Credit: Far Out / Alamy

Did the Eagles rip off ‘Oh! Darling’ by The Beatles?

Tue 11 April 2023 17:45, UK

Some musicians believe there to be a finite number of chord progressions in existence. It is inevitable, they argue, that certain songs end up sounding similar. After all, there are only so many phrasings artists can employ before they start regurgitating something written by Irving Berlin, Bob Dylan or, as some have argued of this particular track, The Beatles.

Written by Paul McCartney, ‘Oh! Darling’ is, of course, itself a throwback to the 6/8 rock and roll tracks of the 1950s and early ’60s. First attempted during the Get Back sessions, it was eventually released as an album track on Abbey Road in 1969. During his conversation with David Sheff for All We Are Saying, John Lennon cast heaps of shade on McCartney’s vocals, describing the track as a “great one of Paul’s that he didn’t sing too well. I always thought that I could’ve done it better – it was more my style than his. He wrote it, so what the hell, he’s going to sing it. If he’d had any sense, he should have let me sing it.”

Almost a decade after the release of Abbey Road, American rockers the Eagles released ‘Please Come Home For Christmas’ just in time for the jolliest of seasons. Stand it next to ‘Oh! Darling’ and these two tracks sound almost exactly the same. The swing beat, the earnest vocals, the guitar stabs on the accented fourth beat of the bar: it’s all there.

So, is this Christmas classic actually a complete rip-off? Well, no. And why not? Because ‘Please Come Home for Christmas’ wasn’t written by the Eagles; it was written by Charles Brown and Gene Rede back in 1960. So, the question really ought to be: is ‘Oh! Darling’ a complete rip-off?

Whether the resemblances between the two tracks amount to plagiarism is something best left to a copyright lawyer, but it’s certainly possible that McCartney used ‘Please Come Home for Christmas’ as a template for ‘Oh! Darling’. Then again, there are countless songs of the same era that sound exactly the same as ‘Please Come Home’, and considering ‘Oh! Darling’ is clearly a homage to ’50s pop music; it’s more likely a deft approximation of a songwriting formula rather than a piece of thievery.

Either way, you can make your mind up below.