Happy Birthday to You, Church!

Pentecost is a good time to sing a song that's now in the public domain.

One of the unintended consequences of the electronics revolution — the smartphones we carry around with us (and even before that, our CD and record players) — is that communal singing is on the wane.

There was a time — the oldest among us can remember it — when the heart of many social gatherings was a sing-along around a piano. There was a corpus of common tunes most everybody knew — folk songs, show tunes and even the occasional hymn. Singing ability didn't much matter. Your voice melded with everyone else's. In common singing, there was unity.

Nowadays, songfests are few and far between. Everybody has their own music now, their own personal mix.

Still, there remain a few common tunes in America's repertoire. The national anthem is one.  "Take Me Out to the Ball Game" is another: the anthem of the seventh-inning stretch. Even more familiar is a little ditty we've all known since we were kids: "Happy Birthday to You," or, as it is more commonly called, ...