• Share to Facebook
• Share to Twitter
• Share to Email

Theater is filled with storied traditions, developed and preserved over its centuries-long history, which dates back to the playwright Aeschulys in 472 BCE. While some of these customs seem to be rooted in some degree of practicality, others have become outdated or simply never had any grounding in “reality” in the first place. But no matter if it’s a local stage show or a major Broadway production — or if it’s a comedy, musical, or drama — these long-held theater traditions and superstitions are still going strong.

Telling Performers to “Break a Leg”

Ironically, wishing someone “good luck” in the theater is actually, well, bad luck. Instead, it’s common practice to tell entertainers to “break a leg.” That may seem like an odd way to wish them well before a show, but the tradition is rooted in superstition. Many believe that spirits, like ghosts and fairies, may inhabit theaters and be looking to cause trouble. If they hear “break a leg,” they’ll actually do the opposite, meaning good will come from the wish. But that’s not the only explanation, according to Playbill. A different theory suggests that the “leg” in question is not a limb but a curtain that hangs in the wings, so “breaking” it means making it onto the stage. And yet another explanation dates back to Elizabethan England, when audiences used to throw money on the stage to show their appreciation, so when actors “broke” the line of their leg, they were actually bending down to collect their earnings.

Always Leaving a Ghost Light On

If you ever find yourself in an otherwise empty theater in the middle of the night, you’ll likely see a single bare bulb glowing onstage. All the intricate sets and props can make navigating a stage feel like winding through a maze, so it makes sense that a night light of sorts is left on when everything else goes dark. But the fact that the light is called a “ghost light” hearkens to a different explanation. “The superstition around it is that theaters tend to be inhabited by ghosts, whether it’s the ghost of old actors or people who used to work in the building,” stage manager Matt Stern, who has worked on Broadway in shows including Wicked and The Phantom of the Opera, told Atlas Obscura. “[G]host lights are supposed to keep those ghosts away so that they don’t get mischievous while everyone else is gone.” Other explanations relate to the historical need to relieve pressure on gas valves in old theaters, or legend of a thief falling in the dark, breaking his leg (literally this time!), and suing the theater.

Never Saying “Macbeth”

Shakespeare’s shortest tragedy is the Voldemort of the theater world. Many people believe the play is cursed, since so many mishaps have happened in its 400-year history. Legend has it that for the very first performance circa 1606, William Shakespeare himself had to go on as Lady Macbeth because the actor playing the role suddenly died, according to History.com. Another actor was supposedly killed onstage in Amsterdam in the 17th century, when a prop dagger was replaced by a real one. Riots have also plagued the play at times, with the most tragic being a New York production in 1849 when 22 died and more than 100 were injured. As even a mere mention of the title may bring similar disasters, the play that shall not be named is often referred to as “The Scottish Play” or “The Bard’s Play” instead. Of course, not everyone believes in the so-called curse — after all, a play that has been performed regularly for so many centuries is bound to suffer some misfortune. For those who do buy into it, though, there are ways to reverse the bad luck: According to the Royal Shakespeare Company, you have to leave the theater, spin in a circle three times, spit, curse, and then knock to be let back in.

Hoping for a Bad Dress Rehearsal

You might think that the final rehearsal before opening night, when everyone onstage is dressed as if it’s a real performance, should be when everything goes off without a hitch. But thespians believe the opposite: “Bad dress, good opening.” Although the exact origins of the superstition are unknown, according to Backstage, performers swear by the phrase. It makes sense, in a way: The odds of things going spectacularly wrong two nights in a row are slim, especially if a cast and crew have time to address and prepare for those contingencies between a rehearsal and the performance. And if things are going to go wrong, it’s better that they go wrong without an audience.

Not Whistling Backstage

As far back as the 17th century, before stage managers became standard, productions had people called prompters, whose job it was to make sure everything flowed smoothly during the course of the show, Playbill explains. In the days before electricity, these prompters needed a way to indicate to folks backstage that a scene was changing, so they would use a bell or whistle. To avoid confusion, everyone else was strictly prohibited from whistling, lest they trigger an unintended (and potentially dangerous) set transition. When electricity came along, flashing lights and intercoms took over. Yet the tradition remains — this is one occupation where you shouldn’t whistle while you work.

