Spring Can Really Hang You Up The Most

High 70s today in Portland Oregon... this really lifts my spirits! I am going to spend time cleaning the gardens & see what made it through the "Winter Blast" 08/09. Here are "before & afters" of our Magnolias. They usually are in full glory during torrential rain, so nice to be able to enjoy their short run. We live on a regular city lot & we have 15 trees! Cornus Mas blooms first, in early February, with tiny yellow flowers. The Magnolias are next in late March/early April.

More Lyrics:

This song is in my all time top twenty songs. I play it often at this time of year & I have two different versions that bookend my April Mix that my friends are clamoring for:

Once I was a sentimental thing

Threw my heart away each spring

Now a spring romance hasn't got a chance

Promised my first dance to winter

All I've got to shows a splinter for my little fling!

Spring this year has got me feeling like a horse that never left the post

I lie in my room staring up at the ceiling

Spring can really hang you up the most!

Mornings kiss wakes trees & flowers, & to them I'd like to drink a toast

I walk in the park just to kill lonely hours

Spring can really hang you up the most.

All afternoon those birds twitter twit,

I know the tune, this is love, this is it!

Heard it before and I know the score

& I've decided that spring is a bore!

Love seemed sure around the new year

Now its April & love is just a ghost

Spring arrived on time, only what became of you, dear?

Spring can really hang you up the most!

Spring can really hang you up the most!

Spring is here, there's no mistaking

Robins building nests from coast to coast

My heart tries to sing so they won't hear it breaking

Spring can really hang you up the most!

College boys are writing sonnets

In the tender passion they're engrossed

But I'm on the shelf with last years Easter bonnets

Spring can really hang you up the most!

Love came my way, I hoped it would last

We had our day, now that's all in the past

Spring came along a season of song

Full of sweet promise but something went wrong!

Doctors once prescribed a tonic,

Sulphur & molasses was the dose

Didn't help a bit, my condition must be chronic

Spring can really hang you up the most!

All alone, the party's over

Old man winter was a gracious host

But when you keep praying for snow to hide the clover

Spring can really hang you up the most!

This version represents one of the many summits of Ella's artistry.
What could possibly have inspired a songwriter to write with the idea that Spring is the cruelest season? It's such a striking idea for a song that is otherwise more or less full of the usual Tin Pan Alley cliches, I have been really think about this.
Thanks to my music library & the Internet, I found the answer... I discovered that the song's composers are Fran Landesman (lyrics) & Tommy Wolf (music). Even though the song sounds like a classic of the Great American Songbook variety, Landesman is alive and has set up her own site to expound on her art:
"Fran Landesman is still the poet laureate of lovers and losers: her songs are the secret diaries of the desperate & the decadent. No one can convey the bitter-sweet joys of melancholy or the exhilaration of living on the edge like Fran."
Well, that certainly sounds right, but what about that song? According to the intriguing biography on her site, Landesman wrote the song shortly after she initiated her collaboration with Tommy Wolf at the Crystal Palace in St. Louis:
"Fran and Tommy soon began writing songs which he would sing nightly to the drinking masses at the Crystal Palace. One night the British born piano player George Shearing came into the club & was particularly taken with a song whose title Fran had come up with while speculating on how a hip jazz musician might express the T.S. Eliot line "April Is The Cruelest Month..." The song was called "Spring Can Really Hang You Up The Most."
Hmmm....that is it! The source of this striking song lies in the "The Waste Land":
April is the cruelest month,
breeding lilacs out of the dead land,
mixing memory and desire,
stirring dull roots with spring rain.

For me, Spring has always been equal measures of invigoration & melancholy. No wonder this song has always struck a chord.