Birthday Song Best

The most beloved song in the English language for real was sung to you on your first birthday - and probably thereafter by you to many family members and friends dozens of times a year.

Grown men and women in assistance clubs sing it to each other every week with gusto.

My Old Kentucky Home Lyrics

It was the first song to be sung in outer space - by Apollo Ix astronauts on March 8, 1969.

Only the songs "Auld Lang Syne" and "For He's A Jolly Good Fellow" are practically as often sung.

By now, you have guessed that the illustrious ditty is "Happy Birthday To You."

Forerunner of the itsybitsy song was composed in 1893 by two sisters. Dr. Patty Hill was necessary of the Louisville, Kentucky, Experimental Kindergarten. Mildred Hill was a instructor there.

In those days, children began school in the first grade at age 6. There they began the journey through the "three Rs" -- readin', 'riting and 'rithmatic.

The Hill teachers were the vanguard of a principles that children were creative and responsive to learning at a much earlier age than 6. They awakened young minds with structured games, rhyme recitations, coloring, music, dancing and singing.

Patty devised the curricula. Mildred drew on her musical talent as organist for her Old Kentucky Church to furnish music for singing and dancing.

One day, Patty wrote a few lyrics for a school song to open the day for their pupils and get ready their minds to couple on the coming lessons. She titled it "Good Morning To All." Mildred put the words to music - perhaps inspired by a spiritual refrain.

The greeting was included in a range titled "Song Stories of the Kindergarten" published in 1893. The book sold modestly but well sufficient to expound reprinting.

In the first revision, the Good Morning words "to all" became "to you" -- on the premise, I suppose, that teachers had no assigned place or shining face.

"Song Stories" sales increased as the kindergarten idea caught on. The Good Morning song was proper for beginning pupils throughout the country. As a kindergartener in 1926 (yes, I'm that old). I and my classmates sang it every school day - after a cheerful "Good morning, children" from teach.

Schoolroom singing to the instructor has gone out of style. However, I remembered "Good Morning To You" all my life - singing it to my children at morning meal -- and to my grandchildren when they stay overnight with us. They love it:

Good morning to you.

Good morning to you.

We're all in our places,

With involving shining faces.

Oh, what a way

To start a new day.

Mildred died in 1916. Patti became professor of kindergarten schooling at Columbia University. Their ground-breaking book of kindergarten practices was nearly forgotten.

* * *

Thirty-one years after the first publication of "Song Stories," a man named Robert H. Coleman added a happy-birthday-to-you verse to the good-morning-to-you verse and former music notes. Then, without request permission of Patti Hill, he published the aggregate as own -- in sheet-music form.

The birthday verse was so popular, subsequent printings were for it -- and the accompanying musical bars -- only.

Dr. Hill sued Coleman and proved that she owned the melody. She and an additional one sister were awarded gigantic damages. A new copyright was issued the following year (1935) and acquired by Birch Tree Group, Ltd.

The copyright was renewed in 1963 and sold along with other assets to Warner Communications in 1988 - for million.

The "Birthday Song" brought in million in its 1996 group accounting narrative published by Forbes Magazine. Rock singer Michael Jackson recently bought the copyright for million which now is earning "at least" million annually.

Every time "Happy Birthday To You" is sung or played commercially, the Moonwalker gets a cut - until 2010 when the verse copyright reparation expires.

The melody copyright of the Hill sisters passed into group domain long ago. Therefore, whatever has the right freely to write and sing their new words to the old tune.

The song is sung so widely, and often, copyright owners and the American society of Composers, Authors and Publishers long ago gave up trying to regain royalties from families and assistance clubs.

Sing away Rotary, Kiwanis and Lions.

* * *

No need to worry at all about performing the other two "most popular" songs.

"Auld Lang Syne" originally was a poem written in 1788 by Scottish poet Robert Burns. It is not known when folks began reciting the poem with accompaniment of an old Highland air known as "The Miller's Wedding."

The words and music were first published together in 1796. Very quickly, "The Good Old Days" became a universal good-night song among British and American sentimentalists.

It is rendered most properly among a circle of friends with their arms over their chests and retention hands with adjacent partners.

"For He's (She's) A Jolly Good Fellow" is an additional one party song popularized by the French originally but adopted and immortalized by the British. Keep in mind that "fellow" is an old English word for "companion" or "partners in a joint undertaking" and is not gender conscious.

Etude Magazine says the music building is medieval French in the time of King Louis Xiv. French soldiers used "jolly" as an insult for the English general Marlborough.

As is often the case, an enemy's curse can be turned by the insulted into a term of approval -- "Yankee Doodle Dandy" for example.

Marlborough's soldiers took "jolly good fellow" back home after the war, and there it became a beloved tune in the pubs.

About 1830, somebody added a second verse: "We won't go home 'till morning, 'til daylight doest appear." The song, therefore, is properly sung as two verses.

We can guess about how long it will take for "Roll Out The Barrel" also to take its place intimately behind "Happy Birthday To You."

If I know Americans, it won't be long.

November 18,2001

Birthday Song Best