Did Eric Clapton Rip off Rita Coolidge for ‘Layla’?

As far as huge hits go, there’s none more colossal than ‘Layla’ by Derek and the Dominos. Perhaps more than any other song, it’s what cemented Eric Clapton well and truly as a guitar-playing god. But this isn’t entirely the full story. The truth would have it that ‘Layla’ wasn’t completely all of Clapton’s own conception, and there is actually a pretty audacious theft which marred the legacy of the song quite majorly for a select group of people. One of them was Rita Coolidge, who, despite her own blazing career as a pop music machine, knew where her credit...