Does it ever seem to you that winter always outstays its welcome? It’s always a little late in leaving. Belated spring as a metaphor for separated lovers who will reunite serves as the basis for one of Frank Loesser’s first hits as a composer.

In several ways, it represents a departure from the norm both for Loesser and Deanna Durbin, the star of a movie that features the song.

Frank Loesser was born in 1910 to a musical family. His father taught classical piano. His older half-brother Arthur became a distinguished concert pianist and program annotator for the Cleveland Orchestra. Frank, on the other hand, had no interest in classical music and never took lessons from his father. Instead, he taught himself to play piano and harmonica. Arthur liked to joke that Frank was “the evil of two Loessers.”

After dropping out of high school, Frank supported himself with various jobs. By the mid-1930s, he was singing and playing piano in nightclubs and writing lyrics for songs. The songs with his earliest lyrics failed with the public, but earned him a Hollywood contract in 1936. Collaborating with many of Hollywood’s most successful songwriters, Loesser began to write consistent hits. More than sixty films feature songs with his lyrics.

During World War II, Loesser served in Special Services and provided lyrics for camp shows. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, he heard the phrase “praise the Lord and pass the ammunition” and wrote lyrics based on it, but he had no collaborator. As he often did, he wrote a dummy tune. When he sang it for friends, they persuaded him to have it published without waiting for someone else’s tune. It became one of his best hits up to that time. Perhaps it’s its success that gave Loesser confidence to write his own tunes more often, although he continued to collaborate with top songwriters.

After the war, he worked both in Hollywood and on Broadway. In 1950, he wrote the words and music for Guys and Dolls,one of the supreme masterpieces of American musical theater. He followed it with How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying. In all, he wrote five Broadway musicals and continued to provide words and music for films, including the Danny Kaye hit Hans Christian Andersen.

“Spring Will Be a Little Late This Year”

Frank Loesser wrote the words and music for “Spring Will Be a Little Late This Year” in 1944. A now-forgotten crooner Johnnie Johnston made the first recording. The song subsequently appeared in the movie Christmas Holiday. It is one of his rare sad ballads, even though at the height of World War II so many popular songs expressed similarly intense longing. Like many songs of that era, it has a verse that no one sings. I listened to half a dozen videos, including Johnston’s and a clip from the movie, and none of them includes the verse.

January and February were never so empty and grey
Tragic’lly I feel like crying
Without you, my darling, I’m dying
But let’s rather put it this way

Spring will be a little late this year
A little late arriving in my lonely world over here
For you have left me and where is our April of old
You have left me and winter continues cold

As if to say…….Spring will be a little slow to start
A little slow reviving 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

The sadness comes from lovers being parted. Spring symbolizes their happiness when they’re together. But instead of concentrating on the winter bleakness of separation, the chorus holds out the hope that, though a little late, spring and the absent lover will come eventually.

Christmas Holiday

Deanna Durbin, singing “Spring Will Be a Little Late This Year” in Christmas Holiday

If anyone expected cheerful, uplifting holiday fare from Christmas Holiday they must have been bitterly disappointed. This film noir, based on a novel by W. Somerset Maugham is one of the bleakest films of its era.

It featured two stars in roles very much out of character. Gene Kelley stars as a murderer and Deanna Durbin as his wife, who tries to hide from him by operating a cheap nightclub.

Durbin was the highest-paid woman star in Hollywood at the time. She made her reputation in light-hearted musicals that she disdained as low quality. Christmas Holiday gave her a chance to try her hand as a serious actress. Neither it nor another serious movie she made the following year succeeded at the box office. In disillusion with Hollywood, she withdrew completely from public life in 1949.

Although the movie bombed, the song became a great hit. Many of the most famous singers of the generation recorded it, including Ella Fitzgerald, Bing Crosby, and the lovely rendition by Sarah Vaughan in the video above. Carly Simon and other later stars have also sung it.

Be sure to read a post I wrote about another Frank Loesser hit, “Baby It’s Cold Outside.”

Additional source: America’s Songs / by Philip Furia and Michael Lasser (2006)