"Spring Will Be a Little Late This Year": Song History, Commentary, Discography, Performances on Video

"Spring Will Be a Little Late This Year"

Max Wilk, They're Playing Our Song: Conversations with America's Classic Songwriters (originally published 1973 as They're Playing Our Song: From Jerome Kern to Stephen Sondheim—The Stories behind the Words and Music of Two Generations), New York and Stratford, CT: Easton Studio Press, 2008.

Susan Loesser
A Most Remarkable Fella
(Frank Loesser and the
Guys and Dolls in His Life),
New York: Donald I Fine
1993

Philip Furia and Michael Lasser, in their book America's Songs The Stories Behind the songs of Broadway, Hollywood, and Tin Pan Alley, relate an account of how Frank Loesser came to undergo a conversion from being a lyrics only songwriter to being a words and music man. The conversion took root during World War II, in conjunction with Loesser, in 1942, having enlisted in the army where he was assigned to an entertainment creating section in New York City. Already an established lyricist in Hollywood, Loesser was, by early 1943, a prolific writer of songs and shows to entertain the troops. For his New York City duties he was bivouacked in a hotel not far from Times Square where, already financially comfortable from his songwriting income, he rented extra rooms for his family. This along with having, at his own expense, "his private's uniform tailored!" certainly showed he was not a typical soldier. Indeed, according to Abe Burrows, who later, along with Loesser, became a cocreator of Guys and Dolls, "he really hit his stride in the army. That's when he started writing his own music to go with his words" (Max Wilk, They're Playing Our Song, pp. 123-124, paperbound Ed.) One of his first creations for Uncle Sam was the witty but still patriotic "Praise The Lord and Pass the Ammunition," which became both a hit song and a wartime anthem. It was just his second composition to bear his name as having written both words and music. (The first was "Seventeen," the title song for a 1939 Paramount movie). According to Furia and Lasser, Loesser had long been in the habit of writing dummy tunes to accompany his words but had never before wound up actually using one of those tunes to be the music for the finished song. In the case of "Praise the Lord . . . " he did and had such success with it that he soon realized, like Berlin and Porter, he could do both. Not yet able to actually write out the music for tunes he had thought up, he borrowed, in the case of "Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition" the services of a fellow army songwriter-soldier, Milton Delugg.

"Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition"
This 1943 version by Kay Kyser and His Orchestra plus glee club
performing in the big band style of the era but with patriotic flare
reached number 1 on the charts. Loesser donated his royalties from the song
to the Navy Relief Society. (Illustration: detail from Famous Music Corp.
sheet music cover, 1942)

While holed up in New York's Navarro Hotel writing the songs and shows for for the Army, he still found time to moonlight by continuing to write for the movies. During that period, according to his biographer 'Thomas L. Riis, he wrote lyrics and occasionally both words and music for the likes of MGM, RKO, Universal, and several other Hollywood studios. The Ballad "Spring Will Be A Little Late This Year," for the 1944 Universal picture Christmas Holiday, was likely written at the Navarro. It became the second wartime song for which Loesser, as a double threat words and music songwriter, made the charts. As for Christmas Holiday, the movie for which he wrote "Spring Will Be a Little Late This Year," many later commentators dismissed it. They shouldn't have. Besides the compelling performances of Gene Kelly and Deanna Durbin, it has much to recommend it. The previously typically wholesome Durbin plays, against type, a seemingly strung out looking hooker and cheap nightclub chanteuse whom we meet as she performs (in the song's debut) "Spring Will Be a Little Late This Year."

Deanna Durbin playing prostitute and nightclub singer Jackie Lamont
sings "Spring Will Be a Little Late This Year" in an early scene from
the 1944 movie Christmas Holiday.
(The full movie can be viewed below or at YouTube.)

