http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kMQTSJdqMZY&feature=fvsr
Just a typically catchy pop song from 1963...or do you get the feeling you've heard that tune before?
The tune for "Like I Do", recorded by Maureen Evans which reached no.3 in Britain, was based on Ponchielli's "Dance of the Hours", the song Like I Do originally recorded by Nancy Sinatra, and the tune was again used by Allen Sherman in his comic song also in 1963 "Hello Muddah Hello Fuddah", based on a letter from his son complainng about his summer camp "Granada".
Many tunes from Classical Music have been used in Pop songs since 1963, many more than I can list but here are a few examples...
1965 "A Lover's Concerto" by The Toys, based on "Minuet in G major" (BWV Anh. 114) from J.S. Bach's Notebook for Anna Magdalena Bach.
1967 "A Whiter Shade of Pale" by Procol Harum, no.1 in UK was based on Bach's "Air on a G String" or Orchestral Suite No. 3 in D major, BWV 1068.
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=miInerRaIts&feature=fvst
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1973 "Joybringer" by Manfred Mann's Earth Band based on "Jupiter, The Bringer of Jollity" from Holst's "Planets" Suite.
The Farm - All Together Now
The Liverpudlian band reached No 4 in the charts in 1990 with this lad's anthem that leaned heavily on Johann Pachelbel's Canon in D. Coolio also used the Baroque masterpiece, originally penned around 1680, to underlay his 1997 single C U When U Get There.
Take That – Could It Be Magic?The song – a hit for the boy/man band as well as its original composer, Barry Manilow – had Frédéric Chopin's Preclude in C Minor to thank for its basic structure.
Eric Carmen - All By Myself
The karaoke/power ballad classic – covered endlessly by the likes of Celine Dion, Shirley Bassey and, er, John Barrowman – was a monster hit in 1976 for Eric Carmen. He openly admitted that he had borrowed heavily from Sergei Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No 2 in C minor, Op 18.
Nas – I Can After his dying mother had asked him to write an inspirational song for children, the US rapper Nas had a hit in 2003 with this appropriation of Ludwig van Beethoven's Für Elise
The Streets – Same Old Thing One for the trainspotters. Mike Skinner samples Bartók's Concerto for Orchestra for this track from The Streets' debut album, Original Pirate Material.
On the other side of the coin Classical Music composers from Baroque through to the 20th Century drew many of their ideas for Motifs and Figures from popular Folk songs, parts of Dvorak's "New World" Symphony suggested American minstrel songs very clearly, Beethoven, among many others Vivaldi, Bach, Brahms, Tchaikovsky and Vaughan Williams all used popular folk tunes of their Country picked up from Coffee houses, street musicians and used them in their compositions, forever recorded for posterity.
Many Progressive Rock bands such as Yes and Emerson, Lake, and Palmer, with their interpretations of "recycled" Classical works by Stravinsky, Mussorgsky, Copland, Ginastera, The Nice using works by Bernstein, Bach, Sibelius and Dvorak, took Classical Music into their repertoires in a big way, returning such works into the psyche of the masses in a much grander way than the early Pop writers....what goes around comes around so they say !
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Y1x04hAUT4
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Yes if you really "look" there must be hundreds of examples out there, Classical music is closer to most people than they are sometimes aware of! 
