Penny Loafer

Lyrics

Nineteen thirty-six.
Wilton, Maine.
The air smells like leather and fresh-cut pine.

George Henry Bass, he's long gone by then.
But his company, they do it again.
Take a slip-on shoe from a Norwegian farm.
Looked comfortable, couldn't do no harm.
Called it a 'Weejun'.
Clean and plain.
A little diamond cut-out on the vamp.
Maybe just to let out the rain.

Then the kids showed up. Sometime in the fifties.
Walkin' across some green campus lawn.
Needed a coin for the payphone call back to the dorm.
They slid a copper Lincoln, shiny and new, right in that slot.
An emergency fund, right there on the spot.
And just like that, a new name was caught.
The Penny Loafer.
Yeah, that's the story they bought.

And the story changed.
From a lifeline to a phone, to a uniform.
The Ivy League took that shoe and made it warm.
It wasn't about the call no more.
It was about walking through the right door.
That penny wasn't currency.
It was a code. An invitation.
A quiet little piece of affiliation.

Yeah, the kids showed up. Sometime in the fifties.
Walkin' across some green campus lawn.
Needed a coin for the payphone call back to the dorm.
They slid a copper Lincoln, shiny and new, right in that slot.
An emergency fund, right there on the spot.
And just like that, a new name was caught.
The Penny Loafer.
Yeah, that's the story they bought.

It's funny how that works, ain't it?
You take a thing. A little piece of copper.
A slip of paper from a club on Piedmont Road.
And you give it a story.
You give it a meaning that ain't printed on the face.
Suddenly, it's not a cent. It's your place.
It's your ticket in.
The value ain't the metal.
It's the myth.

G.H. Bass.
Still walkin'.
That little copper penny.
Still talkin'.
Penny Loafer.
Real cool.