GIRLS WERE MADE TO LOVE AND KISS
From the Operetta "Paganini" (1925)
(Franz Lehár)
(Original libretto by Paul Knepler & Béla Jenbach)
(English adaptations by A.P. Herbert & Harry Dexter (1937), 
and by David Kram & Dennis Olsen)
 
As recorded by Richard Tauber:
 

Girls were made to love and kiss
And who am I to interfere with this?
Is it well?  Who can tell?
But I know the good Lord made it so
 
Am I ashamed to follow nature’s way?
Shall I be blamed if God has made me gay?
Does it pay?  Who can say?
I’m a man and kiss her when I can
 
Yet I have suffered in love’s great deeps
I know the passion that never sleeps
I know the longing and wronging of hearts
The hope that flatters and shatters and smarts
 
I suffer still but I sleep at nights
Man cannot always be on the heights
And when our aching and breaking is done
Flirting is jolly, it’s folly, but fun
 
Girls were made to love and kiss
And who am I to interfere with this?
Does it pay?  Who can say?
I’m a man and kiss her when I can
  
 
***In some recent recordings, the two lines
"Am I ashamed to follow nature’s way?
Shall I be blamed if God has made me gay?"
have been sung as
"Am I ashamed to follow nature’s law?
Shall I be blamed, it's just my fatal flaw"


*****


(Transcribed by Mel Priddle - November 2002)
(Missing words by thephoenix - March 2005)