There are few things less pleasurable than a tuneless public rendition of Happy Birthday To You. We look into the history of the song, 100 years after it was first written.
It doesn’t rhyme. It doesn’t sound good when sung either solo or en masse (unless, perhaps, being panted out by Marilyn Monroe). It seldom scans when personalised (unless you have a Christian name of exactly two syllables) and three of its four lines are exactly the same. Am I the only one who…
