The wondrous, dreamlike, 84-year life of Canadian music legend Gordon Lightfoot came to an end last week in Toronto. Lightfoot grew up playing piano and guitar (which he had taught himself to play) and performing in barbershop quartets, church choirs, and other small groups. At the age of 12, he performed in Toronto’s Massey Hall, arguably the Canadian equivalent of Carnegie Hall.
Lightfoot had originally wanted to be a jazz musician, and he set out to California to become just that. But while studying jazz composition at the Westlake College of Music in Los Angeles in the early ’60s, he discovered Bob Dylan. The encounter with the American folk singer-songwriter changed the course of his life. Lightfoot gave up jazz, as well as California, to focus on folk, trying to emulate Dylan’s unique sound and more personal style of songwriting. As he later recounted, “I simply write the songs about where I am and where I’m from. I take situations and write poems about them.”
Remaining at home in Canada, several of Lightfoot’s first folk songs were performed by Peter, Paul and Mary. With the help of the publicity that he had received from the famous American folk music group known for hits such as “If I Had a Hammer” and “Puff the Magic Dragon,” Lightfoot was able to sign with a manager. Establishing a relationship with a professional in the music industry allowed him to release his first album, Lightfoot!, in 1966, followed in quick succession by three more albums with United Artists. His major critical breakout occurred in 1968, when his album Did She Mention My Name? was nominated for a Grammy. Lightfoot would go on to earn four more Grammy nominations, 17 Juno Awards (the Canadian Grammy), and compose over 200 songs in his near-five-decade career. At least seven of his records reached the “gold album” status, meaning they each had sold at least 500,000 copies.
Feeding off of the North American folk music revolution, as well as being instrumental in furthering it, Lightfoot became popular with baby boomers who resonated with songs of his, such as “If You Could Read My Mind” and “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” in which Lightfoot sang about less commercial and more personal concerns — the anguish of failed relationships and the joys of exploring the Canadian countryside, which Lightfoot was known to do himself (often by canoe, no less). Lightfoot reached his apogee when his “Sundown” became a No. 1 hit in the United States in 1974, remaining on Billboard’s Top 100 list for 18 weeks. But after his 1975 hit “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” he began to descend into alcoholism, a malady that caused his career and relationships to suffer. After he had managed to quit drinking in the ’80s, he was able to turn his life around again. Several more hits of his in the ’90s gave his career a true second wind, leading to renewed opportunities to go on tour and perform across the country — an aspect of the music profession that Lightfoot relished. Even a near-death experience due to a ruptured abdominal aorta in 2002 could not keep him off the stage.
Lightfoot’s dreams were fulfilled when his idol Bob Dylan acknowledged in a Rolling Stone interview that, on at least one of his albums, he had tried to sing like Lightfoot. Even more flattering for Lightfoot, Dylan acknowledged that he wasn’t able to pull it off. “I thought if he could get that sound, I could. But we couldn’t get it,” Dylan admitted. On other occasions, Dylan described Lightfoot as a “rare talent,” adding, “I can’t think of any Gordon Lightfoot song I don’t like. Every time I hear a song of his, it’s like I wish it would last forever.”
Daniel Ross Goodman is a Washington Examiner contributing writer and the author, most recently, of Somewhere Over the Rainbow: Wonder and Religion in American Cinema.