Avoiding Wearing Blue

As Broadway Direct explains, blue dye used to be among the most expensive, so producers claimed it was bad luck in an effort to keep costs down. But that deception led to another, Playbill adds: Some theatrical troupes would splurge on blue costumes to make it seem like they were doing better than they were. To one-up them, troupes that were actually doing well added silver, which was even more difficult to afford. Thus, unadorned blue ensembles became a symbol of false success.

Banning Peacock Feathers and Mirrors From the Stage

Any good prop master knows to keep peacock feathers far away from the stage. The natural design of the feathers contains an “evil eye” pattern that is thought to bring bad luck in the form of technical failures and chaos, History UK explains. The eye’s curse (which is not unique to the theater) can be traced back to Plato and even the Bible, while the fear of the feathers themselves has existed since at least 1242, when they were linked to Mongols who advanced into Europe. Another item to avoid? Mirrors. While it’s a widely believed superstition that breaking a mirror causes seven years of bad luck, even unbroken mirrors should be kept offstage in the theater, since they can mess with the lighting design. Of course, there are exceptions to this rule — most notably in the staging of “The Music and the Mirror” from A Chorus Line.

Giving Flowers After a Show, Never Before

First do the work, then receive the appreciation. It makes sense to present flowers to performers after they’ve graced the stage, but according to Playbill, this tradition is about more than just rewarding someone for a job well done. Superstition dictates that it’s actually bad luck to give flowers before the show, for fear that something will go wrong to make the performance unworthy of beautiful blooms. Another (now less-common) floral tradition was to give the director and leading lady a bouquet stolen from a graveyard when a show closed, representing the death of the production.

Sing “Happy Trails to You” at the End of a Run

Whether it’s the end of a particular actor’s run or the entire close of a show, it’s tradition for the cast and crew to gather to sing Roy Rogers and Dale Evans’ 1950s tune “Happy Trails.” While the origins of the tradition are unknown, according to the Lincoln Center Theater, it endures today as a way to bid a fond adieu and wish your castmates well: “Happy trails to you / Until we meet again / Happy trails to you / Keep smiling until then.”

• Share to Facebook
• Share to Twitter
• Share to Email

Mascots can be powerful symbols for schools, sports teams, brands, and products, especially when they’re effectively leveraged across advertising campaigns. Some (like the forgotten fourth Rice Krispies elf, Pow!) end up as footnotes in a brand’s archive, but the most successful mascots transcend marketing plans, becoming not just lasting corporate symbols but pop culture icons. From the freezer aisle to the great outdoors, these memorable mascots are here to stay.

Poppin’ Fresh, the Pillsbury Doughboy

The Pillsbury Doughboy is one of the most enduring brand mascots of all time. Created by a Chicago ad copywriter in 1965 and rendered via stop-motion claymation (which required a stunning 24 shots per second of video), the mascot emerged from a roll of dough to declare: “I’m Poppin’ Fresh, the Pillsbury Doughboy!” Within three years, the character had an 87% recognition factor among shoppers.

Over the years, the Doughboy — who has famously represented 50 Pillsbury products across more than 600 commercials and ads — has continued to grow in popularity. He receives fan mail and requests for autographed photos, and at one point in the 1970s, Pillsbury fans were able to collect Poppin’ and the rest of the Fresh family — including his wife Poppie and kids Popper and Bun-Bun — when a series of popular vinyl dolls were released. Poppin’ Fresh, who has been rendered in CGI since 1992, is still out there buttering the public’s biscuits after 55 years: He made his debut in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in 2009 and has been a fan favorite ever since.

The Geico Gecko

The Geico Gecko was born of a Screen Actors Guild strike that prevented the hiring of live actors. After an initial appearance in 1998, the mascot officially debuted during the beginning of the 1999 television season. Those early commercials pleaded with viewers to recognize the difference between the car insurance brand and, well, a gecko. In fact, the whole campaign was inspired by individuals commonly misspelling or mispronouncing “Geico.”

Back then, the Geico Gecko had a posh British accent and was voiced by Frasier’s Kelsey Grammer. As years passed, a more casual Cockney accent was adopted to color the little green mascot as friendlier and more approachable — the spokeslizard next door, if you will. The Gecko has appeared in hundreds of commercials for the brand and even released a book, You’re Only Human: A Guide to Life, in 2013.

