2008 Woodie Awards
Restaurants wish customers a happy, happy birthday
Linda Shrieves
Issue date: 3/8/01 Section: On the Burner
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Did you ever wonder why this strange birthday song turned into a cultural staple? Well, rest assured. There is really a reason behind the happy, happy, happy shtick.
The song, “Happy Birthday to You” still earns royalties – to the tune of $1 million a year.
Ba-da-bing.
Curiously, even though it is sung every minute of the day somewhere in the world, the songwriters, Mildred Hill, a Kentucky schoolteacher, and her sister, Patty Hill, an education professor at Columbia University, never earned much from the song.
Written by the Hill sisters in 1893, the song wasn’t copyrighted until 1935. In 1988, Warner Communications bought the rights to the song for $25 million – and the song earns about $1 million a year in royalties. The song is expected to enter the public domain when the copyright expires in 2010.
So inventive restaurants – eager to avoid the rights police like ASCAP (the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers, which polices the use of “Happy Birthday To You”) – have come up with alternative songs.
What they have created is a body of work like Red Lobster’s “Happy, Happy Birthday” song. It goes like this:
“Happy, happy birthday
We’ re really glad you came
Happy, happy birthday
From the lobster gang
We hope you had a good time
On this your special day
So have a happy birthday
Hooray! Hoora! Hooray! Hey!”
New waiters are expected to learn the ditty, but Red Lobster manager Maggie Ashe said they pick up the song quickly.
“They’re a little shy at first, it doesn’t take long to pick up because it’s pretty simple,” said Ashe, who manages a Red Lobster in Leesburg, Fla. At Ashe’s restaurant, new waiters must learn more than one song so that the staff doesn’t have to sing – or chant – the song repeatedly on a high-volume birthday day.
Is there such a thing?
Absolutely, Ashe said.
“Some days you have only two or three people celebrating birthdays. Other days, it’s 15 to 20,” Ashe said. “Some days it seems like you’re singing happy birthday all the time. That’s when you want to have more than one song, to mix it up.”