My first adventure in songwriting collaboration! I wrote this non-rhyming lyric and passed it over to the excellent Glenn MacPherson who set it to music and performed it.
Have a listen…
The Porcupine Mountains, referred to by locals as “The Porkies,” is a wooded area along Lake Superior in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. It had active copper and iron mines in the 19th century. Silver City was founded in 1875 just outside the Porkies when silver was discovered. The vein was exhausted within a year.
Porkies Girl 1875 (©2025 Sara Glaser / Glenn MacPherson)
She came down from the Porcupine Mountains
With little fairy bells and blue-eyed marys in her hair
All dressed up in her mother’s Sunday outfit
Calico with roses and goatskin leather shoes
In her hands she’s got a sugar maple basket
And a yellow-throated warbler in a copper wire cage
She looks up from the Silver City high street
She can hear the dance band playing from the window up above
They come out on the ballroom veranda
Silver City girls with golden ribbons in their hair
They’re dressed up in shiny silks and velvets
Lacy sleeves and collars and sequin dinner shoes
In their hands they have fringed and beaded purses
And the arms of dapper dandies, scrubbed behind the ears
They look out at the Silver City high street
The bright lights of the street lamps dancing in their eyes
She looks down, sees the tattered hemline
The patching and the scratches, shoes down at the heels
She turns round, walks back into the Porkies
Back to Little Iron River and the Nonesuch Copper Mine
Up up up, high up in the mountains
She takes the yellow warbler from its copper wire cage
She looks out to never-ending water
To the silver on the surface, to the fading golden sun
