The 1970s File Feature
This Song
"This Song" — George Harrison Takes His Day in Court and Turns It Into a Hit The Lawsuit That Became a Record Few singles in the history of pop music arrive …
01 The Story
"This Song" — George Harrison Takes His Day in Court and Turns It Into a Hit
The Lawsuit That Became a Record
Few singles in the history of pop music arrive carrying as much legal baggage as George Harrison's This Song. To understand why it exists, you have to travel back to 1971 and the enormous commercial success of My Sweet Lord, Harrison's first solo number one. That record was subsequently the subject of a copyright infringement suit alleging that its melody was too similar to the 1963 Chiffons hit He's So Fine. The lawsuit wound through the courts for years, resulting in a 1976 ruling that found Harrison had engaged in what the judge described as "subconscious plagiarism."
Harrison responded to this verdict with a characteristic combination of spiritual resignation, dry humor, and musical creativity. Rather than retreating into bitterness, he wrote and recorded This Song, a track that addressed the lawsuit directly and sardonically. The single was released in November 1976 as part of his album Thirty Three and 1/3, and it became one of the more amusing footnotes in rock history.
The Record as Legal Brief
The tone of This Song is one of amused exasperation. Harrison structured the track as a kind of running commentary on the lawsuit, with lyrics that protested the innocence of the new melody with pointed, self-aware humor. The accompanying music video featured Harrison in a courtroom setting, surrounded by judges, lawyers, and musical witnesses, playing the self-deprecating comedy of his legal situation for full effect.
The production of the record, crafted with Tom Scott serving as co-producer alongside Harrison, reflected the more relaxed and musically diverse approach Harrison had brought to his work by the mid-1970s. The arrangement is bright and relatively playful, which suits the material's sardonic energy. Harrison was clearly not suffering through the recording; the performance throughout has the quality of an artist who has found a way to laugh at his own predicament.
An Eleven-Week Chart Run
The single debuted on the Billboard Hot 100 on November 20, 1976, entering at position 82. It built steadily through the late weeks of 1976: 82, 63, 52, 37, 32. The peak position of number 25 arrived on January 8, 1977, after an eleven-week chart run that extended through the holiday season. The sustained chart presence reflected both the strength of the Harrison brand and the curiosity factor generated by the song's unusual subject matter.
For an artist who had produced chart-toppers as a solo performer, a peak of 25 was modest but entirely respectable, particularly for a track that was more conceptual statement than commercial calculation. The record proved that there was an audience for Harrison's sardonic commentary, even when the comedy required some knowledge of music industry history to appreciate fully.
Harrison's Mid-70s Creative Phase
The album Thirty Three and 1/3 represented a creative resurgence for Harrison after the more mixed reception of Dark Horse and the difficult tour of 1974. The critical and commercial reception of the album was warmer than his immediate post-Beatle output had been, and This Song generated the kind of media attention that money cannot buy: a genuine news story wrapped in a catchy single.
The lawsuit had been a genuine source of distress for Harrison, who maintained throughout that he had not consciously borrowed from the Chiffons. The ability to transmute that distress into music that was genuinely funny and genuinely musical was a mark of his artistic resilience and his particular sensibility.
The Joke That Holds Up
Decades later, This Song remains one of the more unusual artifacts in the Harrison catalog precisely because of what it represents: an artist turning a legal defeat into a musical joke at his own expense and doing it with grace. The song works both as a chart single and as a piece of musical autobiography. Put it on and you will find yourself grinning at the whole absurd situation.
"This Song" — George Harrison's singular moment on the 1970s charts.
02 Song Meaning
"This Song" — Creativity, Ownership, and the Copyright Paradox
The Problem at the Heart of Musical Creation
At its core, This Song engages with one of the most genuinely difficult questions in the philosophy of artistic creation: can a melody be owned, and if so, what does it mean when two melodies are too similar to each other? George Harrison's legal predicament with My Sweet Lord was not a simple case of artistic theft; it was an exploration of the murky territory where influence, memory, and originality intersect.
The concept of subconscious plagiarism, which was at the heart of the legal ruling against Harrison, is both legally coherent and philosophically troubling. The idea that an artist can infringe on a copyright without any conscious intention to do so, simply by having absorbed a melody so thoroughly that it resurfaces in new work, raises uncomfortable questions about the nature of creative ownership. Harrison's response in "This Song" was to make those questions explicit, inviting listeners to think about them through comedy rather than through legal briefs.
Humor as Intellectual Argument
The tone of This Song is sardonic and self-deprecating, and that tone is itself an argument. By laughing at the lawsuit, Harrison was making a claim about its essential absurdity. The comedy of the song functions as a critique of a legal system that had determined a sincere and spiritually motivated artist was guilty of stealing from a girl-group hit he had not consciously recalled. The humor was Harrison's way of maintaining his dignity in a situation that had stripped him of some of his professional credibility.
There is also something philosophically sophisticated in the move. By writing a song explicitly about not having stolen a melody, Harrison demonstrated his awareness of melody as such, his conscious engagement with the question of musical originality. The very act of writing This Song was a performative declaration of intentionality that the lawsuit had denied him.
The Artist as Subject
Songs about the experience of being an artist are a relatively rare genre, but This Song belongs to a distinguished tradition of self-referential work in which the creative process itself becomes the subject matter. Rock musicians who turned their professional experiences into songs were engaging in a kind of meta-commentary that invited audiences inside the workings of the music industry.
For Harrison, who had spent years inside the most scrutinized band in history and had written openly about spiritual searching, personal growth, and disillusionment, addressing the lawsuit directly was consistent with a broader pattern of artistic honesty. He had never been interested in maintaining comfortable fictions about what it meant to be famous and professionally embattled.
Copyright, Creativity, and Cultural Legacy
The My Sweet Lord lawsuit has had an influence that extends far beyond George Harrison's personal legal history. The concept of subconscious plagiarism that the ruling established has been cited in subsequent copyright cases involving popular music, making the Harrison case part of the legal architecture within which musicians now operate.
From that perspective, This Song is a piece of music history commentary that was inadvertently ahead of its time. It addressed questions about musical ownership and creative originality that would become increasingly urgent as the volume of recorded music expanded and the possibilities for legal challenge multiplied. Harrison turned his personal misfortune into a cultural artifact with real explanatory power about the limits of intellectual property law in an artistic context.
The Enduring Charm
What keeps This Song listenable decades after its specific legal context has faded from memory is the quality of Harrison's wit and the genuine musical craft of the recording. It is funny without being gimmicky, self-referential without being navel-gazing. The song works because it trusts the listener to find the irony without having it underlined, and that trust is its own form of respect.
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