In The Springtime: A Song History
"In The Springtime" is an original song by the singer and dulcimer player Aubrey Atwater, who is credited with both words and music under a 1988 copyright.[1] According to the duo's own notes, it was inspired by her grandmother, Eleanor Bartlett Atwater (1897-1990), and a remark the older woman made to her in her nineties about losing her friends.[1] A note for the 1992 recording on the duo's website describes the song as being about the changes her grandmother, then ninety, had seen in her life, adding that many of its lines are direct quotations.[2] When Atwater sang it to her, the grandmother's verdict was, in Atwater's telling, "How lugubrious!"[1]
Charles-François Daubigny, Apple Blossoms, oil on canvas, 1873. An orchard in spring, shown for the season in the title.
Atwater first recorded the song on Simple Sentences (1992), a solo album of her own songs that she dedicated to the students and staff of the Dorcas Place Parent Literacy Center in Providence, Rhode Island, where she was then working.[2] She returned to it in 2011 on the Atwater~Donnelly album Each Other's Story, a collection of original songs spanning some thirty years of her and Elwood Donnelly's careers.[2] On that recording Atwater sings lead and plays guitar and tin whistle, with Donnelly on guitar, and the duo's notes say that the only thing added to the earlier arrangement was a set of chimes played by Kevin Doyle.[1] Atwater also includes the song, set in DAC tuning, in Song By Song, Vol. II, her book of mountain dulcimer tablature.[3]
Sources
- Atwater~Donnelly: "Each Other's Story: Lyrics & Notes".
- Atwater~Donnelly: "Shop" (album notes for Simple Sentences and Each Other's Story).
- Aubrey Atwater: "Song By Song, Vol. II".
- Image: Charles-François Daubigny, Apple Blossoms, oil on canvas, 1873. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.