This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Listen to "My Sweet Lord" without knowing its history and it can read as a simple, warm devotional song. Listen with the history and its structure turns out to be doing something deliberate: George Harrison built the song's later verses to move from the Hare Krishna maha-mantra directly into the Hallelujah chorus, two vocabularies for addressing God, Vedic and Christian, sung back to back rather than kept apart.
That structure follows directly from where Harrison was in his own life by 1970. He had turned toward Krishna Consciousness under the teaching of A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, the Gaudiya Vaishnava teacher who founded the International Society for Krishna Consciousness, supporting Prabhupada's mission financially and bringing devotees from the movement into the studio to sing backing vocals on the track. Musicologist Simon Leng, in his critical study of Harrison's music, describes the resulting sound as gospel incantation with a Vedic chant, borrowing a phrase from a fellow biographer, and reads the pairing as Harrison's own considered statement rather than an accident of arrangement.
Harrison was explicit about the intention behind it: the song was meant to express a desire for closeness to God that did not belong to one religion alone, using the Hallelujah chorus specifically so listeners already comfortable with a Christian vocabulary would find a way into the Hare Krishna mantra sitting right beside it.