Is there a torch song that laments the coming of Spring? This time of year, if you're tuned to the right stations, you may well find yourself listening to Ella Fitzgerald's unforgettable rendition of "Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most." The song is a buried treasure on Ella's 1961 quartet-backed jazz set "Clap Hands, Here Comes Charlie!" (I love the Amazon review that rates it "50,000 stars.") It represents one of the many summits of Ella's artistry. Here are the lyrics:

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.

Morning's kiss wakes trees and flowers,
And to them I'd like to drink a toast.
But I walk in the park
Just to kill the lonely hours.
Spring can really hang you up the most.

All afternoon the birds twitter-twitt.
I know the tune. This is love, this is it.
Heard it before
and don't I know the score.
And I've decided that spring is a bore.

Love seems sure around the new year.
Now it's 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.

Hey, it only took three verses and a chorus to clue us in to the reason for the sorrows of Spring. Once the reason is disclosed, however, the song digs a little deeper into the seasonal theme:

College boys are writing sonnets
In their tender passion they’re engrossed
While I’m on the shelf
With last years easter bonnets.
Spring can really hang you up the most.

Love came my way. I thought it would last.
We had our day, now it's all in the past.
Spring came along, a season of song,
full of sweet promise
but something went wrong.

Surely Spring will cheer you up? Not a chance:

Doctors once prescribed a tonic.
Sulfur and molasses was the dose.
Didn't help one bit.
My condition must be chronic.
Spring can really hang you up the most.

All alone, the party is 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.

In Fitzgerald's renditon, the song ends on what must be the lowest note in her register. Utter devastation.

What could possibly have inspired a songwriter to hang a tale on the notion that Spring is the cruellest 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've wondered about the thought that lay behind it.

Thanks to the glories of the Internet, I found it. It didn't take long to discover that the song's composers are Fran Landesman (lyrics) and 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 and 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 the 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 and 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 Cruellest Month..." The song was called "Spring Can Really Hang You Up The Most."

So that's it. The source of this gorgeous song lies in the Ur-text of modernist poetry:

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.

And Eliot? We know that he seemed to be working a perverse twist on Chaucer's "Whan that Aprille..." It's a long, long road to a great pop song, but listening to Ella pour it on, you know the journey represents arrival as well as departure.