Spring Will Be a Little Late This Year

Written: 1944

Words and Music by: Frank Loesser

Written for: Christmas Holiday (movie, 1944)

On the Main Stage at Cafe Songbook

Tivon Pennicott
and
The Sound Quartet

performing

"Spring Will Be
a Little Late This Year"

with Tivon Pennicott, vocal, tenor sax and arrangement; Mike Battaglia, piano; Spencer Murphy, bass; Kenneth Salters, drums;
(in studio, 2014)

More Performances of "Spring Will Be a Little Late This Year"
in the Cafe Songbook Record/Video Cabinet
(Video credit)

Cafe Songbook Reading Room

"Spring Will Be a Little Late This Year"

Critics Corner || Lyrics Lounge

Philip Furia and Michael Lasser, in their book America's Songs The Stories Behind the songs of Broadway, Hollywood, and Tin Pan Alley, relate an account of how Frank Loesser came to undergo a conversion from being a lyrics only songwriter to being a words and music man. The conversion took root during World War II, in conjunction with Loesser, in 1942, having enlisted in the army where he was assigned to an entertainment creating section in New York City. Already an established lyricist in Hollywood, Loesser was, by early 1943, a prolific writer of songs and shows to entertain the troops. For his New York City duties he was bivouacked in a hotel not far from Times Square where, already financially comfortable from his songwriting income, he rented extra rooms for his family. This along with having, at his own expense, "his private's uniform tailored!" certainly showed he was not a typical soldier. Indeed, according to Abe Burrows, who later, along with Loesser, became a cocreator of Guys and Dolls, "he really hit his stride in the army. That's when he started writing his own music to go with his words" (Max Wilk, They're Playing Our Song, pp. 123-124, paperbound Ed.) One of his first creations for Uncle Sam was the witty but still patriotic "Praise The Lord and Pass the Ammunition," which became both a hit song and a wartime anthem. It was just his second composition to bear his name as having written both words and music. (The first was "Seventeen," the title song for a 1939 Paramount movie). According to Furia and Lasser, Loesser had long been in the habit of writing dummy tunes to accompany his words but had never before wound up actually using one of those tunes to be the music for the finished song. In the case of "Praise the Lord . . . " he did and had such success with it that he soon realized, like Berlin and Porter, he could do both. Not yet able to actually write out the music for tunes he had thought up, he borrowed, in the case of "Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition" the services of a fellow army songwriter-soldier, Milton Delugg.

"Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition"
This 1943 version by Kay Kyser and His Orchestra plus glee club
performing in the big band style of the era but with patriotic flare
reached number 1 on the charts. Loesser donated his royalties from the song
to the Navy Relief Society. (Illustration: detail from Famous Music Corp.
sheet music cover, 1942)

While holed up in New York's Navarro Hotel writing the songs and shows for for the Army, he still found time to moonlight by continuing to write for the movies. During that period, according to his biographer 'Thomas L. Riis, he wrote lyrics and occasionally both words and music for the likes of MGM, RKO, Universal, and several other Hollywood studios. The Ballad "Spring Will Be A Little Late This Year," for the 1944 Universal picture Christmas Holiday, was likely written at the Navarro. It became the second wartime song for which Loesser, as a double threat words and music songwriter, made the charts. As for Christmas Holiday, the movie for which he wrote "Spring Will Be a Little Late This Year," many later commentators dismissed it. They shouldn't have. Besides the compelling performances of Gene Kelly and Deanna Durbin, it has much to recommend it. The previously typically wholesome Durbin plays, against type, a seemingly strung out looking hooker and cheap nightclub chanteuse whom we meet as she performs (in the song's debut) "Spring Will Be a Little Late This Year."

Deanna Durbin playing prostitute and nightclub singer Jackie Lamont
sings "Spring Will Be a Little Late This Year" in an early scene from
the 1944 movie Christmas Holiday.
(The full movie can be viewed below or at YouTube.)

Aside from the debut of a song which has since become a highly and consistently praised standard, Christmas Holiday is also notable because it was, and still is, a rare example of a Christmas movie with none of the sentimentality that is typically de rigueur for that genre. Indeed it is a noir Christmas film with a quality screenplay by Herman Mankiewicz based on a novel by Somerset Maugham as well as the startling performances from Kelly, in his his first leading role in a movie, a role in which he neither sings nor dances, and Durbin who creates a persona that is a far cry from her earlier film work on which her reputation then rested. Kelly's character was, in fact, reminiscent of his role as the title character in the Rodgers and Hart 1941 musical Pal Joey, the show that got him noticed enough to lead to an enormously successful future in Hollywood. In that show, he played an anti-hero/heel that foreshadows his work in Christmas Holiday.

