Spring Will Be a Little Late This Year

An early instance of Frank Loesser writing his own music for his lyrics,^[1] "Spring Will Be a Little Late This Year" has been described by singer Michael Feinstein - the "foremost expert on the music of the Great American Songbook" -^[2] as "a perfect example of that heart-on-your-sleeve quality evident in so many [Loesser songs]."^[3] The composer's daughter: Susan Loesser, classes the song as a rare "melancholy" item in her father's songbook, but one whose lyric is "not without hope".^[4] "Spring Will Be ..." belongs to a sub-genre of songs which treat springtime as a metaphor in an ironic context,^[5] the most extreme exemplars such as "Spring Is Here" and "Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most" "upend[ing] the conventional view of spring as the season of rebirth [to instead] use spring as the setting for expressions of disenchantment or remorse":^[6] however "Loesser's lyric ... follow[s] a middle course, evoking a state of mind neither breezily cheerful nor trite; but not unremittingly dark either."^[7]

"Spring Will Be a Little Late This Year" was written for the film Christmas Holiday to be sung by the female lead Deanna Durbin, a movie musical star from the age of 14 who at age 23 was making a career shift with an essentially dramatic role as a fallen woman working a taxi dance hall near New Orleans. The film discreetly posits Durbin's character as a singer who is first seen singing "Spring Will Be ..." at the dance hall in a performance which eschews Durbin's established "perky upbeat operetta persona" in favor of a "downbeat bluesy jazz" style.^[8] The lyrics of "Spring Will Be ..." touch on the film's plot: Dean Harens plays a serviceman who, just after receiving a Dear John letter, is flying home for Christmas when a storm mandates a layover in New Orleans. Meeting Durbin at the dance hall, Harens treats her chivalrously, and she eventually confides her sad history. Once married to a charming roué (Gene Kelly) who has been jailed for murder, Durbin is now self-indentured at the dance hall as penance for failing to somehow save her husband from himself. Subsequent to a denouement which frees Durbin from her thralldom, with imminent romance with Harens implied, Christmas Holiday ends with Durbin gazing up at an overcast sky whose clouds drift apart as she watches.^[9][10]

Completed in February 1944, Christmas Holiday would be released June 1944 to become a box office hit while making only a transient impression on the public consciousness, suggesting that moviegoers anticipating the lighter fare associated with Deanna Durbin and Gene Kelly were disappointed by Christmas Holiday and preferred to forget the film,^[11] whose few critical notices virtually ignored "Spring Will Be a Little Late This Year" (Margaret Bean of the Spokesman-Review dismissed the film's "new song" as "not too appealing").^[12] The song had already had three recorded versions prior to the film's release, beginning with that by Johnnie Johnston with the Paul Weston Orchestra, released March 1944 (the song serving as B-side to a 78-rpm single entitled "Irresistible You"), followed by recordings by Percy Faith (recorded April 24, 1944), as an instrumental) and Morton Downey (recorded May 8, 1944, for June 8, release). Also recorded in 1944 by Eddy Howard, "Spring Will Be ..." was recorded by Deanna Durbin - in her signature soprano -^[13] in a December 1944 session in which Durbin also recorded the other song she'd sung in Christmas Holiday: "Always", with the tracks being paired on a March 1945 single release (on which "Always" was designated as A-side). Durbin's studio recording of "Spring Will Be ..." is the first evident instance of the song's two verses being preceded by a four line song intro which has rarely been included in subsequent recordings of the song. (See sidebox below.)