"Hello! Ma Baby" is a Tin Pan Alley song written in 1899 by the team of Joseph E. Howard and Ida Emerson ("Howard and Emerson"). Its subject is a man who has a girlfriend he knows only through the telephone. The song was first recorded by Arthur Collins on Edison 5470.[1]
Although it is portrayed as a "coon song", with African-American caricatures on the sheet music, the song is easily adaptable to any singer.
Its chorus is far better known than its verse, 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 Bert Williams:
In Charles Ives's composition Central Park in the Dark "In The Good Old Summer Time", it is quoted frequently.
Paul Kinsey, a character on AMC's Mad Men, sang this song in the season 3 episode "My Old Kentucky Home".
The song is sung by two characters in the 2007 episode "Bless Me Father, For I Have Sinned" of Saving Grace.
It was also sung by Michigan J. Frog in Looney Tunes several times, including in Looney Tunes: Back in Action, when Bugs Bunny tells Kate Houghton that he plays the female co-star and dresses as a female. Michigan J. Frog, sitting at a table behind Kate and Bugs, starts singing the song.
It was sung in the movie Spaceballs by an alien that emerges from a man's chest in the diner. This is the Michigan J. Frog version as well.
In the South Park episode "Cancelled" (2003), the likeness of Saddam Hussein (briefly assumed by an alien) sings the song while dancing.
In an episode of American Dad, Steve sings it while dancing a dead frog.
In an episode of The Cleveland Show Rallo Tubbs posing as the class turtle through a baby monitor convinces Cleveland, Jr. to sing the song forwards then backwards.
In an episode of the comedy series F Troop "She's Only a Build in a Girdled Cage," Patrice Wymore sings a variation of the song that substitues "Hello my soldier boy" for "Hello ma ragtime gal."