It's My Birthday

Happy Birthday to You, also known simply as Happy Birthday is a tune traditionally sung to celebrate a birthday, like my own, which is today.

This post is not all about me, instead it's about the Happy Birthday song. But, since it is my birthday, I've included photos of my much younger days, and my question is: When did I become grown up and how can I make it stop?

Did you know that Happy Birthday to You is the most recognized song in the English language guaranteed to make people of all ages smile and sing along? (The second most popular is For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow.)

The tune has been sung annually hundreds of times for over a century — in outer space, in baseball stadiums, homes, parties, including famously by a movie star to a U.S. President (Marilyn Monroe to JFK at Madison Square Garden in 1962). It’s been included in all types of tune-playing products, cards, music boxes, toys, games and more. 

These rankings from the Guinness Book of World Records do not mean that either tune is the most popular worldwide, but the most known by the most people. It's been estimated that the birthday song's lyrics have been translated into at least 20 languages.

Where It Started

The most popularly recognized four-line melody dates to the 1890s, but not as the birthday song. It was originally titled, Good Morning to All, and written by two Kentucky sisters, Patty and Mildred Hall, to be used as a classroom greeting from teachers to kindergarten students: Good morning to you/Good morning to you/Good morning, dear children/Good morning to all.

Patty was a nursery school and kindergarten teacher, and later principal at the Louisville Experimental Kindergarten School. Her oldest sister, Mildred, was a composer, organist and music scholar with a specialty in Negro spirituals. Mildred created the melody for Good Morning to All and Patty added the lyrics. 

Their goal was to compose a simple melody that would be easy for young children to sing. The tune had a range of six notes, repetitive lyrics and took about 10 seconds to sing). In 1893, the  song was included in Song Stories for the Kindergarten.

There are various accounts of how Good Morning to All became Happy Birthday to You. In 1924, according to one, the Hill sisters' song appeared without authorization in a songbook edited by Robert H. Coleman. In the book, Coleman used the original title and first stanza lyrics but changed the second stanza's opening line to “Happy Birthday to You.” Thus, the sisters’ line  of“Good morning dear children” became “Happy birthday dear (name).” This new stanza became hugely popular and soon overshadowed the original lyric. 

By the mid-1930s, the tune had appeared in several films, a Broadway musical, and had been used for Western Union’s first singing telegram. It was so widely heard and sung that many assumed it was already in the public domain, but that was not the case.

Copyright and Royalties

When it was used, uncredited and uncompensated, in a 1933 Irving Berlin musical revue, a third Hill sister, Jessica, filed a court suit showing the link between Happy Birthday to You and Good Morning to All, and secured a copyright for her sisters.

Jessica Hill took her sisters’ tune to a Chicago-based publisher, Clayton F. Summy Co., which published and copyrighted it in 1935. Years later, the company was bought and renamed Birch Tree Ltd which retained the publishing rights for Happy Birthday until 1988. That’s when Warner Chappell Music, the largest worldwide music publisher, purchased Birch Tree and claimed copyright for every use (film, TV shows, stage, radio, greeting cards) insisting the lyrics could not be sung for profit without a royalty payment. In 2008, Warner collected some $2 million annually in royalties. Much of it went to the Hill Foundation charity founded in the name of the Hill sisters. The company said that it held the song’s copyright until 2030, which would give it decades to claim royalties on what was considered as the single highest-earning song in history.

What Happened Next

In 2013, Warner Chappell was sued for claiming false copyright on Happy Birthday to You. Copyright law professor Robert Brauneis researched it and cited issues with the song’s authorship and notice and renewal of the copyright. Brauneis wrote that since only certain arrangements of the song were renewed in 1963, the end of the original copyright’s term, the song became part of the public domain. He concluded that it is almost certainly no longer under copyright.  In 2015, a federal court ruled that Warner Chappell's claim to a copyright on the song was invalid and there was no other claim to copyright. Warner Chappell agreed to pay back $14 million in licensing fees. 

Today, the music and lyrics are in public domain in the U.S. and the European Union. In the EU, copyright lasts for the life of the author plus 70 years. Patty Hill, who died in 1946, was the last surviving author as Mildred had died in 1916. The Hill sisters were posthumously inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in June 1996. The sisters have no surviving family members.

To this day, no one knows for certain who wrote the new words to Mildred Hill’s melody or when it happened. 

Even the claim that the Hill sisters composed the tune has been argued by those who have stated that the sisters could have copied the tune and lyrical idea from other popular and similar 19th-century songs of the time as Mildred was a musicologist.

The journey of Happy Birthday to You is unique in the history of popular songs. What started as a simple teaching aid tune has now become a worldwide popular standard.

Thanks to the Corona-19 virus pandemic, the song recently has gained another identity. It's become the accompaniment to a hand-washing ritual. That current popularity is due to the fact that (1) nearly everyone knows it by heart and (2) it takes about 10 seconds to sing. If someone sings it twice, that's the time experts have recommended for a thorough hand-washing.

And, now you (and I) know the rest of the story.

If any other fellow blogger has a birthday this month, here's my choice for a birthday song, this 1968 Beatles birthday tune included on The Beatles, also known as the White Album. 

There's no special plans for a celebration today. However, next week we're taking a getaway to a neighboring New England state and will co-celebrate my 🎂 and ❤️ Day.

We don't stop playing because we grow old. We grow old because we stop playing. 

(George Bernard Shaw)