A Cottage for Sale

Willard Robison and Larry Conley wrote this ballad in 1929, and it has been a singer's tune ever since — a man standing outside the house he and someone else were going to live in. The A Cottage for Sale chords here are the thirty-two bars in E flat with a two-bar vamp in front, marked at 85, slow enough to let the line breathe. The backing track follows that chart, and both the tempo and the key can be moved to fit a voice.

Who wrote "A Cottage for Sale"

The music is Willard Robison's and the words are Larry Conley's. Robison was a Missouri pianist and bandleader whose songs — this one, "Old Folks", "Guess I'll Go Back Home This Summer" — were admired far more widely than his own records ever sold. It was published in 1929. The Revelers put it on record first, for Victor in January 1930, and Bernie Cummins and his New Yorker Orchestra followed in March of the same year. It went on to be recorded more than a hundred times.

Recordings that made it a standard

• The Revelers, single (Victor, 1930) — the first version, a close-harmony vocal group taking it at the brisk clip of its day rather than as the lament it later became.
• Billy Eckstine and his Orchestra, single (1945) — Eckstine's baritone slowed it down and moved it out of the dance band and into the ballad repertoire, where it stayed.
• Nat King Cole, Just One of Those Things (1957) — Billy May's arrangement, sung almost conversationally; Cole keeps the tempo moving where others let it stop.
• Frank Sinatra, No One Cares (1959) — Gordon Jenkins's strings and the bleakest of the saloon albums. This is the performance most singers answer to, and it is why the song is filed with the torch ballads.

The changes

Thirty-two bars in E flat, AABA, with the last A written into the end of the bridge section rather than set out on its own, and a two-bar vamp on Eb6 before the first chorus. The two A strains part company only in their last two bars, one ending to send the form round again and one to finish.

The A strain is a chain of secondary dominants of the kind songwriters used in 1929 and mostly stopped using afterwards. Eb6, then G9 — the dominant of C, though C major never comes — then C7, the dominant of F, and Fm7b5 with Bb7b5 to bring it home. Every chord is pulling at the next one by the circle of fifths, and none of the way stations is ever confirmed. Then Gm7 to C7, Fm7 to Bb7b9, F7 to Bb7: three two-beat cadences in a row, each a shade different from the last.

The bridge is the eight bars worth practising. Eb over G with Gbdim7 beside it is the old rising chromatic move, the tonic in first inversion nudged upward by a passing diminished chord into Fm7; G7 and Gm7 sit next to each other a bar apart, major then minor, which catches people out. C7b9 leads to F7 and F9 — two bars of the same chord, held where the rest of the tune keeps moving — and Bb7 with Edim7 wandering through it turns back to Fm7 and Bb7 for the return.

The places players stumble are the Fm7b5 in the fourth bar, which is a half-diminished chord where the ear expects plain Fm7, and the two diminished chords, Gbdim7 and Edim7, which are passing harmony and not destinations. Take them as voice leading and they cause no trouble.