Christmas Holiday does have its shortcomings but they do not add up to more than its clearly compelling whole. "Spring Will Be a Little Late This Year" fits the tone and mood of Christmas Holiday perfectly even if its lyric is not an exact commentary on the characters or the plot. Indeed, it is less directly connected to the story than the lyric of the other standard used in the film, "Always" by Irving Berlin, a 1925 song that was not written for Christmas Holiday but is performed repeatedly as both vocal and instrumental. The clip below of Durbin singing "Always" during flashbacks from the earlier scene during which she sang "Spring Will Be a Little Late This Year," highlights central irony of Christmas Holiday by demonstrating in spades the change that has taken place in her character.

Deanna Durbin, who earlier in Christmas Holiday faked being prostitute and nightclub singer Jackie Lamont (See above.), here plays her actual character Abigail Martin as she sings "Always" by Irving Berlin. Gene Kelly, as Robert Manette, is at the piano while Kelly's character's mother (Mrs. Manette), played by Gale Sondergaard, looks on. The contentment shown by all three does not last. (The full movie can be viewed below or at YouTube.)

Janet Roitz and Sean Martinfield, in the video below, dig a little more deeply in their wryly insightful commentary on Christmas Holiday as well as on Durbin's debut of "Spring Will Be a Little Late This Year." Their commentary might even make one want to see this downer noir flick, maybe even on Christmas Eve. One of their observations reveals the difficulty Loesser faced in writing a song focusing on the predicaments of two bereft wartime lovers who have just discovered the irreversible losses of their respective loves. All this not to mention Loesser's having had to write the song, most likely, in a hotel room off Times Square instead of in his more familiar songwriting digs -- a bungalow on the Universal Studios lot in Hollywood. Below is Roitz' and Martinfield's take on the movie, on the song, on Kelly and on Durbin:

Janet Roitz and Sean Martinfield comment on "Spring Will Be a Little Late This Year" as well as on the 1944 movie, Christmas Holiday in which the song was debuted.

And now, if you're up for it, here's the full Movie:

Christmas Holiday (the full movie) starring Gene Kelly, Deanna Durbin, Richard Whorf, et. al., 1944. Directed by Robert Siodmak, screenplay by Herman Mankiewicz based the novel by Somerset Maugham.
(Note: the movie may be viewed above or at YouTube.)

Frank Loesser unlike so many songwriters of The Great American Songbook who began their lives and careers and achieved their success in New York (e.g. the Gershwins, Rodgers and Hart, Irving Berlin, etc.), did not hit his stride until he reached Hollywood.
As Wilfred Sheed by way of Richard Adler informs us, Loesser was multi-skilled (amateur astronomer, master carpenter, cabinet maker, cartoonist) but the Depression made things so bad during the early thirties that none of this helped him make a decent living. So he headed for the place where all year around money (movie money anyway) still seemed to be grow on trees:

By the time Frank hit Hollywood in 1937, his new [songwriting] partner Hoagy Carmichael would find him "so packed with ideas he was overloaded." But they were still ideas for words only. It took another five years or so for anyone to find out that Loesser could write tunes too.

So he settled for being the best or second best lyricist in Hollywood in the late thirties and early forties, depending on how you rate Johnny Mercer. As with Mercer, his double gift gave him an almost unfair advantage in the race for hits, because his words were not just clever but musical. They made the tunes they went with sound their absolute best. Songs like Burton Lane's "The Lady's in Love with You," Victor Schertzinger's "Sand in My Shoes," and almost everything he wrote with Jimmy McHugh-- "Let's Get Lost"and Say It (Over and Over Again)"--are good songs that sound like great ones because of Loesser's touch (Sheed, p. 276, hardcover Ed.).

