My Sweet Lord - Background and Composition

Background and Composition

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", and he had 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 a 500-year-old Vaishnava Hindu mantra, 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, though, 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" 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.

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:

My sweet Lord
Hmm, my Lord
Hmm, my Lord
I really want to see you
Really want to be with you
Really want to see you, Lord, but it takes so long, my Lord ...

Biographer Ian Inglis observes a degree of "understandable" impatience in these last words. 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:

Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna
Krishna Krishna, Hare Hare
Hare Rama, Hare Rama

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 Brahma, gurur Vishnu
Gurur devo Maheshvara
Gurur sakshat, param Brahma
Tasmai shri gurave namah.

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.

Various Christian fundamentalist anti-rock activists object to the chanting of "Hare Krishna" in "My Sweet Lord" as anti-Christian or satanic, while some born-again Christians appear to have adopted the song as an anthem. Many commentators have identified the mantra and the simplicity of Harrison's lyrics as central to the song's universality. " lyrics are not directed at a specific manifestation of a single faith's deity," Ian 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 ."