Product Description
I wrote this arrangement on request to celebrate a birthday and it was performed and recorded by my daughter and I as a present the following day.
Even though it is word-famous, few people know where this birthday song originally stems from. It has been attributed to the Kentucky sisters Patty and Mildred Hill. It was first published as "Good Morning to All". The melody was composed by Mildred, who unfortunately died before knowing her melody was to become so popular. It has been suggested it was composed in 1893, though the first printed edition of this melody with the words now associated with it, "Happy Birthday to You" date from 1912.
As the sisters were nursery school teachers, their aim was to create a song that would be easy for their school children to sing and remember.
Both sisters were musical, Mildred being also a musicologist, writing under the pen name Johann Tonsor. She specialised in Negro Spirituals and went as far as suggesting Negro melodies could become the basis for an American national idiom. This might have encouraged Antonin Dvořák, the Bohemian composer and erstwhile Director of the National Conservatory of Music in New York, to use Negro melodies in his Symphony of the New World, in his American Quartet and in his American Suite.
I suggest that when performing this arrangement you call it by the name I gave to it, A Birthday Greeting, so that people are not immediately aware of what will be played. After a few bars and puzzled looks, they will laugh when the tune of Happy Birthday to You breaks through. I am sure they will also not expect it to continue for a further two bars!
This is an easy piece in the first position. My daughter did add the two double stops at the end and I kept them. If too hard I suggest playing only the two higher notes, omitting the two lower ones.
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