Lessee:
Scarborough Fair is a traditional song, not that Paul Simon would tell you so. I believe he thinks he wrote “El Condor Pasa” as well. Los Lobos also accused him of not crediting them as co-composers of “All Around The World.”
OK, I just discovered what everyone’s talking about:
There’s an utterly dreadful song called “Hey 98.6” by “Keith”. It’s horrid. Bleh. Foo.
Anyway, it opens with “Bridge Over Troubled Waters”'s introduction. Almost exactly. I don’t know why, since it doesn’t fit the mood, tempo, pacing or (lack of) quality of the rest of the song.
If I was Simon or Garfunkle, I woulda sued.
Fenris
Well, in “Heal The World” Michael Jackson lifts from the melodic break in the Jaws Theme.
And have you noticed how Oleander’s “Are You There” is indistinguishable from “Helter Skelter” at the beginning?
LC
The Beatles’ “All You Need Is Love” opens with an uncredited excerpt ripped off from a song called the “Marseillaise”, actually written by a French bloke named Claude-Joseph Rouget de l’Isle in 1792!
Emerson, Lake, & Palmer ripped off Béla Bartók’s 1913 piano composition “Allegro Barbaro.” (I used to play that on the piano a lot. It is the most no-holds-barred, take-no-prisoners, open-a-can-of-whupass piano composition in the world.)
The songs in the 1953 Broadway musical play Kismet, allegedly by Robert Wright and George Forrest, were ripped off from the Georgian-Russian composer Aleksandr Borodin (1833-1877).
Around midcentury there was a trend to rip off dead romantic classical composers and retrofit their melodies as pop songs. A skit on Broadway had Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff, and the rest picketing Tin Pan Alley. With signs that said, “You compose — We decompose!”