Vintage sheet music for "Hello Central, Give Me No Man's Land." This song was written by Sam Lewis and Joe Young, and set to music by Jean Schwartz in 1918. It tells the story of a little child trying to use the (then) relativly new invention of the telephone to talk to his daddy, who's been killed in the war.

Curiously enough, there are other "telephone" themed songs from the era. "Hello, Central, Give Me Heaven" (Charles K. Harris, 1901) is thematically similar, but other telephone songs of the time are: "Call Me Up Some Rainy Afternoon" by Irving Berlin (1910), and "Hello Frisco Hello" by G. Buck and L. A. Hirsch (1915). "My Wife's Gone To The Country" (1908) possibly has the first refrence to a telephone call, while "Hello Frisco" was the first coast-to-coast telephone song, written made to commemorate the first coast-to-coast telephone call made that same year. It was a hit in the Ziegfeld Follies. After that it's been hundreds, if not thousands of singers songwriters going on about the telephone, from Chuck Berry to AC/DC.

"Hello Central, Give Me No Man's Land" was introduced to the world by the worlds greatest entertainer Al Jolson in the play "Sinbad". This is the same show that gave us the smash hit "Swanee" by Gershwin.