The Everyday Song Book

The Everyday Song Book


published by The Cable Company, Chicago
12th ed. 1927

This directory contains ABC transcriptions of a collection of children's songs of the early 20th century in the U.S. This collection is memorable for being the first to contain the "Happy Birthday" song, number 16, which surveys report to be the most-sung song in the world. This book was important evidence in the 2015 lawsuit that cancelled the long-standing copyright on the song claimed by a string of "owners", ending with Warner/Chapell's claim. Many of the songs in this collection are still well known and (sometimes not so well) sung.
List files with: Session lister - Collection lister - Tune lister
Transcription Notes

In some tunes, it is difficult to follow the lyric lines after the first staff, especially for songs with two lines of words per staff. The book sometimes uses extra spacing to help, but ABC doesn't have notation for this. (Neither does "standard" staff notation; each publisher handles it differently.) Sometimes the verse numbers are added to all the lyric lines to help solve this problem. This isn't perfect, though, since it produces poor labelling when the staffs are reorganized. If a solution to this ever appears, we can edit the tunes appropriately.