Merry X-mas!

For the verses of this song, Steve Marriott or Ronnie Lane ( I assume) lifted the chorus of the Christmas hymn, “Gloria In Excelsis Deo.”  Creative theft at its finest.

3 Replies to “Merry X-mas!”

  1. By the way, some of the comments claim that J. S. Bach wrote the melody, which is not true. He wrote a cantata by the same name, but the melody is entirely different. A number of bands have borrowed from Bach, but not this time.

  2. Billy Joel also had a song that used part of Beethoven’s Pathetique Sonata verbatim, but I don’t remember the name of it. But the biggest hit from that practice was probably Procul Harum’s “Whiter Shade of Pale.” It managed to sound almost just like several Bach pieces without stealing any of them verbatim. None of the baroque masters would bat an eye at any of this. They ripped off each other and their own earlier music regularly. The amount of music they had to churn out pretty much forced them to.

Leave a Reply to Renfield Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *