A Tribute to Gordon Lightfoot

As I write this it is early May 2023 and one of my all-time heroes has passed. His music and legend are to me, synonymous with Canada and being Canadian. Somehow in our world, the brand of being a Canadian gets a bit of a wet towel thrown on it. What I mean is it is just not always so readily visible for others to see, for others to recognize what being a Canadian means. That is what this piece is about, how he personified the Canadian identity and how unique and personal that experience is.  

The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald

My first recognition of his music was in 1976, I was 14 and the evening news had a story about the sinking of a Great Lakes freighter the year before. I think I was in the middle of my schoolboy fascination with the Titanic at that time. What made the news so interesting was not only remembering the tragedy from the previous year, but it was also the release of a song to commemorate the sinking. The song caught my imagination and brought the story to my young consciousness. The song and its story have stuck with me to this day. I literally cannot hear the song without having a strong emotional reaction to the melody, the tempo and especially the lyrics. The song, “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” is quite simply a Canadian masterpiece.

The reason why I think his music and especially this song captures the “Canadianness” is the way in which it makes you feel. That emotion is triggered by his unique sound and the images his lyrics congers up. Sometimes subtle and other times so vivid. With the “Edmund Fitzgerald” he paints a sharp and eerie depiction of a vocation as a Great Lakes’ mariner caught up in the spirit of nature’s most fierce force, and the profound loss that ensues not only for the crew but for a nation. It’s like you are there and you feel the force and you experience the sacrifice. All of this tragedy is just because people need to earn a living and choose to make their way in what is a very dangerous environment, our Great Lakes.

What also makes this so Canadian is the vastness he portrays in his description of the places he depicts. Having association with many of the places he characterizes you are placed right in the experience of the sailors, their homes, and families. His inclusion of our American neighbors with such warmth and a sense of solidarity – even with the commerce theme – is uniquely a Canadian motif.

What is also so very Canadian is the ship and the crew are actually all American. Somehow, we share and adopt the tragic sinking of the ship as a uniquely Canadian thing. We do this without hesitation or a need to clarify why. Those lakes and the people are ours, just like the “legend living on from the Chippewa on down”.

His ownership of the event and the storytelling are another poignant feature of being Canadian. The lake he calls “Gitche Gumee,” along with the other Great Lakes, ties our nations not only together but in a certain unique consolidation with our neighbors. Even the weather we know and fear is shared, and somehow it is also understood as a fair trade for its natural resource the “iron ore”. The ore takes on an almost human quality as it connects us with the need to be there.

He hangs on the words of “Pride and the American Side” like they are a badge of shared belief, a knowing that we are all here together only separated by some imaginary lines. The ship leaving some unknown port heading for “Cleveland” is so matter of fact, like it is a part of the mutual landscape. The inevitability of the weather and Mother Nature’s revenge is kind and almost selfless. Gales and tattle tales of waves with freezing rain mix up a hurricane force that is an almost expected inevitability with the combined northerly and westerly winds. A unique and exchangeable Great Lakes cocktail.

The rich pageantry of the cook and his desire to feed the crew not only leads to suffering, but it also serves as a calling card for the darkness to come. The captain’s steadfast belief of survival in the face of the unknown peril and the distance to safety hang so close you can almost taste it.

The certainty of a feeling portrayed by “the love of God going through the waves and the minutes and hours” pulls us to the bottom, to the moment where hope is gone. The powerful tempo picks up and throws us down through the water to be with them. “The searchers all say they’d have made Whitefish Bay”, but no, that is not the ending.

The unknown circumstances feed our hope of a loss that might mean something. “All that remains is the faces and the names, of the wives, and the sons and the daughters” is so consequential and a reckoning to last.

To tie the five lakes together as not a villain but a condition so we can feel the vastness that now owns another part of us is a fairness that we have to accept. To tie Detroit and the Maritimes together is so disconnected but no longer. A dusty old hall and a cathedral smell the same with a certainty, for us all to share. Reminding us exactly 29 times. Superior is the last word before the dead, and giving up her bodies is never a November come early.

To help us remember the song is there. He wrote it to share what it is like to be one of us. To be part of the landscape. To feel what it is like to be a Canadian. I love it.

RIP Gordon.