music #11: a definition article: the happy birthday song.
I turned 20 the other day. Whoopee. I also had an assignment due at midnight that night, a deifnition article for my music journalism class. Whoopee. Students across the course addressed a plethora of material, one even addressing the issue of defining silence - I'll give you a hint, it's just a whole lot of paragraph breaks and a period - but I thought that no topic fit me better than the happy birthday song, and the place it has in our hearts (and apparently, our wallets).
It’s that special time again, the mark of half-May. The sun is slowly going down and nature’s music is the sound of people complaining about how freezing it is and rubbing their hands together, the sound of their boots jumping up and down on the cobblestones dulled by the strangely misty cold air. It’s birthday time. Of the things I associate with my birthday, there’s only one that is reliably present each and every year: my dad coming into my room at the crack of dawn singing ‘Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you…’
Usually the adaptation ends somewhere along the lines of ‘You look like a monkey, and you smell like one too’ - because there’s nothing better than being reminded of your supposed ancestors on the annual celebration of your birth. But worse than ‘that awkward moment when your dad calls you a smelly ape’, there’s that really awkward moment when you don’t know quite where to put the syllables (or perhaps it monosyllabic and it just sits there like a lump of cake) at someone else’s party, and occasionally you find yourself mumbling through the person’s name until you get to ‘…dear da-murrmph-uhhh… happy birth-day to you!’ A quick glance to the left, a look at the cake, a lick of the lips and you’ve just survived potentially the most disastrous feature of birthdays: the obligatory happy birthday song, generally followed by a round of hip-hip-hoorays while the birthday guy or gal sits there waiting to eat their cake and lick the icing off the candles.
Making fun of people singing the birthday song, or the cake that comes after the birthday song is the most interesting part of the history of the tune. Seriously, it goes downhill and gets more ordinary hereon in.
The song was originally ‘Good Morning to All’, written by American sisters Patty and Mildred Hill in 1893. Patty was a kindergarten principal in Louisville, Kentucky and wrote the song to sing to the children. Whether there was cake involved at this point is not known. Apparently, they thought their song was so amusing that they sang it at the birthday parties of children as entertainment (happy birthday predates clowns and jumping castles, apparently), but they changed the tune slightly to accommodate the two syllables in ‘happy’. Currently, the song ‘Happy Birthday to You’ is sung in more than 20 languages, leading me to ask who exactly needs drunk karaoke when there’s intercontinental versions of the same embarrassing birthday song?
According to Wikipedia (the source of eternal knowledge) in 2008 Warner (who bought the song for a measly $5000 to begin with) collected about $5000 per day ($2 million per year) in royalties for the song. This was from the usual film, television, radio and other technological mediums, but, - check this out and weep - also ‘where a substantial number of those in attendance are not family or friends of whoever is performing the song’. Well, that’s the last time I get anyone to throw me a party in a bar. There wouldn’t be any drinks served, everyone would have forked over cash just to participate in one of the strangest communal rituals we have. This is why people generally make up their own little ditties. The best birthday song adaptation I’ve ever heard (other than my dad’s monkey-version) is the ‘Michael Jackson’ version in the 1991 episode of the Simpsons. ‘Lisa it’s your birthday; happy birthday Lisa’ certainly gets around those copyright laws in an interesting and amusing way.
The copyright for both the words and the music of ‘Good Morning to All’ has since expired in the US and both are now free to the US public, but the same doesn’t apply for the two-syllable ‘happy birthday’ version. In the countries where copyright lasts for the life of the author and an additional seventy years, the copyright will expire 31 December 2016, and in the US 2030. So, based on rough Wikipedia-verified calculations, the birthday song will have generated over 44 million dollars just because it’s part of a cultural practice that’s repeated several times each and every day of the year all around the world.
Good investment, guys.
It’s that special time again, the mark of half-May. The sun is slowly going down and nature’s music is the sound of people complaining about how freezing it is and rubbing their hands together, the sound of their boots jumping up and down on the cobblestones dulled by the strangely misty cold air. It’s birthday time. Of the things I associate with my birthday, there’s only one that is reliably present each and every year: my dad coming into my room at the crack of dawn singing ‘Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you…’
Usually the adaptation ends somewhere along the lines of ‘You look like a monkey, and you smell like one too’ - because there’s nothing better than being reminded of your supposed ancestors on the annual celebration of your birth. But worse than ‘that awkward moment when your dad calls you a smelly ape’, there’s that really awkward moment when you don’t know quite where to put the syllables (or perhaps it monosyllabic and it just sits there like a lump of cake) at someone else’s party, and occasionally you find yourself mumbling through the person’s name until you get to ‘…dear da-murrmph-uhhh… happy birth-day to you!’ A quick glance to the left, a look at the cake, a lick of the lips and you’ve just survived potentially the most disastrous feature of birthdays: the obligatory happy birthday song, generally followed by a round of hip-hip-hoorays while the birthday guy or gal sits there waiting to eat their cake and lick the icing off the candles.
Making fun of people singing the birthday song, or the cake that comes after the birthday song is the most interesting part of the history of the tune. Seriously, it goes downhill and gets more ordinary hereon in.
The song was originally ‘Good Morning to All’, written by American sisters Patty and Mildred Hill in 1893. Patty was a kindergarten principal in Louisville, Kentucky and wrote the song to sing to the children. Whether there was cake involved at this point is not known. Apparently, they thought their song was so amusing that they sang it at the birthday parties of children as entertainment (happy birthday predates clowns and jumping castles, apparently), but they changed the tune slightly to accommodate the two syllables in ‘happy’. Currently, the song ‘Happy Birthday to You’ is sung in more than 20 languages, leading me to ask who exactly needs drunk karaoke when there’s intercontinental versions of the same embarrassing birthday song?
According to Wikipedia (the source of eternal knowledge) in 2008 Warner (who bought the song for a measly $5000 to begin with) collected about $5000 per day ($2 million per year) in royalties for the song. This was from the usual film, television, radio and other technological mediums, but, - check this out and weep - also ‘where a substantial number of those in attendance are not family or friends of whoever is performing the song’. Well, that’s the last time I get anyone to throw me a party in a bar. There wouldn’t be any drinks served, everyone would have forked over cash just to participate in one of the strangest communal rituals we have. This is why people generally make up their own little ditties. The best birthday song adaptation I’ve ever heard (other than my dad’s monkey-version) is the ‘Michael Jackson’ version in the 1991 episode of the Simpsons. ‘Lisa it’s your birthday; happy birthday Lisa’ certainly gets around those copyright laws in an interesting and amusing way.
The copyright for both the words and the music of ‘Good Morning to All’ has since expired in the US and both are now free to the US public, but the same doesn’t apply for the two-syllable ‘happy birthday’ version. In the countries where copyright lasts for the life of the author and an additional seventy years, the copyright will expire 31 December 2016, and in the US 2030. So, based on rough Wikipedia-verified calculations, the birthday song will have generated over 44 million dollars just because it’s part of a cultural practice that’s repeated several times each and every day of the year all around the world.
Good investment, guys.
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