Oh, To Be a 'Cello is a book in two parts. The first part is made up of thirteen essays in some way about music and the author's various experiences with music. The second provides Bert Hornback's musical settings for thirteen English poems, by Thomas Hardy, William Butler Yeats, Alfred Tennyson, John Masefield, Lewis Carroll, John Donne, and William Wordsworth. The settings, he insists, come from the poems themselves, not from him. Hornback has sung these poems in concert on several occasions to very appreciative audiences.