Aside from the debut of a song which has since become a highly and consistently praised standard, Christmas Holiday is also notable because it was, and still is, a rare example of a Christmas movie with none of the sentimentality that is typically de rigueur for that genre. Indeed it is a noir Christmas film with a quality screenplay by Herman Mankiewicz based on a novel by Somerset Maugham as well as the startling performances from Kelly, in his his first leading role in a movie, a role in which he neither sings nor dances, and Durbin who creates a persona that is a far cry from her earlier film work on which her reputation then rested. Kelly's character was, in fact, reminiscent of his role as the title character in the Rodgers and Hart 1941 musical Pal Joey, the show that got him noticed enough to lead to an enormously successful future in Hollywood. In that show, he played an anti-hero/heel that foreshadows his work in Christmas Holiday.

Christmas Holiday does have its shortcomings but they do not add up to more than its clearly compelling whole. "Spring Will Be a Little Late This Year" fits the tone and mood of Christmas Holiday perfectly even if its lyric is not an exact commentary on the characters or the plot. Indeed, it is less directly connected to the story than the lyric of the other standard used in the film, "Always" by Irving Berlin, a 1925 song that was not written for Christmas Holiday but is performed repeatedly as both vocal and instrumental. The clip below of Durbin singing "Always" during flashbacks from the earlier scene during which she sang "Spring Will Be a Little Late This Year," highlights central irony of Christmas Holiday by demonstrating in spades the change that has taken place in her character.

Deanna Durbin, who earlier in Christmas Holiday faked being prostitute and nightclub singer Jackie Lamont (See above.), here plays her actual character Abigail Martin as she sings "Always" by Irving Berlin. Gene Kelly, as Robert Manette, is at the piano while Kelly's character's mother (Mrs. Manette), played by Gale Sondergaard, looks on. The contentment shown by all three does not last. (The full movie can be viewed below or at YouTube.)

Janet Roitz and Sean Martinfield, in the video below, dig a little more deeply in their wryly insightful commentary on Christmas Holiday as well as on Durbin's debut of "Spring Will Be a Little Late This Year." Their commentary might even make one want to see this downer noir flick, maybe even on Christmas Eve. One of their observations reveals the difficulty Loesser faced in writing a song focusing on the predicaments of two bereft wartime lovers who have just discovered the irreversible losses of their respective loves. All this not to mention Loesser's having had to write the song, most likely, in a hotel room off Times Square instead of in his more familiar songwriting digs -- a bungalow on the Universal Studios lot in Hollywood. Below is Roitz' and Martinfield's take on the movie, on the song, on Kelly and on Durbin:

Janet Roitz and Sean Martinfield comment on "Spring Will Be a Little Late This Year" as well as on the 1944 movie, Christmas Holiday in which the song was debuted.

And now, if you're up for it, here's the full Movie: Christmas Holiday (the full movie) starring Gene Kelly, Deanna Durbin, Richard Whorf, et. al., 1944. Directed by Robert Siodmak, screenplay by Herman Mankiewicz based the novel by Somerset Maugham. (Note: the movie may be viewed above or at YouTube .)

Frank Loesser unlike so many songwriters of The Great American Songbook who began their lives and careers and achieved their success in New York (e.g. the Gershwins, Rodgers and Hart, Irving Berlin, etc.), did not hit his stride until he reached Hollywood.
As Wilfred Sheed by way of Richard Adler informs us, Loesser was multi-skilled (amateur astronomer, master carpenter, cabinet maker, cartoonist) but the Depression made things so bad during the early thirties that none of this helped him make a decent living. So he headed for the place where all year around money (movie money anyway) still seemed to be grow on trees:

By the time Frank hit Hollywood in 1937, his new [songwriting] partner Hoagy Carmichael would find him "so packed with ideas he was overloaded." But they were still ideas for words only. It took another five years or so for anyone to find out that Loesser could write tunes too. So he settled for being the best or second best lyricist in Hollywood in the late thirties and early forties, depending on how you rate Johnny Mercer . As with Mercer, his double gift gave him an almost unfair advantage in the race for hits, because his words were not just clever but musical. They made the tunes they went with sound their absolute best. Songs like Burton Lane's " The Lady's in Love with You ," Victor Schertzinger's " Sand in My Shoes ," and almost everything he wrote with Jimmy McHugh-- " Let's Get Lost "and Say It (Over and Over Again)"--are good songs that sound like great ones because of Loesser's touch ( Sheed , p. 276, hardcover Ed.) .

