From the Record Shelves #309

Love for Sale

LP RCA Vintage Series LPV-554

Several things stand out as different or special on this recording, the song and its subject and the arrangement. It’s not one of the bands most happy contributions to the roaring twenties, but now we have reached 1930 and the depression. The band in question is Waring’s Pennsylvanians. Leader Fred Waring (1900–1984) came from a musical family, and when he and his brother Tom began the climb in the beginning of the 1920s to a very successful career, he abandoned his banjo for the baton.

Their recordings often featured the singing of brother Tom or the whole band, and as a special element of humor, their drummer Poley McClintock who had a raspy voice just like Billy Costello, who made Popeye in the cartoons.

This one is, as I said, more serious. In the spring of 1930, the band had been in Los Angeles playing in a show for six weeks. Later in the year, the show was bought and transformed to “The New Yorkers” with a music score by Cole Porter, who wrote this tune especially for the female vocal trio in Waring’s orchestra, the “Three Girl Friends,” who at the time were renamed “The Waring Girls.”

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