How singing Happy Birthday can cost you a small fortune
from Tom Leonard
For very good reason, it is the world’s most popular song. Whether sung self-consciously at a family gathering or belted out raucously by every table in a packed restaurant, it’s one number where nobody — no matter how drunk — needs help with the words or tune.
You will find versions in Arabic, Basque, Catalan, Mandarin Chinese, Hebrew and Tagalog, the national language of the Philippines. Happy Birthday To You, to give it its full title, is less of a song than a ritual that we all enjoy or have to endure, loving every second of it or secretly longing for it to be over.
The idea that this innocent little expression of human goodwill might come with a sting in its tail seems almost inconceivable. But the truth is that you have to be careful when you sing Happy Birthday. Do it for profit — on TV, film, stage or even, technically, as a waiter hoping for a better tip — and you can expect a stronglyworded legal letter and demands for payment from the song’s ‘owners’.
Ever wondered why you seldom hear it in singing birthday cards, or in films, where characters inexplicably strike up with For He’s A Jolly Good Fellow instead? It’s to avoid having to fork out for using the handful of musical notes and words of Happy Birthday.
of course, many will be amazed that anyone could own the rights to it in the first place. You might as well copyright the wolf whistle.
But that is not the view of Warner/Chappell, the publishing arm of the giant Warner Music Group. It has quietly been collecting at least $2 million a year in licensing fees for the song’s commercial use. Depending on the size and budget of the production, the company charged as much as $10,000 to use the song.
But then, in 2013, an American filmmaker named Jennifer Nelson sued Warner/Chappell after paying $1,500 to use the song in her documentary. She wants the company to repay her and anyone else it has charged.
Happy Birthday, she insists, has been in the ‘public domain’ for nearly a century and so is not owned by anyone. Last week, on the eve of the judge’s ruling, Ms Nelson’s lawyers in California announced they had uncovered a ‘proverbial smoking gun’ in the form of 200 pages of conclusive new evidence proving her case — evidence, they say, that Warner/ Chappell withheld.
Such legal shenanigans seem far removed from the sweet associations we have with Happy Birthday. The saga of the song began innocently enough with two Victorian spinster sisters in Louisville, Kentucky.
Mildred and Patty Hill were the daughters of a Presbyterian minister who reportedly told them it was better to live in a hollow tree, than depend on a man.
Neither married, but they devoted much of their energies to other people’s children. Patty ran a kindergarten while Mildred was an accomplished pianist. Together they wrote dozens of children’s songs, testing each one on the kindergarten’s pupils, honing them until the youngest could sing it and remember it with ease.
In 1893, they published their sheet music in a book called Song Stories For The Kindergarten. one number, a greeting song, was a special hit with the kids. It was called Good Morning To All and the melody — composed by Mildred — is the one we now use for Happy Birthday. The words, written by Patty, went: ‘Good morning to you, Good morning to you, Good morning dear children, Good morning to you.’
MILDRED had studied Negro spirituals and their influence is seen in the tune’s chant-like quality. The kindergarten children loved its simplicity but music historians agree it would have withered away if it had not acquired a birthday association.
By coincidence, around the time the song was published, children’s birthday parties started to take off. Patty’s kindergarten children started to sing Good Morning at parties. Somewhere along the line — nobody can agree exactly how — the lyrics were changed to fit the occasion. The new song spread by word of mouth. Soon they were singing Happy Birthday To You across Kentucky, and then the U.S. and beyond.
An Indiana newspaper reported the Happy Birthday song being sung as early as 1901 while the lyrics were first set to the Hill sisters’ tune in published form in a book in 1912. The book, however, didn’t credit the song’s creators and the issue of who exactly owned the song was left legally unsettled.
Then in 1934, an Irving Berlin musical, As Thousands Cheer, opened on Broadway. one of the sketches was set at a birthday party for the industrialist John D. rockefeller Snr and the Happy Birthday song was sung.
Patty Hill, by then a childhood education expert at Columbia Uni- versity, wasn’t interested in demanding money for the use of her song.
She and her sister Mildred — who had died in 1916 — had always insisted they didn’t write songs to make money but to entertain children.
But their more assertive younger sister, Jessica, sued the show’s producers and extracted a hefty $250 for every performance of the musical. The following year, 1935, she and a music publisher, Clayton Summy, copyrighted Happy Birthday To You.
The rest is showbusiness history. The huge popularity of As Thousands Cheer only served to ensure the song’s ubiquity. By 1937, the melody was so well-known that the tune alone, without lyrics, was being used in Hollywood films to set the scene for a birthday.
Despite the fact filmmakers have had to pay too use it, it has appeared in some 150 movies and countless adverts. Composers Igor Stravinsky and Aaronn Copland have even written pieces based on the song’s melody.
When, in 1962, Marilynn Monroe sashayed out in M Madisondi Square Garden to serenade President John F. Kennedy, we all know what song she breathlessly purred into the microphone. It probably wasn’t what the Victorian spinsters who wrote it had in mind.
As for conflicting claims over the song’s ownership, the publishing company that agreed the original deal with the Hill sisters later became part of a bigger business business. This in turn was sold in 1988 for $25 million to Warner, which got the rights to Happy Birthday in a job lot of 50,000 songs. But the copyright issue has stopped its use on countless occasions.
In the animated Wallace and Gromit film The Wrong Trousers, Gromit is given a birthday card which sings Happy Birthday, but the song was replaced on the DVD version with For He’s A Jolly Good Fellow, which isn’ t under copyright.
Producers of TV series Star Trek: The Next Generation made the same substitution after planning to use a Klingon version of Happy Birthday in one episode. repeats and copies of Eyes on The Prize, a documentary about the civil rights movement, were unavailable for years in part because of copyright concerns over vintage footage in which activists sang Happy Birthday to Martin Luther King.
Copyright law gone mad? Greedy big business spoiling everyon one’s fun? Some think so. Warner/Chappell claims its copyright will run until 2030 bu but Bob Brauneis, a law profes fessor at George Washington Un University and authority on th the song, says nobody sh should pay a cent. M Making a distinction be between melody and lyrics, Pr Prof Brauneis says copyright on the Hills’ tune, written in 1893, ran out decades ago ago. But there is no evidence the sisters wrote the Happy Birthday words. Indeed nobody knows who did, so they shouldn’t be under copyright either.
And what of the ‘ smoking gun’ laid out in court last week? It comes in the form of a tattered 1922 book lawyers for filmmaker Jennifer Nelson found in the library of the University of Pittsburgh.
The fourth edition of The Everyday Song Book, it contains the Happy Birthday lyrics without any copyright notice.
This is proof, they say, the Hill sisters dedicated their song to the public years before 1935, when Warner/Chappell says the family registered ownership of the music and lyrics.
Warner/ Chappell, meanwhile, insists there is no evidence the sisters abandoned their copyright or knew this 1922 book existed.
The judge has yet to rule but one thing is clear: we haven’t heard the last refrain of Happy Birthday.