Alec Wilder, in his book American Popular Song, a work often cited as a fundamental critical text on what Wilder calls "Theater songs," but on what is now often called "The Great American Songbook"-- that is songs having their origins in the Broadway theater or Hollywood movies -- admits to reversing himself as follows:

I've always been inclined to believe that Frank Loesser, whose theater career fell outside the time limit of this book [1900-1950] never wrote great ballads -- great production numbers, great novelties (" Baby It's Cold Outside ,"), great comedy songs, but inadequate ballads. Well, as I seem often to have done in this survey, I must prove myself wrong again. For his 1943 song, "Spring Will Be A Little Late This Year," from the film Christmas Holiday , is a very lovely, finely-fashioned melody and bears not a trace of green eyeshade*. . . . (p. 511, hardcover Ed.).

To begin the chapter "Indian Summer of the Classic Popular Song" in their book Classic American Popular Song: The Second Half -Century 1950-2000, David Jenness and Don Velsey write:

Loesser was the first to secure a top-tier reputation after 1950, and proved to be one of the most gifted and individual of American songwriters. He began, in Hollywood, by supplying lyrics for others, but by 1943 he had already written a great ballad, "Spring Will Be a Little Late This Year." The tune is constructed around intervals just smaller or larger than an octave, which moves it along by avoiding any predictable resting place--an effect reinforced by the absence of time-out rests in the voice line ( Jenness and Velsey , p. 105).

Smithsonian Collection Of Recordings: Six Decades Of Songwriters And Singers/American Popular Song
by James R. Morris, J.R. Taylor, and Dwight Blocker Bowers
Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1984
(book plus recordings)

In this lovely ballad Leslie Uggams demonstrates superior legato singing. Her smooth, even way of tying notes together and spinning out beautifully molded phrases reveals a singer endowed with an exceptional voice and keen musical sensibilities. The stimulus for her performance is Loesser's stunning ABAB (See Glossary for definition) melodic line with it's long arching phrases, dropping down a full octave in the first measure and soaring upward a ninth in the third, dropping a sixth in the fourth measure and again soaring a ninth in the fifth. Uggams glides along with even vocal weight, focussed tone, and complete assurance . . . ." ( Smithsonian Collection Of Recordings: Six Decades Of Songwriters And Singers/American Popular Song , pp. 118-119).

Philip Furia and
Michael Lasser,
America's Songs: The Stories Behind the Songs of Broadway, Hollywood, and Tin Pan Alley, New York: Routledge, 2006.

Loesser rarely wrote ballads, not even during the war when most songs were drenched in longing. Yet "Spring Will Be a Little Late This Year" is so perfectly defined by its melancholy hush that one wonders why he did not write in this vein more often. Despite the expansive imagery of delaying the seasons, Loesser reduces it to human scale--"a little late"--to ponder the absence of "our "April of old." Though spring is late because the lovers are apart, the lyric eventually suggests that the separation is temporary. Although "you have left me, and winter continues cold," the song asserts that he "needn't cling to this fear" because "it's merely that spring will be a little late this year." Susan Loesser suggests that the idea of the season's slow start "doesn't make the mood less sad, but it makes it clever at the same time." Rather than mere cleverness, though, the shift in attitude transforms the song into an anthem of hope. (Furia and Lasser, pp. 198-199 hardcover Ed.) .

Spring, whether in poetry or in song lyrics, is typically used to suggest or symbolize something new, reborn, full of vibrant life, etc. There is however, a smaller, but perhaps more poignant group of poems and songs, that employ spring ironically, to suggest the opposite of these typical expectations. The first line of T. S. Eliot's landmark poem "The Wasteland" is "April is the cruellest month." Lorenz Hart's song "Spring Is Here" asks if the season so commonly associated with all things bright and cheery has indeed arrived why doesn't his "heart go dancing," and "why doesn't the spring delight him?" Good (not to mention great) poetry and songbook lyrics are nothing if not unconventional, so we should not be surprised by notions such as these. Indeed we applaud them even as we feel their sting.