Kool-Aid Man

Back in 1954, Kool-Aid Man was known as Pitcher Man. Reportedly inspired by an ad agency’s art director who would watch his son draw smiley faces on frosty windows, the grinning pitcher promoted the ability to make two quarts of refreshing Kool-Aid from one tiny package. In 1974, the character got a revamp — he was renamed Kool-Aid Man, given arms and legs, and debuted in the brand’s first television commercials. By the 1980s, Kool-Aid Man and his “Oh yeah!” slogan were famously bursting through walls with refreshing pitchers of the soft drink for thirsty kids. His pop culture domination was solidified with appearances in video games, as well as a short-lived comic book series called Kool-Aid Komics. More recently, Kool-Aid Man has appeared in both The Simpsons and Family Guy.

Mr. Clean

If you visit Procter & Gamble’s Mr. Clean website, you’ll find an origin story involving a mysterious bald baby industriously cleaning a farmer’s front porch. The farmer and his wife thought “he was the cutest, cleanest baby [they] had ever seen,” and so they adopted him. The hardworking baby grew big and strong and traveled the world to help clean messes. His travels inspired a book, The Encleanapedia, which may or may not only exist as a promotional item at corporate press events.

Mr. Clean, the product, was developed as a less caustic cleaning agent for boats. When Procter & Gamble added the brand to its stable, Mr. Clean the mascot was born. Created by an ad agency in 1957, the muscular, tan, famously bald, genie-esque character in a tight white tee was reportedly modeled after a retired Navy sailor from Florida. The first animated commercial debuted in 1958, and within six months, Mr. Clean was the best-selling cleaning product in America.

Mr. Peanut

Mr. Peanut’s proper given name is Bartholomew Richard Fitzgerald-Smythe, which perhaps explains his regal top hat paired with a monocle and spats. A classic mascot, Mr. Peanut first represented Planters nuts in 1916, when a Virginian schoolboy named Antonio Gentile won a design contest with his anthropomorphic peanut drawings.

Mr. Peanut’s first Times Square billboard appeared in 1937, and 60 years later, in 1997, he made another New York City splash with his first Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade appearance. Animated television commercials featuring the dapper legume began airing in the 1950s, but Mr. Peanut didn’t speak until 2010, when he was voiced by Robert Downey Jr. In a surprising turn of events, however, the 2020 Planters Super Bowl commercial killed off Mr. Peanut and replaced him with Peanut Jr., a hip kid nut in a baseball cap.

The Michelin Man

One of the world’s earliest and most enduring mascots, Bibendum — better known as the Michelin Man — was introduced way back in the Victorian era. Large and puffy, the iconic mascot is said to have been inspired by a pile of tires that looked a bit like a man. A cartoonist in 1898 ran with the idea and created the Michelin Man, who wore pince-nez glasses on a chain, held a glass full of beer, and smoked a cigar. In later ads, his goblet was filled with bits of broken glass and nails, which, alongside a slogan that referred to “drinking up” the road, boasted the tire brand’s ability to overcome hazardous driving conditions.

It might seem odd for a tire mascot to be stark white, but the rubber used in tires was a milky white until around 1917, when companies began adding carbon black to the formula to increase its durability. Thus, Michelin Man has always been white — but his appearance has morphed in other ways over the years. The earliest versions were considerably less friendly looking and more mummy-like, and were usually based on slimmer bicycle tires. In the 1920s, he became a bit more athletic-looking. (That’s around when he quit smoking.) And in 1998, his 100th anniversary saw the introduction of an even slimmer Bibendum, inspired by the lower-profile tires of modern cars. Currently, a CGI Michelin Man is often accompanied by his dog Bubbles.

Smokey Bear

Smokey Bear was born from an effort to curb forest fires in the 1940s, when many firefighters were off fighting World War II. An initial campaign distributed fire prevention posters, including a series featuring characters from the hit Disney film Bambi. In 1944, an official mascot was created: a bear in blue jeans and a campaign hat named after New York Fire Department hero “Smokey” Joe Martin.

In 1950, a bear cub injured in a forest fire in New Mexico became the real-world Smokey. He lived at the National Zoo in Washington, D.C., for 26 years, during which time he received an estimated 13,000 fan letters a week. Meanwhile, Smokey the cartoon mascot had begun appearing on radio and television programs, in comic strips, in a line of toys, and even in a Little Golden Book. In 1952, to capitalize on the success of Smokey, Congress passed the Smokey Bear Act, which removed the fire-prevention bear from the public domain and ensured any royalties on Smokey tie-ins would go toward fire-prevention education. In 2013, for Smokey’s 70th birthday, the Forest Service released a social media-heavy campaign centered around the “Smokey Bear Hug.” It focused on more unusual causes of wildfires in all places, not just forests.