Alec Wilder, in his book American Popular Song, a work often cited as a fundamental critical text on what Wilder calls "Theater songs," but on what is now often called "The Great American Songbook"-- that is songs having their origins in the Broadway theater or Hollywood movies -- admits to reversing himself as follows:

I've always been inclined to believe that Frank Loesser, whose theater career fell outside the time limit of this book [1900-1950] never wrote great ballads -- great production numbers, great novelties ("Baby It's Cold Outside,"), great comedy songs, but inadequate ballads. Well, as I seem often to have done in this survey, I must prove myself wrong again. For his 1943 song, "Spring Will Be A Little Late This Year," from the film Christmas Holiday, is a very lovely, finely-fashioned melody and bears not a trace of green eyeshade*. . . . (p. 511, hardcover Ed.).

*the overly dramatic

To begin the chapter "Indian Summer of the Classic Popular Song" in their book Classic American Popular Song: The Second Half -Century 1950-2000, David Jenness and Don Velsey write:

Loesser was the first to secure a top-tier reputation after 1950, and proved to be one of the most gifted and individual of American songwriters. He began, in Hollywood, by supplying lyrics for others, but by 1943 he had already written a great ballad, "Spring Will Be a Little Late This Year." The tune is constructed around intervals just smaller or larger than an octave, which moves it along by avoiding any predictable resting place--an effect reinforced by the absence of time-out rests in the voice line (Jenness and Velsey, p. 105).

James R. Morris writes of Leslie Uggams 1963 performance (See just below) of "Spring Will Be a Little Late This Year":

In this lovely ballad Leslie Uggams demonstrates superior legato singing. Her smooth, even way of tying notes together and spinning out beautifully molded phrases reveals a singer endowed with an exceptional voice and keen musical sensibilities. The stimulus for her performance is Loesser's stunning ABAB (See Glossary for definition) melodic line with it's long arching phrases, dropping down a full octave in the first measure and soaring upward a ninth in the third, dropping a sixth in the fourth measure and again soaring a ninth in the fifth. Uggams glides along with even vocal weight, focussed tone, and complete assurance . . . ." (Smithsonian Collection Of Recordings: Six Decades Of Songwriters And Singers/American Popular Song, pp. 118-119).

Leslie Uggams accompanied by Orchestra, conducted
and arranged by Glen Osser, recorded 4/4/63,
on her album So In Love.

Phillip Furia and Michael Lasser write on Loesser's somewhat rare evocation of sadness:

Loesser rarely wrote ballads, not even during the war when most songs were drenched in longing. Yet "Spring Will Be a Little Late This Year" is so perfectly defined by its melancholy hush that one wonders why he did not write in this vein more often. Despite the expansive imagery of delaying the seasons, Loesser reduces it to human scale--"a little late"--to ponder the absence of "our "April of old." Though spring is late because the lovers are apart, the lyric eventually suggests that the separation is temporary. Although "you have left me, and winter continues cold," the song asserts that he "needn't cling to this fear" because "it's merely that spring will be a little late this year." Susan Loesser suggests that the idea of the season's slow start "doesn't make the mood less sad, but it makes it clever at the same time." Rather than mere cleverness, though, the shift in attitude transforms the song into an anthem of hope. (Furia and Lasser, pp. 198-199 hardcover Ed.).

Robert Kimball and Steve Nelson, Eds., The Complete Lyrics of Frank Loesser. New York: Alfred A. Knoph, 2003.

Reading Lyrics,
Edited and with an Introduction by Robert Gottlieb and Robert Kimball, New York: Pantheon Books, 2000, 2003.

Both of the above volumes include the published lyrics for "Spring Will Be a Little Late This Year."

Click here to read Cafe Songbook lyrics policy.

Spring, whether in poetry or in song lyrics, is typically used to suggest or symbolize something new, reborn, full of vibrant life, etc. There is however, a smaller, but perhaps more poignant group of poems and songs, that employ spring ironically, to suggest the opposite of these typical expectations. The first line of T. S. Eliot's landmark poem "The Wasteland" is "April is the cruellest month." Lorenz Hart's song "Spring Is Here" asks if the season so commonly associated with all things bright and cheery has indeed arrived why doesn't his "heart go dancing," and "why doesn't the spring delight him?" Good (not to mention great) poetry and songbook lyrics are nothing if not unconventional, so we should not be surprised by notions such as these. Indeed we applaud them even as we feel their sting.

