My favorite songs: Gordon Lightfoot's "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald"
Reposting a piece from 2017 in honor of the late singer-songwriter
[Originally written December 2, 2017; a few minor edits made today. RIP to a true legend, whether I’m much of a fan or not; I probably owe his catalog some investigation, because this song frequently haunts me - not just due to its subject matter, but because it’s so damned good.]
Gordon Lightfoot is not typically my cup of tea. Any interest I have in 1970s folk music tends to lean towards the women’s music side of things, and the “sensitive men” of the early ’70s don’t do much for me at best, and actively annoy me at worst (or worse). But in researching a proposed November ’76 top 40, which I decided was ultimately too uninteresting to review, I came across “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.”
I’d probably heard “Fitzgerald” before this year, but I don’t have much memory of it. And goddamn, as story songs go, it doesn’t get much more compelling than this. The US freighter SS Edmund Fitzgerald sunk in a storm on Lake Superior on November 10, 1975; two weeks later, Newsweek published an account of what happened, which apparently inspired Lightfoot. He wrote the song, taking some artistic lyrical liberties, and it was recorded the following month with Lenny Waronker in the producer’s chair. And frankly, you can hear how tough Lightfoot’s band was, on this recording: Terry Clements’s lead guitar and Pee Wee Charles’s pedal steel add so fucking much to the song — there’s some serious meat on these musical bones. And Gene Martynec’s Moog touches that come creeping in under Lightfoot’s vocals ca. the 2:30 mark add an honestly eerie feel to the tale.
But none of this matters if not for Lightfoot’s lyrics, telling the SS Edmund Fitzgerald‘s story. Above are the front and back sleeves of “Fitzgerald”’s German 45, the back of which includes the song’s full lyrics. (If you need an easier-to-read version, here.) Lightfoot hits all the crucial points in the tale of the ship’s sinking, so the record goes over six minutes, yet to me at least, never feels overlong. This is a filmic single — think Spielberg in serious drama mode, cf. Lincoln — that needs its long runtime to do its job, but does it so well that you never really notice its length.
Released on Lightfoot’s June 1976 album Summertime Dream, this was his second-biggest US hit, spending a pair of weeks at #2 on the Hot 100 in November 1976, appallingly stuck behind Rod Stewart’s as-gross-as-it-gets “Tonight’s the Night.” It also made it to #9 on the Easy Listening (now AC) chart, and #50 country. In his native Canada, it was of course an even bigger smash, topping both the pop and country charts, deservedly. (I love how this contrasts with, say, the Conway Twitty and Merle Haggard hits of ’76.) Thanks to Lightfoot, those 29 men who perished on the SS Edmund Fitzgerald will never be forgotten — and this song shouldn’t be, either, because it’s a solid songwriter/performer at the top of his game. (There’s a reason that no less than Bob Dylan was a huge fan.)