Happy Birthday to You Lyrics

The song is four lines long and only one word changes: the name. The 1911 book prints the name John, because the teacher is speaking about a particular boy, but the line works for any child. Three of the four lines are the same, and only the third carries the name, which is why a group of very young children can join in after hearing it once.

The book also shows how the classroom used it. The teacher asks who had a birthday this week, finds that John did, and asks how old he is. John drops his pennies into a bank while the children count out loud, one for each year, and they reach four. Then the children clap for him, counting the hands again, one, two, three, four, and one to grow on. Only after that do they sing the birthday song. The birthday child is then given a birthday card.

The 1911 printing is in The Elementary Worker and His Work, a study book for people who taught the youngest children in Sunday schools. In its plan for a Sunday morning, the song comes after the opening greeting song, and the book says it is sung to the same tune as that greeting, which begins Good morning to you.

That tune has its own history. It is Good Morning to All, written by the sisters Patty and Mildred Hill for the book Song Stories for the Kindergarten (1893). So by 1911 the birthday words were already being sung to the Hill sisters' melody. This is one of the earliest known printings of the words with that tune, not necessarily the first.

The song's legal history is well known. In 2015 a United States federal court ruled that the copyright claim on the words was invalid, and since a settlement in 2016 the song has been treated as public domain, so anyone can sing it, print it or perform it.