Johann Sebastian Bach has been in the background for most of our lives. His compositions are comforting and you can always admire his knowledge of music. For musicians, his compositions have been the doorway to stardom.

His extensive and varied collection of works has served as the springboard for countless new pieces of music.
For example, part of the melody from Bridge Over Troubled Water by Simon & Garfunkel was based on a Bach chorale.

Simon once explained how the iconic song began with a melodic segment lifted from this Bach piece. “So I had started out with that, me singing a song… the beginning of the song… that comes from a Bach piece… that comes from a Bach chorale.”


The Bach composition that inspired Simon is the beautiful four-part chorale O Sacred Head, Now Wounded. Even though we know that Simon began with this segment of melody to write his tune, it is very hard to find anything resembling Bach’s original melody when looking at the song. The only similarity, perhaps, is that the contour in one part is close to the contour in Bach’s original melody. It shows that even if you use an existing piece of music as the starting point for a new song, the result doesn’t have to sound anything like the original.


Simon used the very same Bach piece again when he wrote his song American Tune, but this time the similarities with Bach’s melody were clearer.
On this occasion, Simon directly lifted the melody from the original Bach chorale and set his own lyrics to it.

He was fully within his rights to do so because the Bach melody, along with all of Bach’s works, is in the public domain.
Interestingly, just like Paul Simon, Bach himself used this tune more than once, weaving it into a variety of his works.

The parallels between Simon and Bach’s relationship with this melody do not stop there. Not only used the tune repeatedly, but they also borrowed it from a previous composition.
Bach did not actually write the melody; he borrowed it from an earlier hymn by Paul Gerhardt. But the story does not end there. Gerhardt, in turn, did not write the tune either; he borrowed it from an earlier work by Hans Leo Hassler.


There is a clever irony here: A tune that Paul Simon titled American Tune is actually a centuries-old German melody. One of the lyrical themes of American Tune — “We come on the ship they call the Mayflower… and sing an American tune” — tells of the story and struggle of the original settlers who came to America. Just as they were Europeans who became Americans, the piece of music that describes their journey was a German melody that crossed the Atlantic and became an American tune.

The Beatles get inspired


Another legendary songwriter influenced by Bach is Paul McCartney. The inspiration for the Beatles’ Blackbird was Bach’s Bourrée in E minor, which lent its shape and harmony to the song’s iconic opening. Paul and George Harrison used to play it as a party piece.


The Beatles

“We had a piece, which was like a party piece to show people that we were not as stupid as we looked. It was by Bach… but we got it wrong, and truncated it. We ended up adapting that years later, remembering this little thing we used to do,” McCartney recalled in an interview.


Bach’s influence on the Beatles did not end there. Take the song All You Need Is Love. As boys, McCartney and John Lennon sang in Liverpool church choirs, where they may have encountered Bach’s church and organ music. The band’s producer, George Martin, also loved Bach and baroque forms. Bach’s Invention No. 8 in F can be heard in the final section of the Beatles’ song.


There is more. The Liverpudlian quartet created brilliant orchestration in Penny Lane. Listen closely and you will hear a piccolo trumpet playing lines from Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 2.

Bach’s music has touched Lady Gaga

Other musicians have also drawn inspiration from Bach. Lady Linda by the Beach Boys features one of the finest key changes in pop music, reworking Bach’s Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring from his cantata Herz und Mund und Tat und Leben, BWV 147. The song begins with a baroque-inspired harpsichord part.

You can even hear Bach in Led Zeppelin’s Heartbreaker. Jimmy Page once spoke about Bach’s Lute Bourrée in E minor during a live performance of the song.
A more famous pop reworking of Bach’s music is the melody and bass of A Whiter Shade of Pale by Procol Harum. You can hear Bach’s Air on the G String, but the music is more closely linked to Johann Sebastian’s instrumental Arioso from Cantata 156.

Led Zeppelin

Here’s something more modern: Eddie Van Halen knew plenty about baroque, classical and romantic violin, so it is not surprising to hear a Bach riff in Eruption. Lady Gaga’s Bad Romance also features echoes of the Fugue in B minor from Book One of the Well-Tempered Clavier.