The big music-news story here in the US is that a federal court has declared invalid Warner Music's claimed copyright on the world's best-known song, "Happy Birthday". The company has been making several million dollars each year on royalties from the song, and the lawyers are now preparing a class-action suit to reclaim all those royalties. In celebration, here's an ABC transcription of the song from the children's songbook that was submitted as evidence: X: 16 T: Good Morning and Birthday Song B: "The Everyday Song Book" 1927 F: http://www.library.pitt.edu/happybirthday/pdf/The_Everyday_Song_Book.pdf Z: 2015 John Chambers M: 3/4 L: 1/8 P: Special permission through courtesy of The Clayton F Summy Co. K: Ab E- E | F2 E2 A2 | G4 E- E | F2 E2 B2 | A4 | w: Children:~Good* morn-ing to you, Good* morn-ing to you, w: Teacher:~Good* morn-ing to you, Good* morn-ing to you, w: Optional:~Hap-py birth-day to you, Hap-py birth-day to you, % E- E | e2 c2 A2 | G2 F2 d- d | c2 A2 B2 | A4 |] w: Good_ morn-ing dear teach-er, Good* morn-ing to you. w: Good_ morn-ing dear child-ren, Good* morn-ing to you. w: Hap-py birth-day dear [Child's Name], Hap-py birth-day to you. I actually had a problem with the transcription: The original has the text "*..........," below two obvious notes, and I couldn't find any way to get all my ABC tools to include the asterisk in the text. \052 works with the old abc2ps program and several of its clones, but the major clone (abcm2ps) doesn't show it as '*'. You might think that \* would work, but it didn't work with any of the tools I tested. There's also a footnote with the explanation "* When the song is sung as a birthday greeting for some child in the room, the name of the child is inserted here." I decided the obvious thing to do was what you see above, which is a bit more compact than the footnote. Part of the fun is that the songbook was published in the US in 1916, before the modern extendable-forever copyright law was passed in 1928. The Everyday Song Book was discovered in Warner Music's library, and was submitted to the court as evidence. The song had a copyright-related comment below and left of the title, which I put in the P: header, but it was blurred and illegible in the copy submitted to the court. Warner's lawyers claimed that they didn't know what it said or how it got so smudged. Someone found a clean copy in a library, and submitted it to the court. It's widely considered "smoking gun" evidence that Warner's lawyers and management knew quite well that their claim was fraudulent, and the court has agreed (though without quite using words like "fraud"). I've been doing a lot of transcribing of old, public-domain music, and I'm tempted to set up a new project to transcribe the rest of this book. It now qualifies as an important historical collection, and about half the songs in the book are well known to the general public today. If anyone else has started transcribing this collection, could you let me know, so we don't have to duplicate each other's work? (Actually, such duplication isn't a bad idea, since comparing the results can be useful as a form of proofreading for all the transcriptions. And the different styles of ABC that usually result can help make the music available to people using tools that don't implement the full so-called "standard[s]" for ABC. I'd guess that lots of the tunes in this collection already exist in ABC form, though maybe not always with the same lyrics.) In June 2017, I finished transcribing the book, and I've included it in my .../music/book/ collection. I didn't actully hear from anyone who wanted to help do it, but I've already seen a few references to it, sometimes including a tune or two, in some online discussions.