Happy Birthday to You Day
Today is Happy Birthday to You Day. While this song may evoke pleasant memories for us, at one point, the right to sing it was so hotly contested that 6,000 Girl Scout camps received letters demanding the payment of royalty fees.
On this date in 1893, teachers (and sisters) Mildred and Patty Hill composed a tune and lyrics for kindergarten students to sing before the start of their school day. It was called “Good Morning to All” and used the music we now recognize as “Happy Birthday to You.”
Good morning to you,
Good morning to you,
Good morning dear children
Good morning to all.
It was published that year in Song Stories for the Kindergarten. A few years later, the lyrics were modified and the first note split to reflect the two syllables of Happy. Copyrights for that second version have been sold many times over the years. Many have complained that a song almost 125 years old should be in the public domain.
In 1996, the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP), the industry’s main professional guild, sent letters to 6,000 Girl Scout camps demanding payment of fees for the singing of “Happy Birthday to You” and “God Bless America,” among other songs. ASCAP’s director of licensing later apologized, saying, “What we were really chasing here…was going after the summer camps that are really like sending your kids to a resort.” So targeting well-to-do camps was okay? Not really an apology, in our opinion.
On August 5, 2013, scientists sent special instructions to the surface sampling device of the Mars Rover Curiosity. The apparatus, which employs a sound transducer at the business end to help it more easily penetrate a variety of soils and clays, audibly “hummed” Happy Birthday to You in celebration of its first year on the surface of a planet an average of 140 million miles away from Earth. NASA paid a royalty fee.
Fights over the validity of copyrights continued until June 27, 2016, when a judge affirmed a $14 million class-action judgment against Warner/Chappell Music, which had purchased the copyright in 1988. Poetic justice? Perhaps. Estimates that the company has made at least $2 million in fees per year since acquiring it render the penalty more poetic than just.
At least, we can all sing Happy Birthday without having to pay a toll. But what about this other schoolyard favorite:
Happy birthday to you,
You live in a zoo,
You look like a monkey
You act like one too.
That one could cost you.
June 9 is Donald Duck Day. It celebrates the date in 1934 when he first appeared in a Disney cartoon called “The Wise Little Hen.” His rise was meteoric. Only nine years later, in 1943, Donald won an Oscar for his role in a satire about Nazis, only to see the film shelved by Disney for the next 71 years.
