The last of the Leelanau schooners: “The boat doesn’t sink and nobody dies”
Photo l-r: Chris Skellenger and Paul Koss
By Norm Wheeler
Sun editor
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.
Listen to the song here:
Koss wrote his classic homage to the era of the tall ships, The Last of the Leelanau Schooners, back in the early 1990’s 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 explains. “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. It takes me a long time to write a song, including this one, but that was the beginning and the initial thought.”
At the same time Paul was taking a writing class at NMC from Kathleen Stocking. “She gave me the best writing advice ever: ‘Show me, don’t tell me’. That truth is in a lot of my songs.” Kathleen was writer-in-residence at that time for a program in Leelanau County working with students to present their family’s local histories. Paul told her “Well, I have a song”, and she asked him to play it for the other students, but, “It wasn’t done yet! I literally wrote the last verse on the couch one hour before I had to perform it!”
As Paul recounts, this area was settled as a result of those boats. Before there were roads around here, the schooners sailed the waters of these lakes carrying passengers and the goods they needed to the new villages being born along the coasts. “Somebody sailed a schooner for the last time as part of that era, before the steamships took over. They wouldn’t have known that. So that’s what the song is about.”
As a footnote to this song’s origin story, Paul eventually wrote a sequel to this song and included it on his last recording. (Paul’s adaptation of ‘Roll Away Boys” was also performed at the Old Art Building in Leland for a Scott Craig production that included the story of the Christmas Tree Ship.) In the sequel song, the captain of the steamer is the grandson of a sailor who was a teen on the Last of the Leelanau Schooners! So some of what Paul Koss’s grandfather passed down to him is captured in these songs. Here’s the first verse of Roll Away Boys: “My Grandfather was my first captain. I can still see him there by the wheel. That steamer’d been built in ’07, when they first turned to great ships of steel. I can still hear his tales of the last days of sails as a young lad first out on his own. His sea legs were born in an October storm on an old schooner’s final run home.”
Please check out Koss’s iconic historical capturing of The Last of the Leelanau Schooners. It’s available on most streaming services. As Paul says when he performs this song: “The boat doesn’t sink and nobody dies!”
Previous installments in our Songs of Leelanau series featured: André Villoch’s “Cedar”; Chris Skellenger’s “Old Yellow Dog,” Patrick Niemisto’s “Sand” about the megastorm that hit Glen Arbor 10 years ago; Hazel Olberhelman’s “Leelanau Theme Song”; Ingemar Johansson and Song of the Lakes’ “Pearl of America”; Laura Hood’s “Eddy Up”; Les Dalgliesh’s “The Ways of Leelanau”; Jeff Maharry’s “Good Harbor Bay”; Seth Bernard’s instrumental ode to the Manitou Islands; Blake Elliott’s “Small Town,” and Louann Lechler’s “I’m Proud to Say I Live in Leelanau County.”
