No One Believed These Gordon Lightfoot Stories. Until They Watched This! 

He recorded the song that would define him in a single take. His band had never heard it before that afternoon. They played it exactly once. And that first playthrough, the very first time those musicians heard the melody, became a record that peaked at number two on the Billboard Hot 100.

 Bob Dylan called him a mentor. Said every time he heard one of his songs, he wished it would last forever. Elvis Presley cut one and sang it on the final tour of his life. Johnny Cash, Barbara Stryisan, Neil Young, the Grateful Dead. Peter, Paul and Mary, Sarah McLaclin. Roughly 500 songs written, more than 200 he recorded himself.

 Hundreds of other artists cut the  rest. Five Grammy nominations, zero wins, 35 years of eligibility at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. His name was never once placed on a ballot. In September of 2002, a main artery ruptured in his stomach. He went down before a show. 6 week coma, 28 units of blood, a tracheotomy that permanently altered the voice you hear on every record he ever made.

 Afterward, the doctors told his family to prepare. Two years later, he walked back onto a stage. He kept touring for another two decades. He later changed one line, one lyric in the song that made him famous because he decided he owed it to 29 dead men. He heard the news of his own death on the car radio in 2010.

 He was driving home from the dentist. He picked up a phone and politely called a Toronto television station to explain that he was still alive. One of the most decorated songwriters Canada ever produced, the man Dylan wanted to sing forever, and a Hall of Fame that never once sent the letter. Stay to the end because the final show he ever played did not happen where the internet keeps telling you it did.

 This is Gordon Lightfoot’s real story. Number one, the choir boy from Aurelia.  He was a boy soprano before he was anything else. Gordon Meredith Lightoot Jr. was born on November 17th, 1938 in Aurelia, Ontario, a small lakeside town about 2 hours north of Toronto. His father ran a dry cleaning business. His mother came from a family of Scottish descent.

 He was the second of two children, and by the time he was old enough to sit still, he was already singing in the choir of St. Paul’s United Church. The choir master’s name was Ray Williams. Williams had one instruction that Lightfoot would carry with  him for the next 70 years. He told the boy to sing with emotion, not just accurate, not just clear.

Feeling first. At 12 years old, Gordon won a Kiwanis competition in a category for boys whose voices had not yet changed. The prize was a trip to Toronto to sing on the stage of Massie Hall. the finest concert hall in the country. A 12-year-old boy from Aurelia, a soprano voice, a church trained ear, standing on the very same wooden boards where every serious Canadian musician of the 20th century wanted to stand.

 He would go back to that stage more than 170 times before he was done, more than any other artist in the history of Massie Hall. But that afternoon, he was still a boy, still a soprano voice, and nobody in the audience knew his name yet. If the choir master planted the seed, Los Angeles was where a very ordinary Canadian teenager learned that music was actually a job.

 Number two, the jingle writer who went home. In 1958, at 19 years old, he flew to California. He enrolled at Westlake College of Music in Los Angeles to study jazz composition and orchestration. Almost nobody knows this piece of his history. Long before he became the folk country ballader with the acoustic guitar, Gordon Lightfoot was reading arrangements off a page, writing charts, learning the mechanics of the music business from the inside.

 To pay rent, he  wrote jingles. He sang on demo records. He was in the strictest technical sense a session hired hand. After two years, he did something almost nobody in his position did in 1960. He walked away from Los Angeles. He went home to Toronto and he stayed. He joined the singing swing in 8, a chorus on the CBC television program Country Hoown.

 He worked with Ian and Sylvia Tyson. He hung around the folk clubs of Yorkville. But something else was happening in those clubs that mattered more. He was writing songs, not jingles, not chart arrangements for other people’s records. His own songs, notebooks of them, songs about railway tracks and Lost Love and Northern Rivers and Lake Mist and Long Drives Home.

 He wrote every day in pencil in a tidy, precise hand. And in the next few years, the biggest names in North American folk music were about to notice. Number three, the covers that made him a ghost. By 1964, his songs had escaped his notebook. Ian and Sylvia recorded Early Morning Rain. Then they recorded For Love in Me.

 Peter, Paul, and Mary, the biggest folk act in the United States, heard them and cut both songs themselves. For Love & Me became one of their signature performances. In 1965, Marty Robbins took Ribbon of Darkness to number one on the American Country chart. Gordon Lightfoot was not on any of those records, but every one of them had his name on the label under the words and music by.

 In 1965, Bob Dylan’s manager, Albert Gman, signed him. United Artists gave him a record deal. His debut album, titled Simply Lightfoot, arrived in 1966. And here is the pattern that would haunt his entire career. The songs kept escaping. Elvis Presley recorded Early Morning Rain, not just recorded it, sang it live over and over on the final tour of his life, including his last shows in the summer of 1977.

Lightfoot later said he was proud and that Elvis had related to the song perfectly. Johnny Cash cut Lightfoot songs. Bob Dylan cut one on self-portrait in 1970. Judy Collins, the Chad Mitchell Trio. By the end of the decade, roughly 100 artists had already recorded a Gordon Lightfoot composition. Very few American listeners could tell you what he looked like.

 That was about to change because on New Year’s Day 1967, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation was going to hand him something no other Canadian songwriter would ever be given. Number four, the song that opened a nation. The commission was almost impossible. Canada was turning 100 years old. The CBC wanted one original song that could serve as an anthem for the entire country.

 Not a folk cover, not a patriotic hymn,  a new piece of music that could stand in for a hundred years of national history. They gave the assignment to Gordon Lightfoot.  He wrote it in about 3 days. He called it Canadian Railroad Trilogy. It was 6 and 1/2 minutes long. It was about the men who built the country’s transcontinental railway in the 1800s.

