RIP Gordon Lightfoot. Singer, Songwriter, Documentarian.
Celebrity deaths usually don’t affect me much. I have limited bandwidth for grieving and it rarely includes people I haven’t met. Even famous folks I deeply admire.
But when I woke up Tuesday morning and heard Tony Macrini tell his listeners that 84-year-old Gordon Lightfoot had died, I was flooded with memories.
Not simply of the Canadian balladeer, but of his music. His soothing voice and the stories he spun with his music. My favorite Lightfoot song was “Sundown,” about his affair with the notorious Cathy Smith.
Lightfoot’s most memorable song was the mesmerizing way he immortalized the 1975 sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald in Lake Superior.
I know where I was on November 11, 1975.
I was a new employee of The Washington Post, where I worked as a lowly newsroom copy aide. We were stationed next to the “wire room,” a cramped, noisy space lined with news wire machines from UPI, AP, Reuters, Knight-Ridder, Dow and half a dozen others. They clattered all day, spitting out news from around the world. The person assigned to the wire room ripped off the wire stories, sorted them into the “local”, “state” “national,” “international” and “business” baskets, which were then retrieved by news aides and distributed to the appropriate desks.
Occasionally the machines’ bells would ring, signaling breaking news stories. Those had to be delivered to the appropriate editors with haste.
On November 11th, I walked past the wire room when suddenly all of the bells on almost all of the machines went off at once.
“Hey, what’s going on?” I asked, ducking in.
“The Edmund Fitzgerald, a merchant ship, sank in Lake Superior,” said the guy assigned to the wireroom, reading from a long, white sheet hanging from his hands. “The vessel and all 29 crew members were lost last night in a huge storm.”
I grabbed a bulletin and read it for myself. Until that moment I’d never thought about ships sinking in the Great Lakes. And my father had been a merchant seaman. I should have known how dangerous those waters were.
Gordon Lightfoot read about it too.
The morning after the Fitzgerald went down, the rector of Mariners’ Church of Detroit tolled its bell 29 times, once for each man lost. An Associated Press reporter knocked on the church’s door, interviewed the rector and filed an account that was published in newspapers.
Mr. Lightfoot read the article. Soon afterward, he started singing a song about the wreck during a previously scheduled recording session. His band joined in, and the first version of the song that they recorded was later released.
The song was six minutes long. DJs hated it, unless they had to take a bathroom break, recalls Macrini who was a top-40 disc jockey early in his radio career.
A year after the tragedy, Gordon Lightfoot released the haunting folk ballad, “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” that immortalized the sinking and the men on board. The unlikely hit spent 21 weeks on Billboard’s list, reaching as high as #2.
When you listened to Lightfoot’s lyrics you could see the cook, the captain, the crew, working tirelessly to keep the ship afloat in a sudden, violent storm.
The SS Edmund Fitzgerald was a freighter that was loaded with 26,000 tons of iron ore, en route to a steel mill near Detroit, from Superior, Wisconsin. When she was launched in 1958, the Edmund Fitzgerald was the largest ship plying the waters of the Great Lakes. She was known as Big Fitz, Mighty Fitz, and Pride of the American Side.
She remains the largest ship to ever sink in any of the Lakes.
Unlike songs that use a real-life story as the basis for embellishment, Mr. Lightfoot’s ballad hewed precisely to the real-life details. The weight of the ore, for example — “26,000 tons more than the Edmund Fitzgerald weighed empty” — was accurate. So was the number of times that the church bell chimed in Detroit.
Decades later, Mr. Lightfoot changed the lyrics slightly after investigations into the accident revealed that waves, not crew error, had led to the shipwreck. In the new lyrics, he sang that it got dark at 7 that November night on Lake Superior — not that a main hatchway caved in.
“That’s the kind of meticulous, looking-for-the-truth kind of guy that he was,” his friend, Eric Greenberg said.
Lightfoot gave pop culture the true story of a modern-day shipwreck, ensuring that the tragedy would be remembered long after the men and their immediate families were gone.
The late songwriter caused me to do a little more research. It seems there have been at least 6,000 shipwrecks in the Great Lakes. And, according to the Great Lakes Shipwrecks Museum, at least 30,000 crew members were lost in those sinkings.
Thanks to a folk singer from Canada, we will never forget 29 of those who died, nor their vessel, The Edmund Fitzgerald.
The Fitz rests at the bottom of Lake Superior in 538 feet of icy Canadian waters. Three separate dives to the wreck are known. One, sanctioned by the families, was to retrieve the ship’s bell.
The Canadian government has prohibited any more dives to the wreck out of respect for the men entombed there.
“The lake, it is said, never gives up her dead,
When the skies of November turn gloomy.
RIP Gordon Lightfoot.