Loesser's lyric for "Spring Will Be a Little Late This Year" is in a sense even less conventional than the two examples cited above following a middle course, evoking a state of mind neither breezily cheerful nor trite; but not unremittingly dark either. Although Loesser's verse starts out bleakly with "January and February . . . never so empty and gray. / Tragic'lly I feel like crying / Without you, my darling, I'm dying," the singer finally arrives at a somewhat more optimistic alternative. It is not that Spring has changed so much as to become cruel as it has for Eliot, not changed its nature from what we have always believed it to be, but, in fact, realized it is he or she, the singer, who has wandered off course to his or her "lonely world over here." And by the time we get to the refrain we discover the singer's misfortune in love has not resulted in Spring changing it basic nature or disappearing altogether but in merely taking longer to get to him.

Spring will be
A little late this year,
A little slow arriving
In my lonely world over here.

Although the song was written for Deanna Durbin to sing in the 1944 movie Christmas Holiday, even she does not include Loesser's verse. She like so many singers drops it, a not uncommon fate for verses. The singer's love has left and it is implied that a never ending winter has sealed his or her fate. The day will be saved, however, at least partially, by what is sung in the refrain. Apparently human affairs cannot alter the patterns of life permanently, and we need to know this. The song is great because of the truth and beauty of Loesser's words that affirm this idea:

You have left me, and winter continues cold,
As if to say,
Spring will be a little slow to start,
A little slow reviving that 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.

No doubt some will remain sceptical of the singer's newly found hope, as if he or she is grasping at straws to find a saving grace from what may be an inescapable fate, but many will take away some comfort chilly though it may be.

Typically and for various reasons the verse is dropped by singers, and, in fact, none of the performances included in the Cafe Songbook Record/Video Cabinet (this page) for "Spring Will Be a Little Late This Year" have retained it. The lyric for the verse is just below:

Verse:

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

Refrain:

Spring will be a little late this year . . . . .

Visitor Comments

Credits

The Cafe Songbook
Record/Video Cabinet:
Selected Recordings of

"Spring Will Be a Little Late
This Year"

1944
Morton Downey
album: Morton Downey The Irish Nightingale

Notes: Although Downey's recording on which he is accompanied by Jimmie Lytell and His Orchestra (Decca 18607) was released in June 1944, it was not the first version of the song to appear. The Johnnie Johnston version with the Paul Weston Orchestra came out in March of '44. The Downey recording, however, was the only one to make the charts, reaching number 25 that year, the year the song was written for the Paramount Pictures movie Christmas Holiday in which it was sung by Deanna Durbin (See clip center column, this page.).
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1945
Deanna Durbin
album: Always

Notes: Durbin debuted "Spring Will Be a Little Late This Year" in the 1944 Paramount Pictures release Christmas Holiday. (See clip center column, this page.) On the post movie recording above, she is accompanied by orchestra under direction of Edgar Fairchild.
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1953
Stan Getz Quintet
album: Stan Getz Quintet in Boston
Live at the Hi-Hat

Notes: Stan Getz, tenor sax; Bob Brookmeyer, valve trombone; Duke Jordan, piano; Bill Crow, bass; Al Levitt, drums. Recorded live at the Hi-Hat Club, Boston, March 8, 1953.
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1953/55
Sarah Vaughan
album: Sarah Vaughan in Hi Fi

Notes: The date of 1955 is the album release year for the original first issue Columbia mono Hi-Fi album having twelve tracks (CL 745). The actual recording sessions took place between 1949 and 1952, one of which includes "Spring Will Be a Little Late This Year" and one other Loesser song (music by Jimmy McHugh), "Can't Get Out of This Mood." Album personnel include: Tony Scott, clarinet; J.C. Heard, drums; Mundell Lowe, electric guitar; Freddie Green, trumpet; Jimmy Jones, piano; Miles Davis, trumpet; (et.al.); Sarah Vaughan, vocals, . (A Jan. 5 1953 Vaughan recording from The Complete Columbia Recordings 1949-1953 has been noted. That it is the same track as here seems likely but not certain.) The Amazon link above is to a 21 song/track CD that includes all of the tracks on the 12 track mono recording referenced above plus tracks from later releases of Sarah Vaughan in Hi-Fi albums.

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1957
Rita Reys with Art Blakey and The Jazz Messengers
album: The Cool Voice of Rita Reys

Notes: Dutch jazz singer Rita Reys recorded this album with Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers as her primary accompaniment confirming Blakey's confidence in her as well as her confidence in herself that she was indeed a jazz singer. In fact "she was one of the most important of the European jazz singers of the late fifties and early sixties. Known for her cool voice and demeanor, she typified the image of the jazz singer of that era," carrying the banner of "Europe's first lady of jazz."