The Energizer Bunny

In the Energizer Bunny’s first commercial, he marched onto the screen, decked out in sunglasses and flip flops and beating his big bass drum, and outlasted the rows and rows of snare drum-playing pink bunnies. But why pink bunnies? Well, the 1988 ad was an attack on a long-running commercial by a top competitor. Duracell had used a pink bunny with a snare drum for 15 years, but in 1973, with their trademark on musically gifted rabbits expiring, Energizer swept in.

The mascot worked well for Energizer, and so began decades of memorable ads featuring their hip, high-stamina cottontail. Earlier commercials appeared to be selling fictional restaurant brands, phone companies, or sinus medications until the relentless Energizer Bunny showed up and a voiceover touted the company’s slogan. Now, 30-plus years later, he’s still going and going and going …

• Share to Facebook
• Share to Twitter
• Share to Email

Some mascots are born in boardrooms — like Betty Crocker, who started as a fictional advice columnist, or the Geico Gecko, who came about during an actors strike. Others grew more organically, or at least were based in reality. Sometimes the inspiration is a heavily branded version of a company founder, and sometimes it’s a family member. Some mascots have nothing to do with the company at all. How did the little boy get on the Cracker Jack box — and what does Captain Morgan have to do with rum? These eight brand icons have origin stories based in real life.

Wendy Thomas Beat Out Her Siblings for Burger Stardom

Melinda “Wendy” Thomas, the pigtailed, redheaded girl who graces the logo for burger chain Wendy’s, was a real person — the daughter of the chain’s founder, Dave Thomas. The illustration is based on a photograph taken at a Columbus, Ohio, photo studio in 1969, when she was just 8 years old.

It turns out that Wendy wasn’t the only kid up for the role. The Thomas family had four other children: her older sisters Pam, Lori, and Molly, and a brother, Kenny. Wendy, with her red hair and dusting of freckles, had, as she told People in 1990, the “all-American mug” her dad was looking for.

The elder Thomas, who died in 2002, eventually regretted naming his restaurant chain after his kid because, as a de facto spokesperson, she “lost some of her privacy.” Wendy did use her face to sell Wendy’s burgers — this time as an adult — one more time in 2011, promoting a burger named after her father.

The Real Duncan Hines Couldn’t Cook

Before he lent his name to baking mixes, Duncan Hines, born in Kentucky in 1880, was a traveling office supply salesman, a profession that didn’t allow much time for home cooking. Instead, Hines became a discerning patron of local restaurants, taking notes on food quality and even food safety. Car trips were becoming more a part of everyday life during his days on the road in the 1920s through the 1940s, so when he self-published a guidebook called Adventures in Good Eating in 1936, it was a big hit. He updated and re-released the guide each year until he retired in 1954.

His favored restaurants started displaying “Recommended by Duncan Hines” in their windows — kind of like Zagat today. After releasing a couple of popular sequels, Hines, then 72, teamed up with advertising exec Roy H. Park in 1949 to form Hines-Park Foods. The company merged with Proctor and Gamble in 1957.

Captain Morgan Was a 17th-Century Welsh Buccaneer

Buccaneers were a very specific kind of quasi-legal seafarer that sailed around the Caribbean agitating the Spanish empire, typically with financial backing from the English. Captain Morgan is perhaps the most famous of them all, and made a tidy fortune; he invested in sugar plantations and amassed a fleet of 36 ships. But in 1671, he made a crucial error when he attacked Spanish-held Panama City after England had signed a treaty with Spain. England made a show of arresting him, but when he got back to England he was knighted by King Charles II. He eventually returned to Jamaica, was appointed lieutenant governor, and lived the rest of his life in the Caribbean.

Morgan didn’t have any input on the spiced rum bearing his name, as far as anyone knows, but when the distillery Seagram’s purchased the recipe from a Jamaican pharmacy in 1944, he apparently seemed like a fitting mascot.