Loesser's lyric for "Spring Will Be a Little Late This Year" is in a sense even less conventional than the two examples cited above following a middle course, evoking a state of mind neither breezily cheerful nor trite; but not unremittingly dark either. Although Loesser's verse starts out bleakly with "January and February . . . never so empty and gray. / Tragic'lly I feel like crying / Without you, my darling, I'm dying," the singer finally arrives at a somewhat more optimistic alternative. It is not that Spring has changed so much as to become cruel as it has for Eliot, not changed its nature from what we have always believed it to be, but, in fact, realized it is he or she, the singer, who has wandered off course to his or her "lonely world over here." And by the time we get to the refrain we discover the singer's misfortune in love has not resulted in Spring changing it basic nature or disappearing altogether but in merely taking longer to get to him.

Spring will be A little late this year, A little slow arriving In my lonely world over here.

Although the song was written for Deanna Durbin to sing in the 1944 movie Christmas Holiday, even she does not include Loesser's verse. She like so many singers drops it, a not uncommon fate for verses. The singer's love has left and it is implied that a never ending winter has sealed his or her fate. The day will be saved, however, at least partially, by what is sung in the refrain. Apparently human affairs cannot alter the patterns of life permanently, and we need to know this. The song is great because of the truth and beauty of Loesser's words that affirm this idea:

You have left me, and winter continues cold, As if to say, Spring will be a little slow to start, A little slow reviving that music it made in my heart. Yes, time heals all things, so I needn't cling to this fear; It's merely that Spring will be a little late this year.

No doubt some will remain sceptical of the singer's newly found hope, as if he or she is grasping at straws to find a saving grace from what may be an inescapable fate, but many will take away some comfort chilly though it may be.

Typically and for various reasons the verse is dropped by singers, and, in fact, none of the performances included in the Cafe Songbook Record/Video Cabinet ( this page ) for "Spring Will Be a Little Late This Year" have retained it. The lyric for the verse is just below: Verse: January and February were never so empty and gray, Tragic'lly I feel like crying "Without you my darling I'm dying." But let's rather put it this way: Refrain: Spring will be a little late this year . . . . .

• Janet Roitz: Famous Film Songs
• MusicProf78: Morton Downey
• Tivon Pennicott: Tivon Pennicott
• Screamin Munkee: Christmas Holiday (full movie)

Notes

• Other songs written for Christmas Holiday currently included in the Cafe Songbook Catalog of The Great American Songbook : none
• Another Catalog song not written for this movie but used in the movie is Always by Irving Berlin .
• For a complete listing of songs used in this movie, see IMDB Soundtrack .
• Thomas L. Riis Frank Loesser New Haven and London Yale UP: 2008 (Yale Broadway Masters Series)
• Christmas Holiday with Gene Kelly, Deanna Durbin and Richard Whorf, et. al, 1944
• David Jenness and Don Velsey Classic American Popular Song: The Second Half-Century, 1950-2000 New York: Routledge, 2006
• James R. Morris writes of Leslie Uggams 1963 performance (See just below) of "Spring Will Be a Little Late This Year":
• Leslie Uggams accompanied by Orchestra, conducted and arranged by Glen Osser, recorded 4/4/63, on her album So In Love .
• Phillip Furia and Michael Lasser write on Loesser's somewhat rare evocation of sadness:
• Robert Kimball and Steve Nelson, Eds., The Complete Lyrics of Frank Loesser . New York: Alfred A. Knoph, 2003.
• Reading Lyrics , Edited and with an Introduction by Robert Gottlieb and Robert Kimball, New York: Pantheon Books, 2000, 2003.
• Both of the above volumes include the published lyrics for "Spring Will Be a Little Late This Year."

Cite this page: "Spring Will Be a Little Late This Year": Song History, Commentary, Discography, Performances on Video, Cafe Songbook, https://greatamericansongbook.net/pages/songs/s/spring_will_be_a_little_late_this_year.html