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The Legend Lives On: How Gordon Lightfoot Turned a Lake Superior Tragedy Into ‘The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald’
The Legend Lives On: How Gordon Lightfoot Turned a Lake Superior Tragedy Into “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” On the evening of November 10, 1975, one of the largest ships ever to sail the Great Lakes vanished into Lake Superior. The SS Edmund Fitzgerald — 729 feet of steel, the pride of the lakes,…
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Gordon Lightfoot: The Heart Behind the Highways
He sang about restless hearts on lonely highways, and he lived the words. Gordon Lightfoot’s public image was the plainspoken Canadian bard — steady, modest, reliable as a twelve-string guitar. His private life was stormier: three marriages, six children, a legendary temper, a ferocious battle with alcohol that he won, and a devotion to his…
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How Gordon Lightfoot Created “If You Could Read My Mind”: The Empty House, the Heartbreak, and the Lawsuit
Some songs are written. “If You Could Read My Mind” was confessed. In the summer of 1969, Gordon Lightfoot sat alone in an empty house in Toronto with a wicker chair, a small Quebec table that fit in the trunk of his car, a pad, and a manuscript — and wrote the most nakedly honest…
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The Untold Story of Gordon Lightfoot: The Jealous Night That Became “Sundown,” the Shipwreck He Sang Into Legend, and Six Weeks in a Coma
He was Canada’s bard, the plainspoken troubadour Bob Dylan once called a mentor, the man who turned a Great Lakes shipwreck into one of the most haunting hit singles ever released. But Gordon Lightfoot’s life was anything but the gentle folk idyll his songs suggested. Behind the twelve-string guitar lay a volatile love affair with…