Sez me.
In order to be at the upper end of the audience that was listening to “Will You Love Me Tomorrow” in 1960, a member of that audience would have to be age 17, meaning he or she was born in 1943. At the lower end, let’s pick an arbitrary age of 8, which means a birth year of 1952.
These individuals would be 62 to 71 today, not in “their 40s to late 50s.” Someone in their 40s, even their late 40s, would not have yet been born in 1960. Someone who was at the upper end of your sample group would have been five years old in 1960. Please explain to me how he or she would have grasped the implications you impute to “Will You Love Me Tomorrow.”
So much for “around at the time”!
No, unlike you, I deal with the specifics.
And all of them targeted to an adult audience, not a teen one. The type of music being made for and consumed by teenagers didn’t exist as far as mass culture is concerned until 1955 at the earliest. This music played by an entirely different set of rules than music made before that.
Also, music was not “played on the radio” in the 30s and 40s the way it was once the concept of Top 40 radio, with its playing of the same songs over and over multiple times a day, took hold in the mid- to late-1950s. In fact, the playing of records on the radio itself was all but unknown until the latter part of the 1940s. The vast majority of music performances on the radio were live, and one-time events. Did you hear the same song more than once? Sure, but not nearly to the extent these songs were heard from the mid-1950s forward.
Music in the home was primarily heard on a record player, and if some songs were perceived as too “adult” for young ears, they wouldn’t be played in their company.
As for your examples:
Anything Goes
“Getting matey” can be understood in the same way the term “make love” was understood in the day. Hint: it did NOT mean “have sex” at that time. (This is a side issue I’ve always been fascinated by too…the evolution of the meaning of that term over the years. Perhaps the subject for another thread.)
By the way, according to Wikipedia, the definition of “gigolo” is:
[emphasis mine] In my experience, the gigolo has always been at least as interested, if not more so, in a woman’s money as opposed to her sexual favors. This would certainly be the case with an 80-year-old “grandma.”
I Get a Kick Out of You
(Note correct title and lyric.) What you’ve left out is that, while Ethel Merman’s original stage version had the cocaine line, once the song appeared in the movies, Porter altered the lyric to “Some like the perfume in Spain,” and most subsequently recorded versions have used this or some other variation.
Let’s Fall in Love
You have, of course, conveniently omitted the line that immediately follows the ones you quoted…which is the title phrase, “Let’s fall in love.” So once again, a completely innocent and acceptable line is provided as an available alternate interpretation for what may also be meant to be somewhat “naughty.”