This is Beetroot
Better far than they 
1 June 2003, 21:47
Right, I can’t find any guitar chords for Cole Porter’s Love For Sale. It was written in 1930 for a Broadway show called The New Yorkers. In the musical it is sung my a young lady posing as a prostitute (!). Billie Holliday’s version of the song was banned.
It’s also an extra track on Elvis Costello’s Trust, and unplugged. So someone has guitar tabs. I might have to ask the nasty little trainspotters. (Oh, stupid me, the chords are at .info, and so are the lyrics.)
Anyway, as sung on Broadway in the earlier half of last century by a positively non-Carmen-like white ingenue, the song appears prudishly racy, while a black woman singing this song in that period strikes me as quite an ironic juxtaposition. The reason I never got the real meaning of the song through my head (i.e. a virgin in hooker drag) is that my first/only hearing was Elvis Costello’s slightly Chet Bakery take on it (adding another layer of interpretation to it, whee).
Sources:
- banned (popups)
- billie, which also has some neat points about how the latest wave in music is decried as “bad”, no matter the era.
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