Test ADSL .net

geekstation

Nouveau membre

Inscription : 01-01-1970

Messages : 0

Happy Birthday Song Origins and Lyrics

"Happy Birthday To You", the birthday song heard the world over, is actually protected by copyright. Quite how they manage to enforce this is beyond me for such a massive worldwide song. Apparently the birthday song brings in around $2 million a year in royalties from publishing rights (which is owned now by Summy-Birchard, a company under the AOL Time Warner umbrella who paid $25 million for the company which was then called Birch Tree and then changed to Summy-Birch).

Lets go back to the origins though...

The "Happy Birthday Song" story starts in Kentucky with 2 sisters called Mildred J. Hill (born in 1859), and Patty Smith Hill (born in 1868). Another sister called Jessica also played a role, but more on that later. Patty was a nursery school teacher (and eventually principle) who helped found the Institute of Child Welfare Research and Columbia in 1924, and also created the 'Patty Hill Blocks' used in schools nationwide. Mildred, like her sister, also started out as a kindergarten and Sunday school teacher but she eventually became a concert pianist and composer, she took a very scholarly approach to music and specialised in the field of Negro spirituals.

In 1893 Mildred was working at the Louisville Experimental Kindergarten School where her sister was also working as Principle. Mildred came up with the melody we all now associate with the happy birthday song, and sister Patty added the lyrics and so was born the song "Good Morning to All", a simple and catchy song for teachers to use to welcome their students into the class room each day. It went like this:

Good morning to you,

Good morning to you,

Good morning, dear children,

Good morning to all.

In this same year the song was published in the songbook 'Song Stories for the Kindergarten'. The song proved to be very popular and underwent some small changes to lyrics over time, though always based upon a greeting song for either teachers to students, or changed from students to teachers.

So how did this song end up having its lyrics changed from a greeting to a birthday song? The changed lyrics first appeared in a songbook in 1924, although its unknown who did this first. As radio and film were becoming very popular the song seemed to take a life of its own for a while and the melody was used on more than one occasion in films in the early 1900's.

This all came to a head when Irving Berlin's musical 'As Thousands Cheer' used and didn't credit the "Good Morning to All" melody, the third hill sister called Jessica who administered the copyrights for her sisters filed a suit, and by being able to demonstrate concrete and undeniable similarities between "Good Morning to All" and "Happy Birthday to You" in a court of law she was able to obtain the copyright for "happy birthday song in hindi mp3 download" for her sisters as well.

So there you have it, who would have thought that a song intended as a simple greeting would turn into a worldwide phenomenon.

Here are the birthday song lyrics as we know them these days:

Happy Birthday to you,

Happy Birthday to you,

Happy Birthday, dear (insert name here),

Happy Birthday to you.

The happy birthday song story, a lot more to it than you may have thought.