“Boyardee” Is a Phonetic Spelling of “Boiardi”

Chef Boyardee was a real person, and he was famous before he lent his face to one of America’s most popular canned food brands. He started his career in his native Italy at age 11 and, after settling in Cleveland, Ohio, with his family in the late 1920s, opened an Italian restaurant. Customers loved the food so much that they asked how to make it at home, so he started selling pasta, sauce, and cheese, helping to bring Italian cooking into the mainstream in American households.

His company was originally called Chef Boiardi, but it was hard for many Americans of the day to pronounce, so he changed the brand’s name to Chef Boy-ar-Dee. The company is best known for premade canned meals today, but when the products first hit the grocery store, Chef Boy-ar-Dee was the largest American importer of Parmesan cheese. Boiardi sold his company to American Home Foods Company in 1946, but continued consulting and appearing in commercials until around 1979.

Ronald McDonald Was Played by a Famous Weatherman

When McDonald’s began in the 1940s, it was started by two real McDonalds: Maurice and Richard, a pair of brothers in San Bernardino, California. The company grew throughout the 1950s through franchising, meaning that business owners would operate McDonald’s locations under national brand guidelines.

One branch in Washington, D.C., owned by John Gibson and Oscar Goldstein, sponsored a local broadcast of the incredibly popular children’s show Bozo’s Circus, starring the red-haired Bozo the Clown. The character was one of the first national celebrities for children, and even before he hit the TV screen, he lent his face to books, records, and other kids’ products. In D.C., Bozo was played by longtime Today show weatherman Willard Scott.

The sponsorship was so profitable that after the series ended in 1963, the franchise hired Scott to create his own clown for advertisements: “the silliest and hamburger-eatingest clown, Ronald McDonald.” The original design featured a food tray for a hat and a styrofoam cup for a nose, a far cry from the Ronald McDonald character that would eventually become synonymous with the brand. The idea was a success, and other franchise owners started following suit with their own clowns.

Eventually, Goldstein pitched their clown idea to the parent company, but the latter was reluctant at first. It only agreed because of the D.C. branch’s sales numbers, and debuted Ronald McDonald nationally at the 1965 Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. McDonald’s did, however, fire Scott for being too rotund the next year, hiring a new performer and redesigning the character into something closer to what we know today.

The Cracker Jack Boy (and His Dog) Were a Founder’s Family Members

The story of Cracker Jack started in the 1870s, when German immigrant Frederick W. Rueckheim and his younger brother Louis started selling bricks of popcorn out of a small office in Chicago. They began selling their caramel corn in the 1890s, and by the end of the century, their creation — and the innovative waxed box that kept its contents fresh — was a sensation. The brand was immortalized in the song “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” in 1908, cementing it as an American icon.

As World War I rolled around and anti-German sentiment started rising in America, Cracker Jack needed a show of patriotism to boost declining sales. The company redesigned the boxes in red, white, and blue colors, and for an extra wholesome touch, the elder Rueckheim added an illustration of his grandson, which first appeared in ads and then packages around 1918. Sadly, the boy died of pneumonia at age 8, so his image stayed on the box as a memorial.

A 14-Year-Old Boy Designed Mr. Peanut

The Planters Peanut Company was only a decade old when it held a contest in 1916 for the company’s trademark, with a $5 prize (about $150 today). Antonio Gentile, a boy in his early teens from Suffolk, Virginia — part of the same Italian immigrant community as Planters founder Amedeo Obici — drew an anthropomorphic peanut serving hot peanuts, exercising, and walking with a gentleman’s cane.

A graphic designer spruced up Mr. Peanut, giving him his trademark monocle and top hat, and in 1918, he appeared in a full-page ad in the Saturday Evening Post. It was the first national ad campaign for not just Planters, but any peanut brand. Mr. Peanut still graces Planters products and ad campaigns, sometimes with some trendy adjustments, like roller blades in the 1990s or, more recently, his death and resurrection as a little baby nut.

The Michelin Man Was Originally “the Road Drunkard”

The Michelin Man is pretty cuddly-looking for a stack of tires, but at the turn of the 20th century, he was a little scarier, or at least more of a lush. In fact, he was originally born from a design created for a brewery. When the poster artist hired by Michelin showed co-founder Andre Michelin a rejected brewery poster design of a burly human man raising a beer mug, the co-founder wondered what he would look like if he were made of tires. The final ad was a man-shaped stack of tires with human hands and pince-nez spectacles holding a champagne glass full of road debris as if in toast, as a couple of other tire-men looked on. It read “nunc est bibendum,” a Latin quote meaning “now it is time to drink,” and, in French, “the Michelin tire drinks up obstacles.” The company called the man “Bibendum,” and after this poster, people started calling him “the road drunkard.”

