Cowboy singer Gene Autry starred in a 1937 movie pitting sheepherders against cattlemen in the American west. Betty Grable starred in a 1942 movie recounting the romantic capers of a couple at Lake Louise. The two films shared the title “Springtime in the Rockies” and are memorable chiefly for the ballad featured in both scores:

When it’s springtime in the Rockies
I’m coming back to you,
Little sweetheart of the mountains,
With your bonnie eyes of blue.

Once again I’ll say I love you
While the birds sing all the day.
When it’s springtime in the Rockies,
In the Rockies, far away.

The ballad became a hit single for Gene Autry, and later for country singer Hank Snow. The nostalgic words set to their simple melody suggest that this is an old folk song, its words polished by countless anonymous singers. But it is a 20th century creation, its lyrics written by a Mormon girl, Mary Hale Woolsey, born in Springville, Utah, in 1899.

Mary attended Provo High School, then Brigham Young University where she served as a class officer and wrote for student publications. With a keen ear for the spoken word, Mary wrote several operettas performed by local theater and church groups and found a ready market for her radio plays.

She successfully collaborated with professional musicians. “Springtime in the Rockies” was published in 1929 with music written by Robert Sauer, and was followed by other songs in the sentimental western genre – “When the Wild, Wild Roses Bloom,” “Colorado Skies,” and “On the Trails of Timpanogas” were all popular for a time. Her successes led to her becoming the first Utah woman accepted for membership in the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP).

Mary also became a staff writer for The Salt Lake Tribune, covering society events and fashion. She married, had four daughters, and divorced. She taught school, wrote advertising copy, and edited the Utah Clubwoman, a publication of the Utah Federation of Women’s Clubs. She was active in political issues, serving as executive secretary for the Utah Association for the United Nations in the early 1950s.

For more than 40 years, Mary was a frequent contributor of short stories to the Relief Society Magazine and the Improvement Era. She turned to children’s writing late in life, and her 1963 novel The Keys and the Candle, about an 11th century “boy scribe” facing down the Danish marauders of England’s monasteries, won the California Book Award silver medal that year. She died in California in 1969.

Nothing else she wrote, though, ever reached the popularity of one of her earliest compositions, about the longing for love and the old home in the mountains in the spring of the year.

The twilight shadows deepen into night, dear.
The city lights are gleaming o’er the snow.
I sit alone beside the cheery fire, dear;
I’m dreaming dreams from out the long ago.

I fancy, it is springtime in the Rockies.
The flowers with their colors are aflame.
And though I long to be back in the Rockies,
I’ll wait until the springtime comes again.

Once again I’ll say I love you
While the birds sing all the day.
When it’s springtime in the Rockies,
In the Rockies, far away.