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I’m starting out this post to the somewhat unlikely soundtrack of “Mello Cello,” a meditative instrumental piece by Steven Halpern and cellist David Darling:
I say unlikely because my own meditation today on cello mellowness is centered around the type of Tin Pan Alley song popular in vaudeville about a century ago—a slightly different style of music.
The tradition of rhyming cello with mellow goes back a long way, at least as far back as the anonymous poem “To my violoncello,” published in a Southern paper in 1819 (“What joy to hear the notes so mellow/Of thee, my aged Violoncello!”). The phrase “mello cello,” with this spelling and often hyphenated as if to reinforce its onomonopiac implications, seems to have really caught hold in American popular culture in the 1910s. The songs I’ve discussed in previous mello cello posts—Charlie Chaplin’s “Oh! That Cello” of 1916 and the Neil Moret/Harry Williams song “Mello Cello” of 1921—were in fact later arrivals on the mello cello scene.
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Read on….
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Geoffrey, I’m at a loss for adequate words to express my admiration for your scholarship in unearthing these treasures of historical fact. Your mello cello findings reveal an unsuspected eddy of popular culture back there, ten, eleven decades ago. I particular like this paragraph, from down in the “read on” part of your post:
ReplyDeleteSeveral hummed imitations of cello playing follow, the second one happening after “Goodness gracious, hear him play!” Here I can't resist pointing out that in “Oh! That Cello” Chaplin follows up on the “Cello Rag” scenario with one possible outcome: the girl does fall for the cellist, and they are soon serenaded by their newborn’s not-so-mellow bellow.