector for All Things Must Pass. The single exploded. So did the resemblance.
Even other musicians heard it. John Lennon, never shy about a verdict, later said Harrison “walked right into it.” “He must have known, you know, he’s smarter than that.” Harrison’s own account was different. In I Me Mine he wrote that he had not been consciously aware of the similarity when he wrote the song. When people started pointing it out, he thought:
why didn’t I realize?
What the court actually compared
The case sat for years. Bright Tunes went into receivership. Settlement talks sputtered. Harrison’s camp offered money to end it; Bright Tunes wanted more. By the time Judge Richard Owen of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York heard the liability trial on February 23–25, 1976, the hit had become a legal specimen.
Owen was not only a federal judge. He was a composer. He listened like one.
Both songs, he found, were built from two short musical ideas. Motif A was a three-note figure — G-E-D — repeated four times. Motif B was G-A-C-A-C. “He’s So Fine” used A four times, then B four times. “My Sweet Lord” used A four times, then B three times, with a short bridge where the fourth B would have been. Owen also pointed to a grace note sitting in the same place in both tunes, and to harmonies he called identical. “It is perfectly obvious to the listener,” he wrote, “that in musical terms the two songs are virtually identical.”
Harrison testified. Experts testified. The defense argued that those note combinations were common property, the kind of thing pop writers grab without thinking. Owen was not persuaded. On August 31, 1976 — amended the next day — he issued the opinion that made the case immortal: Bright Tunes Music Corp. v. Harrisongs Music, Ltd., 420 F. Supp. 177.
He did not call Harrison a thief. He called him something stranger.
“Subconscious plagiarism”
“Did Harrison deliberately use the music of ‘He’s So Fine’? I do not believe he did so deliberately,” Owen wrote. “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.”
That last clause is why the case still sits in law-school casebooks. Copyright does not require a smoking-gun confession. It requires access plus substantial similarity. A melody can live in a musician’s ear for years, then come back dressed as a new idea. Owen described the process almost tenderly: Harrison reached for a combination of sounds that felt right because, somewhere below the surface, he already knew it worked. His conscious mind did not remember the Chiffons. His hands did.
Harrison later put the feeling into a song of his own. “This Song,” from the 1976 album Thirty Three & 1/3, is a sly courtroom blues: “This song has nothing ’bout my sweet lord.” He had won the charts and lost the principle. The money fight was just getting started.
Then Allen Klein bought the other side
Damages were supposed to be next. They were delayed by a plot twist worthy of the Beatles’ own business war.
Allen Klein had managed Harrison, Lennon, and Starr after the split with McCartney. He was in the room when the Bright Tunes suit first landed and had even talked about buying the catalog as a way to bury the case. Harrison later broke with him. In 1978, Klein’s company, ABKCO, bought Bright Tunes — the “He’s So Fine” copyright and the lawsuit itself — for $587,000. The former manager was now the plaintiff.
Harrison’s lawyers argued that Klein had used confidential knowledge from his time on Harrison’s side. Judge Owen agreed that Klein’s conduct mattered. In a February 19, 1981 damages opinion, he calculated that “My Sweet Lord” had earned about $2.15 million, and that three-quarters of that success — $1,599,987 — could be attributed to the music taken from “He’s So Fine.” But he would not let Klein collect the full windfall. ABKCO would hold the acquired rights in trust for Harrison, to be transferred when Harrison paid $587,000 — the same price Klein had paid for the catalog.
Appeals followed in 1983, 1988, and 1991. Foreign claims were settled on different splits. The last knots were not tied until the 1990s. By the end, Harrison controlled “He’s So Fine” in North America and the United Kingdom; Klein’s side kept it elsewhere. After twenty years, Harrison liked to joke, he suddenly owned the song that had sued him.
What the Chiffons did in the meantime
The group that gave the original hit its voice was mostly a bystander in court. In 1975, while the case was still pending, the Chiffons released their own version of “My Sweet Lord,” a wry bid to ride the publicity. On the fade they slip back into “He’s So Fine,” as if to make the joke audible. It did not become a hit. It did make the resemblance impossible to un-hear.
That is the uncomfortable fact at the center of the story. You can grant Harrison his sincerity — the Krishna lyric, the Hawkins inspiration, the slide-guitar glow that “He’s So Fine” never had — and still hear the skeleton of Mack’s tune underneath. A three-note hook is a small thing. In pop, small things are the whole business.
Why the case still matters
“My Sweet Lord” did not vanish. It remains the song most people think of when they think of Harrison alone: the quiet Beatle finding a public voice, and finding out that the radio never forgets. The ruling did not say he was a cynic. It said the ear has a memory of its own.
Harrison never pretended the episode was painless. “It’s difficult to just start writing again after you’ve been through that,” he told Rolling Stone. “When I put the radio on, every tune I hear sounds like something else.” He also refused to wear it as shame. “I don’t feel guilty or bad about it,” he wrote later. If Mack had lived, he guessed, there might never have been a lawsuit at all. “God knows I never sued anybody about all the songs of mine that got stolen.”
The doctrine outlived both men. Later cases — from pop hooks to hip-hop samples — still circle the same questions Owen asked in 1976. How close is too close? Does it matter that you did not mean it? What does a songwriter owe the records that raised him?
In the end the file is not really “the Chiffons versus George Harrison.” It is a 1963 Bronx love song, a 1970 spiritual, a publisher with a claim, a manager who switched sides, and a judge who believed a man could copy a melody without knowing he had done it. The records are still easy to play back to back. That is why the case never quite ended. The songs keep making the argument themselves.
