Happy Birthday Song Player

The melody is from 1893. Two sisters in Louisville, Patty and Mildred Hill, wrote it as Good Morning to All for a kindergarten classroom; the birthday lyric attached itself later and nobody is entirely sure who put it there. What happened next is the strange part.

Warner/Chappell collected licensing fees on the song for decades — which is why televised birthday scenes for years either sang something else or quietly paid up — until a US federal court invalidated the claim in September 2015 and a settlement the following year put it in the public domain for good. Guinness has it as the most recognised song in the English language. Stevie Wonder's Happy Birthday, released on Hotter than July in 1980, was never written as a party record at all: it was a campaign song for making Martin Luther King Jr Day a federal holiday, performed at rallies until Congress passed the bill in 1983.

Almost every song on this playlist is somebody's accident. The Beatles wrote and recorded Birthday in a single day at Abbey Road in September 1968, then broke off halfway through to go and watch a film on television. Lesley Gore was sixteen when It's My Party went to number one in 1963 — it was also Quincy Jones's first number one as a producer, twenty-two years before he made Thriller.

Altered Images took Happy Birthday to number two in the UK in 1981 and Clare Grogan spent the rest of her career being asked to sing it at other people's parties. And 50 Cent turned four words — go shorty, it's your birthday — into a line that has outlived the record it came from. The traditional song survives because it costs nothing and needs no musicians.

The rest survive because they borrowed its name. The borrowing never stopped: Katy Perry put Birthday on Prism in 2013 and shot the video in prosthetics, gatecrashing real strangers' parties as a series of terrible hired entertainers. Selena Gomez had already used the title that same year, Anne- Marie took it again in 2021, and New Kids On The Block got there first in 1986.

Four decades, four completely different records, one word — which is about as clear a demonstration as pop music offers that the strongest song title is the one nobody can own.