Love for Sale (Cole Porter song)

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"Love for Sale" is a jazz song by Cole Porter, from the 1930 musical The New Yorkers.

The song is written from the viewpoint of a prostitute advertising various kinds of "love for sale": "Old love, new love, every love but true love". "Love for Sale" was a hit in 1930, but later on the tune was deemed too sensual and banned from radio for decades.

At the initial Broadway production, the song was first performed by Kathryn Crawford, and later by Elisabeth Welch.

Notably recorded by Billie Holiday in 1945, Eartha Kitt in the 1950s, Ella Fitzgerald in 1956, Tony Bennett in 1957, Miles Davis and Cannonball Adderley in 1958, The Manhattan Transfer in 1976, Elvis Costello, live on the remastered Rhino Entertainment CD of his 1981 record, Trust, Simply Red led by Mick Hucknall sang this song at the Montreux Jazz Festival in 1992 & Harry Connick Jr. in 1999 on his album Come by Me. This song has become a jazz standard, played by many jazz artists, often in solely instrumentalist versions. Notable among these is the Arthur Lyman version, which revived the song as a single record in 1963.

Notably, the song has been used during a sequence in a gay night club in the Cole Porter biopic De-Lovely (performed by Vivian Green ) and during a similar sequence in Brian DePalma's The Black Dahlia.