best birthday song
The most popular song in English, without a doubt, was sung to you on your first birthday, and you probably sang it to many members of your family and friends dozens of times a year thereafter.
Adult men and women in service clubs sing it to each other every week with enthusiasm.
It was the first song sung in outer space by the Apollo IX astronauts on March 8, 1969.
just the songs “Traditional Scottish Farewell Song” and “He is an excellent boy” they are sung almost with the same frequency.
By now, you may have guessed that the famous ditty is “Happy Birthday.”
Forerunner of the little song was composed in 1893 by two sisters. Dr. Patty Hill was the director of the Experimental Kindergarten in Louisville, Kentucky. Mildred Hill was a teacher there.
In those days, children started school in the first grade at the age of 6. There they began the journey through the “three Rs”: reading, writing and arithmetic.
Hill’s teachers were at the forefront of the theory that children were creative and receptive to learning at a much younger age than 6 years. They awakened the minds of young people with structured games, rhyming recitations, colouring, music, dancing and singing.
Patty devised the curriculum. Mildred took advantage of her musical talents as organist at her Old Kentucky church to provide music for singing and dancing.
One day, Patty wrote the words to a school song to open her students’ day and prepare their minds to focus on the upcoming lessons. she titled it “Hello, everyone.” Mildred set the words to music, perhaps inspired by a spiritual refrain.
The greeting was included in a collection titled “Song Tales from Kindergarten” published in 1893. The book sold modestly but well enough to warrant reprinting.
In the first revision, the words Good Morning “everyone” became “to you”, I suppose under the premise that the teachers had neither an assigned place nor a bright face.
“Song Stories” sales increased as the kindergarten idea caught on. The Good Morning song was standard for beginning students across the country. As a kindergartner in 1926 (yes, I’m that old). My classmates and I sang it every school day, after a cheery “Good morning, children” from Teach.
Singing to the teacher in the classroom has gone out of style. However, I remembered “Good morning to you” all my life, singing it to my children at breakfast, and to my grandchildren when they sleep with us. they love:
Good morning to you.
Good morning to you.
We are all in our places
With bright and shiny faces.
oh what a way
To start a new day.
Mildred died in 1916. Patti became a professor of early childhood education at Columbia University. Her innovative kindergarten practice book was almost forgotten.
* * *
Thirty-one years after the first publication of “Song Stories” a man named Robert H. Coleman added a happy birthday verse to the good morning to you verse and the original musical notes. Then, without asking Patti Hill’s permission, he published the combination as his own, in sheet music form.
The birthday verse was so popular that subsequent printings were for it alone, and the accompanying musical strains.
Dr. Hill sued Coleman and proved that she owned the tune. She and another sister received substantial damage. A new copyright was issued the following year (1935) and was acquired by the Birch Tree Group, Ltd.
The copyright was renewed in 1963, and it was sold along with other assets to Warner Communications in 1988, for $28 million.
Tea “Birthday song” he raised $2 million in his 1996 public accounting report published by Forbes magazine. Rock singer Michael Jackson recently bought the copyright for $2 million, which now makes “at least” $1 million a year.
Every time “Happy Birthday” sung or played commercially, Moonwalker gets a cut, until 2010, when the verse’s copyright renewal expires.
The Hill sisters’ melody copyright passed into the public domain a long time ago. Therefore, anyone has the right freely to write and sing the new words of her with the old tune.
The song is sung so much and often that copyright owners and the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers gave up trying to collect royalties from families and service clubs long ago.
Sing away from Rotary, Kiwanis and Lions.
* * *
There’s no need to worry about performing the other two “most popular” songs.
“Traditional Scottish Farewell Song” It was originally a poem written in 1788 by the Scottish poet Robert Burns. It is not known when people began reciting the poem to the accompaniment of an old Highland tune known as “The Miller’s Wedding”.
The words and music were first published together in 1796. Very quickly, “The good oldie times” it became a universal goodnight song among British and American sentimentalists.
It is most appropriately depicted among a circle of friends with arms across the chest and holding hands with adjacent partners.
“Because he is (she is) a good fellow” is another party song originally popularized by the French but adopted and immortalized by the British. Note that “mate” is an Old English word for “partner” or “partners in a joint venture” and is not gender conscious.
Etude Magazine says that the construction of the music is medieval French at the time of King Louis XIV. French soldiers used “jolly” as an insult for the English General Marlborough.
As is often the case, an enemy’s curse can be turned by the insulted into a term of approval. “Yankee Doodle Dandy” For example.
After the war, soldiers from Marlborough brought home “Jolly Good Fellow”, and there it became a popular pub tune.
Around 1830 someone added a second verse: “We won’t go home until morning, until daylight appears.” The song, therefore, is properly sung in two verses.
We can speculate about how long it will take to “Unfold the Barrel” also to take his place very closely “Happy Birthday.”
If I know Americans, I won’t be long.
November 18, 2001