How popular is the baby name Monalisa in the United States right now? How popular was it historically? Use the popularity graph and data table below to find out! Plus, see all the blog posts that mention the name Monalisa.
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In mid-1955, Perry Como released pop song “Tina Marie” [vid]. “Tina Marie” became a big hit, peaking at #6 on the Billboard Best Sellers chart in August.
And, just like “Mona Lisa” inspired parents to name their baby girls Monalisa in 1950, “Tina Marie” inspired parents to name their baby girls Tinamarie in 1955:
1957: 14 baby girls named Tinamarie
1956: 17 baby girls named Tinamarie
1955: 10 baby girls named Tinamarie [debut]
1954: unlisted
1953: unlisted
The name Tina also saw a spike in usage that year. No doubt many of these Tinas had the middle name Marie.
Source: Macfarlane, Malcolm and Ken Crossland. Perry Como: A Biography and Complete Career Record. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2012.
Music has introduced dozens of new names (like Rhiannon, Monalisa, and Alize) to the baby name charts.
I believed for a long time that Dardanella was the first of these introduced-by-song names. It bounded onto the charts in 1920 — before the widespread usage of radio and record players, impressively. This must make it one-of-a-kind, right?
Nope. I’ve since gone back over the early name lists and discovered a musical name that debuted on the charts a whopping 17 years earlier, in 1903. That name is Anona:
1906: 12 baby girls named Anona
1905: 22 baby girls named Anona
1904: 22 baby girls named Anona
1903: 7 baby girls named Anona [debut]
1902: unlisted
1901: unlisted
The SSA’s early name lists are relatively unreliable, though, so here are the Social Security Death Index (SSDI) numbers for the same time-span:
1906: 38 baby girls named Anona (SSDI)
1905: 48 baby girls named Anona (SSDI)
1904: 57 baby girls named Anona (SSDI)
1903: 18 baby girls named Anona (SSDI)
1902: 1 baby girl named Anona (SSDI)
1901: 1 baby girl named Anona (SSDI)
The song “Anona” was published in mid-1903. It was written by Vivian Grey, which was a pseudonym for either presidential niece Mabel McKinley or prolific songwriter Robert A. King, sources don’t agree.
The song became very popular and was recorded multiple times. (Here’s Henry Burr’s version, for instance.) This is the chorus:
My sweet Anona, in Arizona,
There is no other maid I’d serenade;
By camp-fires gleaming, of you I’m dreaming,
Anona, my sweet Indian maid.
So-called “Indian love songs” were becoming trendy around this time, thanks to the success of the song “Hiawatha” (1902). Here are a few more that, like “Anona,” have titles that were also used as female names in the songs:
Though most of the baby names in the SSA’s annual datasets are repeats, each dataset does contain a handful of brand-new names.
Below are the most popular debut names for every single year on record, after the first.
Why bother with an analysis like this? Because debut names often have cool stories behind them, and high-hitting debuts are especially likely to have intriguing explanations tied to historical people/events. So this is more than a list of names — it’s also a list of stories.
Here’s the format: “Girl name(s), number of baby girls; Boy name(s), number of baby boys.” Keep in mind that the raw numbers aren’t too trustworthy for about the first six decades, though. (More on that in a minute.)
I’ve already written about some of the names above, and I plan to write about all the others as well…eventually. In the meanwhile, if you want to beat me to it and leave a comment about why Maverick hit in 1957, or why Moesha hit in 1996, feel free!
Source: U.S. SSA
Image: Adapted from LotusBud0048a (public domain) by Frank “Fg2” Gualtieri
Many of us probably don’t know anything about the 1950 movie Captain Carey, U.S.A.
But I bet most of us could hum a few bars of the film’s theme song, “Mona Lisa” [vid].
The song, performed by Nat “King” Cole, was the #1 song in the nation for several weeks straight in the summer of 1950. It went on to win the Academy Award for Best Original Song in early 1951.
Monalisa became the top baby name debut that year, and it’s been on the list ever since.
Even more impressive? The jump in the number of babies named Mona that year:
1952: 950 baby girls named Mona
1951: 1,106 baby girls named Mona
1950: 1,087 baby girls named Mona
1949: 513 baby girls named Mona
1948: 455 baby girls named Mona
You can bet many of those babies were given the middle name Lisa. :)
The song refers to Leonardo da Vinci’s painting Mona Lisa, a 16th-century portrait of Lisa Gherardini. Mona is a contraction of Madonna, or ma donna, Italian for “my lady,” and Lisa is a short form of Elisabetta, the Italian form of Elizabeth.
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