Gordon Lightfoot and the Edmund Fitzgerald
The song of a Great Lakes freighter is a masterwork of lasting importance.
Gordon Lightfoot’s passing came this week just as I had been listening, for about the past month, to his masterpiece, The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald. The song is an ear worm for me, but it is so much more as well. Why I’d been playing it is a thread that makes sense to me, but is of less relevance than the importance of it both as as a poetic song, and as a piece of history for those of us who were born in the Midwest and lived near the Great Lakes.
Lightfoot wrote a number of hits in the 1970’s, but had already made a name for himself in his native Canada in the previous decade. Geddy Lee, the great bass player from another of my favorite bands, Rush, and a native of Toronto, like Lightfoot, wrote of him on his Instagram account:
"The first time we met was outside a local award show at a club in Toronto - a legendary poet, a songwriting inspiration - a gem of a man - I loved him. He used to bring his daughter who was a fan, to our shows, and he'd sit with her in the audience getting blasted with volume for three hours.” —Sourced from Blabbermouth.net
He wrote If you could read my mind, and Carefree Highway, Early Morning Rain, and, of course, Sundown — All hits in the 70’s, all songs for which most of us Gen X-ers know at least some of the lyrics. But it was Edmund Fitzgerald that stands apart from the rest, and even Lightfoot admitted that it was his greatest song. He was reported to have said, around 2010, that he picked up an edition of Newsweek Magazine and read a story about the enormous Great Lakes freighter that sank in an unexpectedly strong storm on Lake Superior as it was heading for Detroit (Lightfoot embellished the story at points—and had the Fitzgerald heading for Cleveland in the song).
The ship was the largest freighter on the Great Lakes when she was launched in 1958. She was 729 feet long and weighed more than 13,000 tons. She was capable of carrying loads that were more than twice her weight, and she was doing so when she sank on November 10, 1975. She’d left Superior, Wisconsin with her load of iron ore and was headed for Detroit, Michigan. A storm had been brewing, but that wasn’t unusual and her Captain, Ernest McSorley, had more than 40 years of experience on the Lakes. She made contact with another ship, the Arthur M. Anderson—headed for Gary, Indiana on a similar course, and the two captains decided to take a more northern route, closer to the coast of Canada, which they thought would help protect them from the storm’s waves.
Winds shifted overnight from Nov. 9 through 10, and left both ships exposed to the waves instead. It’s likely that the Fitzgerald sank rapidly, after developing a list from taking on water, a fact McSorely had radioed to the Anderson during the night. When Captain Bernie Cooper of the Anderson radioed McSorely in the pre-dawn hours, McSorely said they were “holding their own.” Not long after that, Fitzgerald disappeared from Anderson’s radars. All 29 souls were lost.
Lightfoot grew up on the Great Lakes and so his writing the song was a natural thing for him. He must have been moved by the accident. I remember learning about the Fitzgerald when I was 10 years old, by then already living in California with my family. I probably overuse the word haunted, but the fact is there are things that haunt me—some are good, some are not—and some are just facts; things that happened that I find it hard not to see as significant, or even poetic in both dark and light ways. The Edmund Fitzgerald began a rather life-long fascination for me, of people who choose to work in conditions that they cannot always manage, and the courage it must take to do such a thing. From Alaska crab fishing crews to submarine and shipping crews, Space Shuttle crews and beyond.
I don’t remember the first time I heard The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald. Musically, it is as simple as a song gets, and longer than most hit songs, though the 70’s was a special time in many ways for music like that. The song has no bridges, no chorus and it’s a spare melody of both electric and acoustic guitar, bass and drums and some backing keyboards and organ. Lightfoot’s smooth baritone voice reaches just slightly into tenor territory in a melancholy story. His poetry comes alive and I still get chills hearing some of the lines:
The wind in the wires made a tattle tale sound and a wave broke over the railing…
Does anyone know where the love of God goes when the waves turn the minutes to hours…
In a musty old hall in Detroit they prayed in the Maritime Sailor’s Cathedral…
The church bell chimed till it rang 29 times for each man on the Edmund Fitzgerald…
The whole song is a masterwork of taking a historical event, and giving it rhyming and melodic space, while also raising a listener’s emotions. For me, without mentioning the names of crew or captain, it is a story of those 28 sailors, Captain McSorely and the 29 families who lost someone they loved and cared about. The song is a reminder that life is our most precious gift and Lightfoot uses the clarity of his poetic voice to haunt us with that thought.
When we lose a songwriter, a poet—like Lightfoot, we lose a voice of unique power and purpose. It is sad, yes. But he lived a good life and, by all accounts, he was a good, kind and decent man. There is no doubt whatever that he was also poet of place and time—and that this one song by a Canadian writer is a stamp on an American story, a tragedy borne out of the classic clash between man and nature. For that alone, Lightfoot deserves to be remembered.
Addendum: I’d been playing the song after having been introduced to the Dropkick Murphy’s version of The Green Fields of France by Eric Bogle. It’s a sad dirge about a WWI gravestone and a man’s encounter with it, and his reminiscence on the futility of war. The song is similar to Edmund Fitzgerald, in that there are no bridges—though there is a chorus, and there are multiple verses. In a melancholy mood myself after grieving my good dog, Simon, I indulged myself in these sad songs. Coincidentally, Bogle wrote Green Fields in the same year that Lightfoot wrote Edmund Fitzgerald, 1976.
Excellent writing, brother. Also, Duluth, Mn. Has a Maritime museum with a section on the Edmund Fitzgerald, with the song playing in the background
Thank you, Mark. You’ve captured many of my own feelings.