Monday, October 10, 2005

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?

My Chemical Romance Birthday Story

Looking for my 100 dollar bill . . .: My birthday story: "My birthday story
So, last night had to have been one of the BEST nights of my life!! Granted, the events leading up to the MOST AMAZING THING EVER weren't all that great, but the end result was SO good, that I just forgot about all of the crap I had to go through to get there.

First of all, I guess I should explain myself. . . I went to the My Chemical Romance concert last night in St. Paul. It's my birthday today, so, as a birthday present, my sister got me tickets and a hotel room for herself and me. I left Brookings about 10 a.m. and drove, and drove, and drove (withOUT air conditioning, mind you). So, that kinda sucked. But, I finally got to Shakopee, where I was supposed to meet my sister. Only to find out, that she was running behind and had NO idea how to get there. So, NUMEROUS phone calls later, we finally caught one another and set out to look for the hotel room.

Yeah. . . or so we thought..."


Shall I give away the ending? Her super treat was meeting with and talking to the lead singer of My Chemical Romance, Gerard Way, and he signed their ticket stubs. As she says, "But, to say the least, it was the BEST birthday present ever!!!"