JPF Home Page Forums General Messages Industry Message Forum Happy Birthday, It all begins with a song

Saw this on the net;
Mildred and Patty Hill were kindergarten teachers in Louisville, Kentucky, in the 1890s. They believed children learned better through songs, so they wrote simple melodies to teach lessons throughout the day.
In 1893, they composed "Good Morning To All" to greet students each morning. The melody was simple, easy for young children to sing, with a range small voices could handle comfortably.
The song appeared in their 1893 songbook for teachers. It was meant to be sung once a day, by children.
Then something happened.
The melody was so catchy, so easy to remember, it spread beyond classrooms. People changed the words. Instead of "Good Morning To All," they sang "Happy Birthday To You."
By the 1930s, "Happy Birthday" was the default birthday song across America, in Broadway musicals, in films. Everyone knew it.
The Hill sisters never intended this. They'd written a morning greeting song. Someone else—no one knows who—had stolen their melody and added new words.
In 1935, the Hill family secured a copyright on the "Happy Birthday" lyrics, realizing their melody had become a commercial phenomenon. For the next 80 years, technically, every public performance of "Happy Birthday to You" required payment of licensing fees.
Restaurants, movie studios, television shows—all owed royalties. Warner/Chappell Music acquired the copyright and collected an estimated $2 million per year.
People singing at birthday parties were technically violating copyright law with every rendition.(Not always in a commercial venue?)
In 2016, after a lengthy court case, a federal judge ruled the copyright claim on the lyrics was invalid. "Happy Birthday To You" entered the public domain. It had taken over 120 years.
But here's the part that matters: Mildred Hill composed over 600 songs during her lifetime. She was a church organist, a musical educator, and a serious composer. She wrote hymns, teaching songs, and concert pieces.
History remembers one—and it's not even the version she wrote.
The melody everyone sings at birthday parties is hers. The words aren't. And for most of the 20th century, her accidental creation was copyrighted and monetized by people who had nothing to do with writing it.
Mildred Hill died in 1916, having lived long enough to hear her morning greeting song transformed into something she never intended. Her sister Patty lived until 1946, watching "Happy Birthday" become the most recognized song in the English language.
Neither of them made much money from it. Neither wanted the fame. They'd just been teachers trying to make mornings friendlier for kindergarteners.
Today, "Happy Birthday To You" is sung millions of times every day, in dozens of languages, at parties on every continent. It's estimated to be the most performed song in the world.
And most people singing it have no idea who Mildred and Patty Hill were, or that they're singing a stolen version of a morning greeting song from 1893.
Sometimes the thing you create becomes famous for all the wrong reasons. Sometimes your work gets transformed into something you never intended. And sometimes you write 600 songs but only one survives.
Mildred Hill wrote "Good Morning To All."
The world turned it into "Happy Birthday To You."
She never got to correct them.

Wow...
That was a truly interesting read.

