gilded palace of sin (1869-1969)

[Benjamin Zimmer]

"The Gilded Palace of Sin" is a classic country-rock album by The
Flying Burrito Brothers, released in 1969. I don't know where Gram
Parsons et al. found the title phrase, but it began cropping up in
moralistic writing about dens of iniquity a century earlier.

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1869 John B. Ellis _The sights and secrets of the national capital_
405 All is not so fair and pleasant in the history of these gilded
palaces of sin as the outward show would indicate.
<http://name.umdl.umich.edu/AJA2449.0001.001>
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1873 _Daily Evening Bulletin_ (San Francisco) 26 Mar. 3/3 His house
was a gilded palace of sin where Satan showed his cloven foot and hid
his titled name.
[19th C US Newspapers]
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1874 _Inter Ocean_ (Chicago) 24 Oct. 5/2 The furniture is extravagant
in style and the upholstery costly, and your pseudo-moralist would
pronounce it a "gilded palace of sin," and proceed to catalogue both.
[19th C US Newspapers]
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The databases also have various cites for gilded palaces of "vice",
"pleasure", "iniquity", etc.


--Ben Zimmer

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