"Spring Will Be a Little Late This Year" is the title of a 1943 traditional pop composition by Frank Loesser, written for and introduced in the 1944 movie Christmas Holiday, the song was largely overlooked for some ten years before being rediscovered in the mid-1950s to become a pop and jazz standard much recorded by vocalists and instrumentalists. Composition / theme An early instance of Frank Loesser writing his own music for his lyrics, "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" - as "a perfect example of that heart-on-your-sleeve quality evident in so many [Loesser songs]." 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". "Spring Will Be ..." belongs to a sub-genre of songs which treat springtime as a metaphor in an ironic context, 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": however "Loesser's lyric ... follow[s] a middle course, evoking a state of mind neither breezily cheerful nor trite; but not unremittingly dark either." First recordings and Christmas Holiday "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. 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