Everybody remembers "One Tin Soldier" as the theme song from the movie "
Billy Jack", but this was not its first incarnation. The song was originally recorded by the
Canadian pop group "
Original Caste", essentially a one-hit wonder group. "One Tin Soldier" was their only even slightly successful song, reaching as high as #34 on the
top 40 singles list in
1969. The song was written for Original Caste by the successful production team of
Dennis Lambert and
Brian Potter, who wrote hit songs for a number of pop groups in the late
1960s and early
1970s.
One more interesting fact: the song is a blatant knockoff of Pachelbel's Canon, using exactly the same chord progression.