Tag Archives: Happy Birthday

Feel Free to Sing/Play Happy Birthday

Posted by MaryO on

happy birthday

 

You’re legal now!

None of the companies that have collected royalties on the “Happy Birthday” song for the past 80 years held a valid copyright claim to one of the most popular songs in history, a federal judge in Los Angeles ruled on Tuesday.

In a stunning reversal of decades of copyright claims, the judge ruled that Warner/Chappell never had the right to charge for the use of the “Happy Birthday To You” song. Warner had been enforcing a copyright since 1988, when it bought Birch Tree Group, the successor to Clayton F. Summy Co., which claimed the original disputed copyright.

Judge George H. King ruled that a copyright filed by the Summy Co. in 1935 granted only the rights to specific piano arrangements of the music, not the actual song.

Read more at http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-happy-birthday-song-lawsuit-decision-20150922-story.html

The following version is in the O’Connor Music Studio library, if you wish to borrow it.  It is also available on amazon.com

Happy Birthday to… US! | Barbershop HQ

Posted by MaryO on

BarbershopQuartet

It was 77 years ago this weekend that 26 men showed up at the Tulsa Club for a night of singing. They’d been invited by “Rupert Hall, Royal Keeper of the Minor Keys” and “O.C. Cash, Third Assistant Temporary Vice Chairman” of the Society for the Preservation and Propagation of Barber Shop Quartet Singing in the United States (sic), who noted:

In this age of Dictators and Government control of everything, about the only privilege guaranteed by the Bill of Rights not in some way supervised and directed, is the art of Barber Shop Quartet singing. Without doubt we still have the right of “peaceable assembly” which I am advised by competent legal authority includes quartet singing. The writers of this letter have for a long time thought that something should be done to encourage the enjoyment of this last remaining vestige of human liberty. Therefore, we have decided to hold a songfest on the Roof Garden of the Tulsa Club on Monday, April 11, at six-thirty p.m.

Read more:  Happy Birthday to… US! | Barbershop HQ.