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The x-ray on the glass board showed a right arm turned to dust. The bones of the elbow were not just broken. They were crushed into small, sharp pieces.
A doctor stood by the bed in a quiet hospital room. He held a metal chart and spoke in a low, flat voice. Standard medical rules gave the man in the bed two simple choices.
The doctors could remove the right arm completely. Or, they could use steel pins to lock the arm perfectly straight. A straight arm meant the man could still walk normally and carry things at his side.
The man in the bed looked down at his damaged body. He shook his head. He did not ask for the safest path. He asked to be broken in a very specific way.
The man was Lester Polsfuss.
Most people knew him by his stage name, Les Paul.
Les Paul was a working guitar player who built his own solid-body electric guitars in his spare time.
It was January 1948. Les was driving through Oklahoma on Route 66. A sudden winter storm had turned the dark roads to solid glass. His car slid out of control in the freezing wind.
The heavy car broke through a wooden guardrail and dropped off a bridge. It crashed deep into a freezing, snow-covered riverbed. The metal roof crushed inward. Les woke up in the dark, trapped in the cold shell.
His ribs were badly cracked. His back felt completely wrong. He had severe internal injuries from the heavy steering wheel. But the deepest shock came from his right side. His elbow was totally destroyed.
Rescue workers used heavy tools to pull him from the wreck. They rushed him to a local hospital. The pain was blinding and constant. But Les quickly realized the pain was not the real danger.
If his right arm was pinned straight, he would never play the guitar again. A straight arm cannot reach across a wooden body to pick heavy steel strings. His career would simply end.
Music was not just a job for Les. It was the only way he knew how to speak to the world. A straight arm meant a quiet life, a safe life, and a completely silent life.
The hospital operated on strict 1940s medical protocols. When a major joint is destroyed, you stabilize the limb. A straight arm lets a person work a normal factory job or sit at a desk.
The logic of the hospital was cold and correct. They focus on basic survival. They deal in bodily functions, not human dreams. A straight arm limits risk and prevents future damage to the nerves.
The medical system does not care if you are an artist. It only cares that you can walk out the front doors and pay your bills. This rule works — until it meets this person.
A nurse brought in fresh white bandages on a metal tray. The doctor picked up a thick pen to mark the skin for surgery. Les looked at the straight lines drawn on his pale flesh.
He felt the cold reality of the hospital room pressing down. He saw the door to his future closing. A straight arm was a death sentence for the loud life he had built.
Les stopped the doctor from leaving the room. He asked for the lead surgeon to return. When the older surgeon arrived, Les made a strange and highly dangerous demand.
He asked them to bend his arm. He wanted his right arm locked at a very sharp angle. He did not want a normal, working arm. He wanted an arm built just for holding a guitar.
The doctors were entirely confused. An arm locked at nearly ninety degrees would be strange. It would stick out in crowds. It would make wearing normal shirts hard. It would be useless for daily tasks.
Les did not care about wearing normal shirts. He asked them to bring a guitar into the sterile hospital room. He placed the heavy wooden instrument on his stomach while lying flat in the bed.
He moved his broken, painful right hand over the tight strings. He found the exact angle he needed to hold a flat plastic pick. "Pin it right here," he told the surgeon.
The operation took many long hours. Doctors opened his hip and removed a large piece of bone from his pelvis. They used that fresh bone to replace his missing elbow.
They drilled thick steel plates into his arm. They locked the bones together with heavy metal screws. When he woke up, his arm was bent forever. It would never straighten again.
The physical recovery was a slow, dark nightmare. Les was placed in a massive plaster cast that covered his upper body. He carried the heavy white weight around for a year and a half.
His body was weak and thin. He had to learn how to move, sleep, and dress himself with a rigid wing of an arm. Small, daily tasks like opening doors became exhausting battles.
When the heavy cast finally came off, the arm held. It was fixed at the exact angle he asked for. He could hold his guitar again. He could pick the strings. He could play.
But he was not the same man. His right arm was entirely stiff. His physical movements were strictly limited. He could not perform on stage with the same wild, fast energy.
The music industry was moving on quickly. New bands were playing faster and louder. He needed a way to keep up. He needed a way to create the rich sounds he heard in his head.
If his broken body could not do it all at once, he would have to build a new way. Les retreated to his dusty home garage. He surrounded himself with wires, tubes, and tools.
He had always loved taking radios and complex machines apart. He ordered an early Ampex tape recorder. It was a heavy, expensive machine used mainly for radio broadcasts.
Les opened the back panel and started changing the mechanical parts. He added a second recording head to the machine. He played one simple guitar part and recorded it onto the brown magnetic tape.
Then, he rolled the tape back to the start. He picked up his guitar again. He played a second guitar part while the first one played back through a speaker. The machine recorded both sounds together.
He did this again and again. He added deep bass lines. He added layers of his wife singing harmony. He stacked sound on top of sound until it sounded like a full orchestra in the room.
Les Paul had just invented multitrack recording. He called the new process sound-on-sound. The music world had never heard anything so thick and perfect before.
Before this exact moment, bands had to play perfectly in a single room at the same time. If someone made a mistake, they all stopped and started over. Les changed the physical rules of sound.
His garage invention gave birth to modern music production. Every pop, rock, and hip-hop song you hear on the radio today is built on the multitrack method he created.
A destroyed arm forced him to find a completely new path. He could not rely on pure physical skill anymore. He had to use technology to bridge the gap his broken body left behind.
Sources: Archives of the Les Paul Foundation; historical medical and police accounts of the 1948 Route 66 crash. Some minor details summarized for clarity./

Edward Van Halen and Les Paul had a mutual respect for each other's work, and Van Halen collaborated with Seymour Duncan on a pickup design that was inspired by his favorite pickup, which was influenced by Les Paul's designs.