Happy Birthday to You
My Dearest Reader,
I turned 31 today. I have to admit that for some years now celebrating my birthday has felt self-serving. After all, what have I done to contribute to my birth aside from being surgically removed from my mothers womb? If anything, she should be the one to be celebrated for giving birth to me. But as I sit here with writers block, spewing nonsense hoping it comes off as deep, I’m thinking about National Donut Day. If we, as a nation, can set aside a day to celebrate a pastry then why shouldn’t I make one day just about me. It is with this realization that I, an absolute nobody, hereby name April 11th National Sheyda Day (sorry if you have the same birthday — first-come, first-served).
While celebrating National Sheyda Day is a very recent tradition, celebrating birthdays is not. In fact, based on my limited research, the earliest mention of a birthday celebration is the Bible’s reference to a Pharoh’s Birthday (not actual day of birth, but coronation day) around 3,000 B.C.
What happened between 3,000 B.C. and now? TL;DR: The Greek added birthday candles to the tradition, Romans opened birthday celebrations to “the common man”, Christians abandoned their belief that birthdays are a celebration of evil in the 4th century, and German bakers invented birthday cakes with candles in the 18th century.
Fast forward to 1893: Mildred, Patty, and Jessica Hill were living in Louisville, Kentucky where Patty was a Kindergarten Principal at the Little Loomhouse and Mildred was a pianist and composer.
Patty was looking for a greeting song for teachers to sing to their students. So, together with Mildred, they composed and wrote “Good Morning to All,” which was published, sung each morning in class, and translated into French, German, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, and Swedish.
Sound familiar? According to Patty, although disputed, a while later when a student’s birthday came up, the class replaced the lyrics to “Good Morning to All” with “Happy Birthday to You.” While the song first appeared in print in 1912, it wasn’t until the 1930’s that the song’s popularity expanded, forcing the Hill sisters to file lawsuits against everyone who used the melody without a license.
Finally, tired of these lawsuits, Patty and Jessica copyrighted and published “Happy Birthday” with the Clayton F. Summy Company in 1935. Through a series of acquisitions, the copyright became the property of Warner/Chappell Music until 2030 — meaning anyone who sang the song in public would have to pay royalties which, according to Warner/Chappell Music, amounted to $2M each year, “most” of which went to the Hill Foundation in honor of the Hill sisters. Unfortunately for Warner/Chappell Music (and fortunately for all of us who break into song in public), after another series of lawsuits the song was declared public domain and Warner/Chappell Music agreed to pay a $14M settlement to those who had paid to license the Happy Birthday song.
Lawsuits and entertainment conglomerates aside, there is no doubt that the Happy Birthday song had a noticeable cultural impact across the globe. While looking into how many countries use the Happy Birthday melody, I found that the birthday song we sing in Iran is only 50 years old preceded by the Hill sisters’ melody. Mildred Hill passed away in 1916 without seeing the success of her song, but I bet you a donut on National Sheyda Day that she would have loved seeing how far her melody has reached.
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