All Time Low

That searing riff. The heart-wrenching piano coda. Layla by Derek and the Dominos is one of the crown jewels of rock. But Rita Coolidge swears part of it was hers.

The Octopussy theme singer says she and her then-boyfriend, drummer Jim Gordon, wrote the piano piece first. It was part of a song called Time (Don't Let the World Get in Our Way).

"I remember sitting at the piano, playing it, singing it. Eric [Clapton] was there too," she said.

According to Rita, Eric heard it, loved it — and somehow it ended up glued onto Layla. But without her name anywhere near the credits.

She was in Miami's Criteria studio — the same place Layla was recorded — having her photo taken to promote her 1971 debut solo album, when she first heard the song:

"I'm like, 'Wait a minute, I recognise this music and know this music'. They're like, 'You don't know it. It's a brand-new Eric Clapton record', and I said, 'It's my music!' They took pictures of the veins popping out in my neck. I was so upset".

 Coolidge rushed to Tower Records, where, to her dismay, she found her name missing from the credits:

"I started trying to get in touch with Eric through Robert Stigwood, who was his manager at the time, and was just a mogul. I got him finally on the phone, and I said, 'I'm one of the writers, that's my music'. He said, 'Yeah, what are you gonna do about it? You're a girl. You don't have the money to fight this. Let it go'. And that was it".

In her memoir, Delta Lady, Rita says Eric first heard her play the song during earlier sessions, long before it became part of Layla.

"We played the song for Eric Clapton in England", she wrote.

 

"I remember sitting at the piano in Olympic Studios while Eric listened to me play it. Jim and I left a cassette of the demo, hoping, of course, that he might cover it".

Eric has never publicly addressed Rita's claims. But in a 1985 Guitar Player interview, he explained how the coda came to be: 

"Jim Gordon wrote that. He'd been secretly going back into the studio to record his own album, without any of us knowing", Eric said.

 

"And they were all love songs composed on the piano. And we caught him playing this one day and said, 'Come on, man. Can we have that?' So he was happy to give us that part. And we made the two pieces into one song".

Eric gave Jim a co-writing credit. But Rita's role in Derek and the Dominos' short-lived legacy remains overlooked.

Rita admits she didn't have the power to fight back at the time:

"I was a young woman in a man's world. No one was going to take my word over theirs".

Decades later, she's still not chasing the money — but she does want the recognition: 

"It's about respect. About women in music being heard".

So next time you watch Goodfellas, tip your hat to Rita. She may have secretly written the song's most iconic moment.

Or as she put it herself:

"I know what I wrote. And I'll always know".

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