Happy Birthday to You

The story

"Happy Birthday to You" is an American song sung to celebrate a person's birthday; the 1998 Guinness World Records called it the most recognized song in the English language, and its words have been translated into at least 18 languages. Its melody comes from "Good Morning to All", traditionally attributed to two sisters in Louisville, Kentucky: Patty Hill, a kindergarten principal who developed teaching methods at the Little Loomhouse, and Mildred J. Hill, a pianist and composer. They used the greeting as a song small children could sing easily and published it in their 1893 songbook Song Stories for the Kindergarten with the Chicago publisher Clayton F. Summy. Whether they composed the tune is disputed: Kembrew McLeod argues that they likely took it from similar 19th-century songs such as Horace Waters' "Happy Greetings to All" (1858), while Robert Brauneis notes that those songs had quite different melodies.

The birthday words appeared separately. Their complete text first stood in print as the last four lines of Edith Goodyear Alger's poem "Roy's Birthday", in A Primer of Work and Play (copyright 1901), with no mention of singing. A song called "Happy Birthday to You" is mentioned in 1901, and the first dated book to set the birthday words to the "Good Morning to All" tune is The Elementary Worker and His Work of 1911 (other accounts give 1912 for the first printing of words and melody together). Robert Coleman printed it as a second verse of "Good Morning to All" in 1924, and other songbooks followed; none of the early printings carried a credit or copyright notice. The custom spread of singing it to the person whose birthday it is, often as a cake is brought in; in Britain and much of the Commonwealth three cheers usually follow.

In 1935 the Summy Company registered a copyright crediting piano arrangements by Preston Ware Orem and a second verse by Mrs. R. R. Forman, and this became the basis of a claim to the song itself. Summy became Summy-Birchard in 1957, and in 1988 Warner/Chappell Music bought its successor, Birch Tree Group, for US$25 million, the song being valued at about US$5 million. Warner held that the US copyright would last until 2030 and charged for public performance: about US$2 million a year in 2008, and US$700 for a single use in February 2010. Clearing the song's rights helped keep the 1987 civil rights documentary Eyes on the Prize off the air for years, until grants in 2005. The claim drew attention after the Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998; Justice Stephen Breyer named the song in his dissent in Eldred v. Ashcroft (2003), and in 2010 Robert Brauneis concluded that it was "almost certainly no longer under copyright".

On June 13, 2013, the documentary filmmaker Jennifer Nelson, who had paid US$1,500 to use the song, sued Warner/Chappell through her company Good Morning to You Productions; her case was joined with Rupa Marya's in the Central District of California. On July 28, 2015, her lawyers Betsy Manifold and Mark Rifkin produced a 1922 edition of The Everyday Song Book printing the song "through courtesy of The Clayton F Summy Co." without a copyright notice. On September 22, 2015, Judge George H. King ruled that Warner/Chappell's 1935 copyright covered only a particular piano arrangement, not the words or melody, and that the company had never shown it owned the lyrics. On February 8, 2016, Warner/Chappell agreed to pay US$14 million to those who had licensed the song, and on June 30, 2016, the final settlement was approved and the court declared the song to be in the public domain. In the European Union, where copyright lasts for the author's life plus 70 years, it expired on January 1, 2017, Patty Hill having died in 1946.

Among its best-known performances are Marilyn Monroe's to President John F. Kennedy in May 1962, Victor Borge's versions in the styles of various composers, and Zubin Mehta's orchestral variations of 2010.

What it says

A short greeting sung to a person on their birthday, naming them and wishing them well. It is cheerful and simple, made for a group to sing together.

The words