{"version": "1.0", "type": "rich", "title": "\u201cHello! Ma Baby\u201d is a Tin Pan Alley song written in 1899 by the songwriting team of Joseph E. Howard and Ida Emerson, known as...", "author_name": "kontextmaschine", "author_url": "https://kontextmaschine.com", "provider_name": "kontextmaschine", "provider_url": "https://kontextmaschine.com", "url": "https://kontextmaschine.com/post/156874684603/", "html": "\n
\u201cHello! Ma Baby\u201d is a Tin Pan Alley song written in 1899 by the songwriting team of Joseph E. Howard and Ida Emerson, known as \u201cHoward and Emerson\u201d.[1] 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.[2] Additionally, the word \u201cHello\u201d itself was primarily associated with telephone use \u2014 \u201cHello Girl\u201d was slang for a telephone operator even through the first world war \u2014 though it later became a general greeting for all situations.