Actually, the story of “Happy Birthday”being written by two Kindergarten teachers is only half right. Patty was in fact a teacher, and later one of the world’s leading experts in childhood education, teaching at Columbia. Mildred was actually an ethnomusicologist (at least that’s what we would call her today – in her time she would probably be known as a cultural musicologist). It was less a spontaneous moment of brilliance and more a song precisely calculated to be catchy and memorable. George Washington Law professor Robert Branueis actually just wrote a large piece on the history of the song, and a clear argument on why it should be in the public domain. Check it out:

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1111624

All scholastics aside, happy birthday, again!