Hello! Ma Baby

Uncommon card · No. 90302

"Hello! Ma Baby" is a Tin Pan Alley song written in 1899 by the songwriting team of Joseph E. Howard and Ida Emerson, known as "Howard and Emerson". Its subject is a man who has a girlfriend he knows only through the telephone. At the time, telephones were relatively novel, present in fewer than 10% of U.S. households, and this was the first well-known song to refer to the device. Additionally, the word "Hello" itself was primarily associated with telephone use after Edison's utterance—by 1889, "Hello Girl" was slang for a telephone operator—though it later became a general greeting for all situations. The song was first recorded by Arthur Collins on an Edison 5470 phonograph cylinder. The song may be best known today as the introductory song in the famous Warner Bros. cartoon One Froggy Evening (1955), sung by the character later dubbed Michigan J. Frog and high-stepping in the style of a cakewalk. The scene is parodied with a xenomorph in the 1987 film Spaceballs and a baby in the 2005...

Read on Wikipedia · Image art by William Starmer and Fredrick Starmer Joseph E. Howard, Public domain