Billy Preston – My Sweet Lord (Live)

George Harrison gave the song away, and Billy Preston got it on record first

In December 1969, George Harrison, Eric Clapton and Billy Preston were in Copenhagen, guesting on Delaney & Bonnie’s European tour, when Harrison began building a song out of two words. He wanted to set the Hebrew hallelujah against the Hare Krishna chant and see whether an audience would notice it had been moved from one faith to another. Preston contributed to the writing. Harrison was still a Beatle at that point with no plans for a solo career, so when the song was finished he did the obvious thing with it: he gave it to somebody else.

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Preston cut it at Olympic Sound Studios in London in January 1970 with Harrison co-producing. The backing vocals came from the Edwin Hawkins Singers, which was not a coincidence — Harrison had taken his idea for the song from the Hawkins arrangement of Oh Happy Day, the eighteenth-century hymn that had become an international hit the previous year. Apple released Encouraging Words on September 11, 1970. Preston’s recording of My Sweet Lord was on it, and almost nobody noticed.

Then Harrison recorded it himself

Ten weeks later Harrison released his own version, produced with Phil Spector and buried in the Wall of Sound, as the lead single from All Things Must Pass. It was the first single of his solo career. It reached number one in America and Britain, the first by any former Beatle in either country, and finished as the biggest-selling single of 1971 in the UK. Preston’s recording stayed an album track. When Apple did issue it as a Preston single, on December 3, 1970, Harrison’s version was already at the top of the chart.

The song then cost Harrison years. Bright Tunes Music sued in 1971, arguing that My Sweet Lord reproduced the Chiffons’ He’s So Fine. In 1976 a court found against him, coining the phrase subconscious plagiarism to describe what it decided had happened. The case dragged through the courts long after that, and the details of how the song had actually been written in Copenhagen — including Preston’s part in it — came out in the proceedings.

Royal Albert Hall, thirty-two years later

Harrison died on November 29, 2001. In January 2002 the single was reissued and went to number one in Britain a second time. On November 29, 2002, exactly one year after his death, Olivia Harrison and Eric Clapton put on the Concert for George at the Royal Albert Hall, with Clapton as musical director and most of Harrison’s closest musical friends on stage. Paul McCartney played. Ringo Starr played. Jeff Lynne, Tom Petty, Ravi and Anoushka Shankar, Dhani Harrison and the surviving Monty Python team all appeared.

My Sweet Lord went to Billy Preston, with Sam Brown singing behind him. There was a logic to that beyond friendship. Preston had been in the room in Copenhagen when the song started, had helped write it, and had put it on a record before its author did. He sang it at the organ, and the film of the concert keeps cutting away to the audience, who by the second half of it are clapping in time like a congregation rather than a rock crowd. The performance is the reason a lot of people know the Concert for George exists at all.

Preston died on June 6, 2006, less than four years afterward. He would have turned eighty on September 2, 2026. He spent a career being handed other people’s material and making it sound like it had been waiting for him, and My Sweet Lord is the clearest case of it: a song written by a Beatle, given away before anyone knew what it was worth, and returned to its first performer on the one night that mattered.