It would be a while before the tire took on the role of a friendly helper. Until the 1920s, he kept his glass and accessories, and often smoked a cigar; back when only the wealthy could afford cars, this helped him reach the company’s target audience. Today, he’s a more wholesome character.

• Share to Facebook
• Share to Twitter
• Share to Email

Its power is in its simplicity. With only six notes, six words, and four lines — three of them the same — “Happy Birthday” is one of the most universal songs on the planet. Yet for something so straightforward, the celebratory tune has a surprisingly complicated history.

The song has been passed down for generations, with many people learning the tune just by listening to family and friends sing it at parties. But the way that it spreads so organically is what made the tune’s copyright a subject of debate that was only legally settled in 2015.

A Pair of Innovative Sisters Wrote the Song

Born in Kentucky in 1868, Patty Smith Hill was known for breaking the mold when it came to early childhood education. Instead of structured learning, she championed a more natural method of kindergarten focused on children’s instincts and creativity.

Meanwhile, her sister Mildred J. Hill, born in 1859, was just as forward-thinking in the world of musicology. While she was also a composer and performer, the elder Hill focused her musical studies on Black spirituals, often writing about the subject using the pen name “Johnan Tonsor.”

Together, the Hill sisters wrote the song “Good Morning to All.” Three of the four lines were just that, while the third line was “Good morning, dear children.” “She was the musician and I was, if it is not using too pretentious a word, the poetess,” Patty said of their process in 1934, adding that Mildred, who also taught, would perfect the melody by trying it out on her young students. They included it in a songbook, Song Stories for Kindergarten, which they published in 1893.

The Song Began To Morph

Over time, the lyrics changed and the tune began to be used as a celebratory birthday song — the version that we know today. How exactly that happened is unknown, but by 1924, it appeared in another songbook edited by Robert Coleman with the Hill sisters’ original lyrics as the first verse and “Happy birthday to you” as the second.

The tune soon grew in popularity and started to appear more in print. But the Hills never copyrighted the “Happy birthday” version of the lyrics. Patty later said, “I was never a money-grubber.”

When it appeared in Irving Berlin’s 1933 Broadway musical As Thousands Cheer, however, Mildred and Patty’s youngest sister, Jessica, stepped in and filed a court case saying her family was owed royalties. The lawsuit was settled and the Hills were eligible for payment whenever the song was used. Then, in 1935, the Hills registered their work through the Clayton F. Summy Company with the now-famous birthday lyrics.

More Questions Emerge

That was far from the end of the saga, though. The company they registered with was sold off — twice — and in 1988, the song eventually fell into the library of Warner Music Group’s publishing arm Warner-Chappell, which was estimated to receive about $2 million a year from the song’s usage, well into the 2010s.

But it wasn’t long before questions were raised as to whether the song still qualified for copyright. Some believed the rights expired in 1949 since it was written in the 1890s, while others doubted that the Hills even wrote the birthday lyrics. Others believed it wouldn’t go into the public domain until 2030.

Even so, to avoid having copyright fees slapped on them, TV shows and films would often come up with alternative ways to capture the song. Restaurants even started to make up their own birthday tunes so there wasn’t any possibility of having to pay up. After all, when it was used, the fee could vary, costing as much as $10,000.

And even with the questions over the song’s authorship, Warner-Chappell still owned the rights. “The truth is it kind of doesn’t matter,” WNYC’s On the Media reported. “Copyright law isn’t an ironclad dictate, like the border of a country. It’s a lot more like land claims in the Wild West. You own what you can defend. Warner Music Group is a behemoth. No one’s ever seriously challenged it over ‘Happy Birthday.’”

A Final Ruling

In 2013, a filmmaker named Jennifer Nelson filed another lawsuit after paying $1,500 to use the song in her documentary. Two years later, her lawyers found a piece of evidence that changed everything: A version of the song in an old songbook from 1922 published without a copyright notice.

The long saga ended in 2016, as Warner Music Group agreed to pay back $14 million in settlement claims to those who had been charged to use the song since 1949. The song also had to be acknowledged as part of the public domain.

More than a century after the Hill sisters wrote the song that would inspire a cultural phenomenon, it finally became fair use.