She recorded the album "The Cool Voice of Rita Reys" March 25 - March 27, 1957. It includes twelve tracks all of which are now standards and all of which have entries in the Cafe Songbook Catalog of the Great American Songbook: "It's Alright with Me," "Gone with the Wind," "My Funny Valentine," "But Not for Me," "I Should Care, "There Will Never Be Another You," I Cried for You," "You'd Be So Nice To Come Home To," "My One and Only "Love," "That Old Black Magic," "Spring Will Be a Little Late This Year," and "Taking a Chance on Love."

Along with Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers she is also accompanied, on some tracks, by the Dutch Jazz Ensemble and The Wes Ilcken Combo.

Rita Reys died at age 88 in 2013.

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1958
Red Garland Trio
album: All Kinds of Weather

Notes: Scott Yanow writing at AllMusic.com, says, "Red Garland was always a consistent pianist and all of his mid-to-late-'50s Prestige dates are worth acquiring. This CD reissue has six titles having to do with seasons and the weather (such as 'Rain,' 'Summertime' and 'Winter Wonderland' as well as 'Spring Will Be a Little Late This Year')." This "gimmick" allowed Garland and his trio (bassist Paul Chambers, drummer Art Taylor and himself) "to explore six superior songs and their interpretations" [that] always swing and uplift the melodies."
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1962
Anita O'Day and Cal Tjader
album: Time For 2

Notes: "Richard S. Ginell reviewed the reissue of the album for AllMusic and wrote that 'O'Day sounds as if she is "delighted with Tjader's polished Afro-Cuban grooves, gliding easily over the rhythms, toying with the tunes, transforming even a tune so locked into its trite time as 'Mr. Sandman' into a stimulating excursion. Indeed, O'Day's freewheeling phrasing becomes downright sexy on 'That's Your Red Wagon' and Dave Frishberg's delicious parody of a spoiled honeybunch, 'Peel Me a Grape'." --Wikipedia

1962
The Shorty Rogers Quintet
with Jeri Southern
album: The Shorty Rogers Quintet --
with Guest Vocalist Jeri Southern

Notes: "The first of four CD's taken from radio transcriptions used in the show "The Navy Swings" features trumpeter/flugelhornist Shorty Rogers playing with two versions of his quintets in 1962, just prior to him greatly de-emphasizing his playing in favor of full-time writing for the studios. The 13 selections generally clock in around three minutes so the cool bop performances are quite concise. Jeri Southern has three warm vocals and Rogers shares the frontline with either Harold Land or Gary Lefebvre on tenors. The results are not quite essential but will be enjoyed by Shorty's fans. . . ." Scott Yanow at AllMusic.com.

The Shorty Rogers album shown on the video, as mentioned above, includes only three tracks featuring Southern. The rest is the Rogers Quintet only. The album Jeri Southern Coffee, Cigarettes and Memories is all Southern including the track with Rogers backing her, as above, on "Spring Will Be a Little Late This Year." So for more Rogers click the Amazon link above; for more Southern, click the Amazon link below. In both cases you will get the same version of "Spring Will Be a Little Late This Year."

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1963
Leslie Uggams
album: So in Love

for Music-Video, see center column, this page.

Notes: See Critics Corner, center column, this page.
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1967
Julie London
album: Easy Does It

Notes: The album was released early in 1968, recorded October-November 1967, and was London's next to last album for Liberty Records. Album Personnel includes Julie London, vocals; Kirk Stuart, piano and organ; John Gray, guitar; Don Bagley, double bass; Earl Palmer, drums.
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1971
Lee Wiley
album: Back Home Again

Notes: album personel include: Rusty Dedrick, trumpet; Johnny Mince, clarinet and alto sax; Buddy Morrow, trombone; Dick Hyman, piano and organ; Bucky Pizzarelli, guitar; George Duvivier, base; Don Lamond, drums. recorded in 1971 plus a previously unreleased 1965 demo session with Joe Bushkin on piano. Several tracks are rehearsal takes with comments included as the take goes on.
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1998
Wynton Marsalis and ensemble
album: Midnight Blues Standard Time Vol. 5

