nyt: the sound of the city

Then there were the hot-corn girls, pre-Civil War New York's twisted, virgin-whore fantasy. These were teenage girls, always barefoot, wearing trademark calico shawls, and selling ears of fresh-roasted corn - and sometimes themselves. They sang plucky verses at the passing men who pitied them, and wanted to protect them, or to buy them:

Hot corn! Hot corn!
Here's your lily-white corn!
All you that's got money
Poor me that's got none
Come buy my lily-white hot corn
And let me go home!