On the 50th anniversary of the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald—the most famous shipwreck on the Great Lakes—our story series celebrating songs inspired by Leelanau County and the Sleeping Bear Dunes continues with Paul Koss’s “The Last of the Leelanau Schooners”. Koss wrote his classic homage to the era of the tall ships back in the early 1990s when he was working with the Maritime Heritage Alliance preparing to launch the schooner Madeline. “I always had a love of sailing and maritime history because my Grandpa on my Mom’s side was a sea captain in the Merchant Marines,” Paul said. “The Madeline was modeled on a school ship moored in Bowers Harbor, and working on it planted the seed of an idea for a song. Not a song about “The Boat”—Gordon Lightfoot and Stan Rogers had already written those songs—but I wanted to write a song about the end of the tall ship era in our corner of the Great Lakes.” As Paul says when he performs this song: “The boat doesn’t sink and nobody dies!”