Notes: The Midnight Blues is "is the fifth installment in [Marsalis'] ongoing Standard Time series, where he offers his own interpretations of classic American pop, jazz and blues songs. Supported by pianist Eric Reed, bassist Reginald Veal and drummer Lewis Nash, as well as a 31-piece string orchestra, he runs through a number of standards . . . . The result is a lovely, albeit minor, addition to Marsalis' rich catalog." -- AllMusic.com.
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1999
Ralph Sharon Quartet
album: Plays the Frank Loesser Songbook

Notes: Ralph Sharon on piano is leader of the quartet and along with Grey Sargent on guitar take the solos. They are accompanied by Clayton Cameron on drums and Paul Langosch on bass. Sharon has been music director for many vocalists, most notably Tony Bennett, and his songwriter and performer songbook albums have been a specialty for Sharon's small group jazz ensembles.
(See a selection at Amazon.)
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2004
Kitty Margolis
album: Heart and Soul:
Live in San Francisco

Notes: album personnel include: Kitty Margolis, vocals; Michael Bluestein, piano; Jon Evans, Bass; Allison Miller, drums.

In the liner notes for Heart and Soul Live in San Francisco, Will Friedwald writes of Kitty Margolis' album,"It's especially good because it captures the kind of live excitement that's so hard to nail down on a record. I particularly like the way she re-invents several songs associated with her illustrious forbears -- like "Spring Will Be a Little Late This Year" (Sarah Vaughan) and "Heart and Soul" (Betty Carter). There are certain singers who only interest me when they sing something offbeat, but Kitty can take something I've heard a zillion times and find something new to say with it."

"Kitty Margolis is at her very best LIVE and on "Heart & Soul: Live in San Francisco" she proves this in spades. Margolis is a tremendous improviser, a risk-taker at her very core and this new CD brilliantly captures the unpredictable excitement of the singer's club set, down to Margolis' dialogue with the audience and off-the-cuff humor. Here, for her fifth recording as a leader, Margolis celebrates a return to her roots, taping in front of a packed house at the old On Broadway Theater in San Francisco's North Beach, only a few doors down from the legendary but now defunct Jazz Workshop, where she made her critically acclaimed debut album fifteen years earlier.
"Highlights include: Kitty’s fresh, buoyant arrangement of "A Sleepin’ Bee," her incendiary scat tour de force on "Summertime," a bluesy romp though Mose Allison's "Your Mind Is On Vacation" the funky, joyful re-working of "Surrey With the Fringe," her sweet, poignant celebration of "Secret Love," the blazing version of "My Favorite Things" and her achingly romantic interpretation of the title track." From Amazon Editorial Review

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2010
Carol Sloane
album: We'll Meet Again

Notes: Ken Dryden at AllMusic writes: "Carol Sloane has paid her dues over a career that stretches over half a century, surviving the various detours into temporary fads and the fickle whims of the jazz marketplace. For her 37th album as a leader, the vocalist chose to omit both piano and drums, looking toward a cleaner, more intimate sound, which she achieves throughout the sessions. She could have hardly picked a better guitarist than Bucky Pizzarelli, a master who seems to have accompanied nearly everyone and has encyclopedic knowledge of thousands of songs, along with one of her biggest fans, tenor saxophonist/clarinetist Ken Peplowski (who has long told jazz journalists that she is one of his favorite vocalists), and veteran bassist Steve LaSpina. . . . (Read the full review at AllMusic.com.)
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1993-2013
Liz Callaway
album: Anywhere I Wander:
Liz Callaway Sings Frank Loesser

Notes: The first release of the Liz Callaway album Anywhere I Wander Liz Callaway Sings Frank Loesser in 1993 did not include "Spring Will Be a Little Late This Year." The album was re- released by Fynsworth Alley in 2003 (and again in 2013) with an extra track for "Spring Will. . . ."
It's worth it to read David Shire's notes on the album at CD Baby.
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2016
Fred Fried
album: The Wisdom of Notes

Notes: Fred Fried is accompanied by Michael Moore on bass and Tony Tedesco on drums.

Scott Yanow AllMusic.com album review: "Listening to Fred Fried's guitar work, it is difficult not to think of the late Charlie Byrd. Fried's work on acoustic guitar (though he uses a seven-string guitar), his chordal style and his beautiful tone are all reminiscent of Byrd. However Fried is not just an emulator and he is creative within the style that Byrd helped originate. He alternates originals with melodic standards, works closely with bassist Michael Moore and the subtle drummer Tony Tedesco, and creates exquisite music. Highly recommended."
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