Mackinac Island

About the video:  The official music video featuring the studio recording contains awesome public-domain footage obtained from the Prelinger Archives.

Learn to play this song on a ukulele here:  https://www.ukulele-tabs.com/uke-songs/scott-cooley/mackinac-island-uke-tab-64720.html

Related news item:  Learn how to play Mackinac Island (Horseshit & Fudge) on ukulele!

The Story Behind The Song!

PARENTAL ADVISORY WARNING:  Contains one explicit word, repeated many times.

This one only makes sense if you've been there.  It's about a real and unique summer tourist destination in Michigan.  I initially found it to be inexplicable why this song is my most popular, however, after giving it some more thought over the years, I've come to understand.  

Most of the songs I consider my best are not like this one, and instead are mostly fairly serious, emotional love songs.  I don't think of myself as a funny-song guy, a swear-word-song guy, or a songs-about-places guy, but this has all three.

So, if you're not a great singer, instrumentalist, performer, or songwriter, and you still want to write and record a song that is appealing to people, this one has some key ingredients for such a recipe:

• About a place people have heard of and like

• The title contains the name of the familiar place

• It is funny

• It contains a swear word

• There's a good amount of repetition

• It conjures up nostalgia

• The musical style suits the subject matter

• My genius wife "one-take Lenore" lived up to her nickname again by nailing the marimba track

I wrote it and recorded it very quickly because I had a good amount of familiarity with the place.  It seemed like a song that should have already existed, but didn't yet, and somehow I was the lucky one who got to write it.  As you've heard other songwriters say when describing the mysterious process, it really did feel like the song flowed through me, as if I was chosen to channel it from the ether somehow.

I need to come out and state that I love Mackinac Island and always have, and always will.  Everyone I've ever talked to about it loves the place.  I recommend to everyone that they should visit there.

The also-known-as title for this one is Horseshit and Fudge.  The combination of those two smells permeates the air on Mackinac Island, a unique place where the Christopher Reeve movie "Somewhere In Time" was filmed.  There is a huge beautiful hotel there and for some reason, there have always been a bunch of people from Jamaica who work there.  I went to college with a party animal type of guy named Dan who I heard ended up sort of inheriting it and running it for a while, but then I heard he and his family no longer own or operate it - I have no idea if these things I heard are accurate, but I had a few beers with the guy anyway in the mid-80s at Albion College.

I do know for sure, however, that I have several relatives (uncles, cousins) who worked a few summers on the island while they were in college.  Like everyone, they had nothing but great things to say about their experience.  Everyone has fond memories of the place.  I went there to try to get a job one summer while on break from my ski bum days, and quickly realized it wasn't for me.  They basically forced you to stay in employee housing which was dormitory-style with House Mothers and strict rules and everything.  Talk about feeling trapped on an island...I quickly sized it up as totally old-school and not for me.  

I have extremely fond childhood memories of the place, however, like many Michiganders do.  Our family used to sail there on summer vacations when I was growing up, staying on the boat in the marina and enjoying the place.  I played a lot of frisbee in the park there-seriously an awesome place to play frisbee and I love frisbee so that really was the highlight for me.  

There are no cars on this small tourist trap island in Lake Huron, and you take a ferry boat to get there, then you either walk, ride a bike, or ride in a horse-drawn carriage.  You ride around the island, check out Arch Rock, take photographs, and watch reenacters shoot muskets.  You also eat fudge and buy moccasins, for some reason.  It's an odd combination of things, but they are what you do there.

In my way of looking at things, this song just had to be written, and I cranked it out effortlessly in about a half hour.  If you've been there, you know what I'm talking about, and you probably also wonder why nobody wrote a song like this about this place before I did.  If you're from Michigan or anywhere in the Great Lakes region for that matter, you've at least heard of this place, so you recognize the song title...and if that wasn't enough to intrigue you, I labeled it 'explicit' so now you can't help but be convinced to hit play, but it still won't make much sense unless you've been there before.

Back when I offered CDs (and back when people still bought them), I sold way more copies of the "Lakeside Landing" album this appears on than any of my others.  If I ever wrote a "hit" this would be it.  One could safely say it is "regionally famous," and one I always have to play for people when performing live because it's a crowd-pleaser (in Michigan, anyway).  

Needless to say, it's garnered what might be described as "cult status" at this point, a classic that Facebook friends have shared and recommended socially online to the point where it's my highest-selling, highest-streaming song of all time to this day.  I'm proud and happy to be a 1-hit wonder if this turns out to be the only song I'm ever really known for.  I feel lucky to have had the opportunity to write one that connected with so many people who relate to it and enjoy it.