Happy Birthday Song Copyright Protected

News Bits: Happy Birthday Copyright Protected: "Happy Birthday Copyright Protected

Taken from Snopes

The 'Happy Birthday' story begins with two sisters from Kentucky, Mildred J. Hill and Patty Smith Hill. Patty Smith Hill, born in 1868, was a nursery school and kindergarten teacher and an influential educator who developed the 'Patty Hill blocks' used in schools nationwide, served on the faculty of the Columbia University Teachers College for thirty years, and helped found the Institute of Child Welfare Research at Columbia in 1924. Patty's older sister, Mildred, born in 1859, started out as a kindergarten and Sunday-school teacher like her sister, but her career path took a musical turn, and Mildred became an composer, organist, concert pianist, and a musical scholar with an speciality in the field of Negro spirituals. One day in 1893, while Mildred was teaching at the Louisville Experimental Kindergarten School where her sister served as principal, she came up with the modest melody we now know as 'Happy Birthday'; sister Patty added some simple lyrics and completed the creation of 'Good Morning to All,' a simple greeting song for teachers to use in welcoming students to class each day:

Good morning to you,
Good morning to you,
Good morning, dear children,
Good morning to all."


We have these ladies to thank for the melody, and an unknown person contributed the lyrics. Singing it to family and friends on their birthdays is okay, but get up on stage and warble it and you need to pay for the right. Who knew?