Using the same melody, children at Louisville Experimental Kindergarten School would sing Good Bye to You, Happy Vacation to You and - with every birthday celebration - Happy Birthday to You, Patty said in the deposition.īut on cross-examination, she admitted that the sisters never published or copyrighted the lyrics to Happy Birthday - not even as the song grew increasingly popular over the next two decades from coast to coast. The sisters published Good Morning in 1893 in a book of sheet music called Song Stories for Children, which they copyrighted and exhibited that year at the World's Fair in Chicago. Patty said that Mildred would work on the score each night in the family's Louisville home and the next day she would try it out with her pupils, until they finally came up with a version that "even the youngest children could learn with perfect ease." "She was the musician and I was, if it is not using too pretentious a word, the poetess," Patty said in a deposition in a suit filed in 1934 by their younger sister Jessica against renowned composer Irving Berlin, playwright Moss Hart and the producers of a Broadway musical that allegedly featured Happy Birthday without a license. There is little dispute that in the 1890s the Hill sisters wrote the precursor to Happy Birthday, a song for Patty's kindergarten students they called Good Morning to All and which featured the same melody. George Washington University law school professor Robert Brauneis, who may be the world's leading scholar on Happy Birthday, says Warner can only win if it proves that Mildred and Patty Hill wrote the song.Īnd Brauneis, who spent two years researching its copyright, said that while both were remarkable women - Mildred was later a renowned musicologist and Patty an esteemed professor at Columbia University Teachers College - there is "scant" evidence that they did. If Warner/Chappell Music prevails, it will be able to continue collecting fees until 2030, when the disputed copyright expires, from anyone who wants to publicly perform the song or use it on television or in movies. James Steven, a spokesman for Warner Music Group, which owns the music publisher, said the company doesn't comment on pending litigation.
Nelson's lawyers say they have "irrefutable documentary evidence, some dating to 1893," showing that if Warner/Chappell owns the right to anything, it is only to a couple of long-forgotten piano arrangements for Happy Birthday published in 1935. The sisters have no surviving family members.
Happy Birthday generates an estimated $2 million a year in licensing fees, part of which goes to a children's education organization designated by the Hill family.
One of Nelson's lawyers, Mark Rivkin, said as Nelson did more and more research on the song's roots, "she got madder and madder and madder."
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