In The Lady Is a Tramp there is a line “she won’t go to Harlem in a Lincoln or Ford”. Is that because those were nice cars and she’d be showing off? Or becuase it mean she took a cab instead? Or did she take a Rambler?
The song is ironical (I guess, have to ask Alanis Morrissette I 'spose 
)…
The snooty society crowd diss’s our Lady for not doing the obnoxious things they do, like descending on the poor folks in expensive cars.
Although I’ve never understood the California verse.
I get the irony, it’s just that Fords don’t sound expensive.
More irony – Sunny California is “cold and it’s damp.”
Bear in mind that the song is from the '30s, and that the connotation of “Harlem” has changed a lot since then.
The line is really just about not being a scenester – not going out on the town to the Cotton Club – and the end clause is just a convenient rhyme.
Ah, I think I’m on to something… the usual lyrics are an invention of Frank Sinatra (rhyming Fords/Broads). The original lyrics don’t have that line.
The irony is in the line “That’s why the Lady is a tramp”. All the other lines describe her true, honest feelings.
Maybe they were thinking of San Francisco?
The Frank Sinatra version we listen to at work says “ermines and pearls”…and the whole point of the song is that the other society women look down on her and call her a tramp because she doesn’t go along with their pretensions.
It’s on our corporate tape as well. You don’t work at a major mail order catalog company with retail outlets, do you?
The “Sinatra Version” has the first verse going to Harlem in “ermine and pearls” and then in the last verse “in Lincolns or Fords”.
I don’t think there’s any irony there either – at least as originally written. If I remember rightly, the character who sings the song in Babes In Arms is actually a literal tramp – a hobo.
The version I have heard, by Ella Fitzgerald, begins with this verse:
So I always thought it was about someone who becomes a tramp because they don’t like living in high society. This version also has several verses that are not in the Sinatra version. Here are the lyrics.