Good Music Monday to you. Today, it’s It Might as Well Be Spring, music and lyrics by Rodgers and Hammerstein.
The crocuses were starting to open in yesterday’s full burst of sun, but they are tightly bundled against today’s continuing snowfall. It’s pretty cozy inside my house, but Sinatra’s voice makes me pine for something more.
I couldn’t find an adequate and free-to-link-to recording (or video) of Sinatra doing this song, so this Music Monday, you’ll have to troll around teh interwebs and find your own. I love Sinatra’s version the best, with Ella Fitzgerald running a close second. I couldn’t find Nina Simone doing it, but my guess is she, too, would do it justice.
The song generally seems to be presented as a saccharin confection; take for instance, Shirley Jones’, Julie Andrews’, or Andy Williams’ renditions. If I had heard one of those first, I might have dismissed the song as fluffy and escapist; it is after all from the 1945 musical “State Fair,” and though I have never seen it, I can guess at its sentiments.
Until you can find a recording of it, here are the lyrics. Beautiful really. Who writes songs like this any more?
It Might as Well Be Spring
Rodgers and Hammerstein
I’m as restless as a willow in a windstorm
I’m as jumpy as a puppet on a string
I’d say that I had Spring fever
But I know it isn’t Spring
I am starry-eyed and vaguely discontented
Like a nightingale without a song to sing
Oh, why should I have Spring fever
When it isn’t even Spring?
I keep wishing I were somewhere else
Walking down a strange new street
Hearing words that I have never heard
From a girl I’ve yet to meet
I’m as busy as a spider spinning daydreams
I’m as giddy as a baby on a swing
I haven’t seen a crocus or a rosebud or a robin on the wing
But I feel so gay in a melancholy way
That it might as well be Spring
It might as well be spring
twinklysparkles 