It had a slow, sweeping melody. It named no politicians and celebrated no battles. It was in the strictest sense a song about labor, about what it costs to build a country. It was broadcast to the nation on January 1st, 1967. Johnny Cash heard it. He later called it quote an extremely fine piece of songwriting.

 Cash was not a man who handed out compliments casually. At almost the same moment, the American music industry began quietly asking Lightfoot to move south. Anyone with his catalog and his co-signs would have relocated in a heartbeat. Lightfoot refused. He would tour in the United States on a working visa for the rest of his life, but he refused to live there.

He kept his home in Toronto. He kept his band Canadian. Randy Bachmann later said Lightfoot’s example was the reason he and Burton Cummings stayed in Canada and wrote from their own experience. If he had said yes to Los Angeles, the rest of this story might have been a very different one. Instead, he stayed.

 He wrote and in 1970, everything broke open. Number five, the song about a marriage ending. He wrote it about the woman he was losing. The song was called If You Could Read My Mind. It appeared on his 1970 album, Sitdown Young Stranger. His first marriage  to a Swedish woman named Breitta Olyson was disintegrating around him.

 years of long road tours, years of the pressure that fame puts on a home that a spouse is holding together alone. He sat down and wrote a ballad about what happens when two people stop being able to hear each other. In February 1971, If You Could Read My Mind climbed to number five on the Billboard Hot 100.

 It went to number one in Canada. It sold over a million copies. And it changed everything about how the world heard him because now he was not a ghost songwriter anymore. Now, he was a face and a voice and a signature 12 string guitar. There is a small detail buried in the song’s history that tells you who he was as a man.

 Years later, his daughter Ingred asked him to change one word in the lyric. The original line said, “The feelings that you lack.” She asked him to sing, “We lack.” She wanted her mother spared the sting of a line that publicly assigned all the blame to one side. He honored that change on stage for the rest of his life. Then came 1972 and with no warning at all, the left side of his face went slack.

 It was Belle’s palsy, a partial facial paralysis that has no clear cause and no reliable cure. He kept touring. He kept singing. Slowly, the paralysis lifted. And in the summer of 1974, a much larger wave was about to hit him. Number six, Sundown and the woman he couldn’t shake. On June 29th, 1974, a Gordon Lightfoot song was the number one record in the United States. The song was Sundown.

 It sat at number one on the Billboard Hot 100 for one week. It topped the adult contemporary chart. It topped the Canadian charts. The album of the same name spent two weeks at number one on the Billboard 200. It would be his only number one on the American Hot 100. And behind that song was a relationship that would follow him for the rest of his life.

 He had been involved in the mid 1970s with a former partner, a woman who would years later become tragically connected to another famous entertainer’s death. That is as far as we will go with names out of respect for the people still living. Lightfoot’s own words about her, given in interviews decades later, were characteristically blunt.

 He called her the one woman in his life who had most hurt him. “Sundown,” he said, was about jealousy, about what it feels like to sit in your own home and wait for someone you no longer trust to walk through the door. This was also the era of his hardest drinking. He never hid it. In his authorized biography, he was direct about the personal struggles of the 1970s.

 Struggles he would eventually overcome and stay clean from for the last four decades of his life. Sundown was followed almost immediately by Carefree Highway, which peaked at number 10 in November 1974. Then Rainy Day People in 1975. Five consecutive American hits from an artist most Americans could not have named 2 years earlier.

 Then came a November storm on Lake Superior, and Gordon Lightfoot was about to write the song that would prolong his career in his own estimation by 25 years. Number seven, the One Take. The ship’s name was the Edmund Fitzgerald. She was 729 ft long. On November 9th, 1975, she left Superior, Wisconsin, carrying roughly 26,000 tons of iron ore pellets bound for the mills near Detroit.

 The next evening, a fierce storm crossed Lake Superior. Waves reported at over 30 ft. Around 7:10 in the evening, the captain of the Edund Fitzgerald radioed a nearby ship. His last message was four words. He said, “We are holding our own.” No distress signal followed. The ship simply vanished off radar. All 29 men aboard were lost.

 Lightfoot read about it in a Newsweek article titled The Crulest Month, dated November 24th, 1975. He set the words to a melody he had been carrying in his head since he was 3 and a half years old. An old Irish durge his mother had sung around the house. In December 1975, he brought the finished song into Eastern Sound in Toronto.

 His band gathered to hear it for the first time. The engineer, Kenny Fson, quietly rolled tape as a precaution, just in case they got something they liked on an early run through. Then the band played the song once. Basist Rick Haynes later told Guitar Player magazine that Lightfoot gave him a small nod around the third verse.

 Haynes remembered thinking, “We have never heard this song before.” They spent the next two  weeks trying to record a better take. They could not. The version you know from the radio, the six-minute epic with 14 verses and no chorus and no guitar solo is the very first time those five musicians ever played it together.

Released as a single from his 1976 album Summertime Dream, the Wreck of the Edund Fitzgerald peaked at number two on the Billboard Hot 100 on November 20th, 1976. The song that held it out of number one was Rod Stewart’s Tonight’s the Night. Lightfoot did not seem to mind. He would later say more than once that the Edund Fitzgerald had probably prolonged his career by about 25 years.

 What he did not say, and what would only become clear 35 years later, was that he was already quietly worried about a line in the lyric he might one day owe an apology for. Number eight, the line he changed for 29 men. For decades, the accepted theory about why the Edund Fitzgerald had gone down was human error.

 Specifically, a hatchway that had been left improperly secured. Water had poured in. The ship had lost buoyancy. The crew had contributed to their own deaths. That theory sat inside Lightfoot’s lyric. One of the verses of the original 1976 recording included the line, “At 7 p.m., a main hatchway caved in,” he said. In March 2010, a documentary crew from the History Channel reached out to him.

Their investigation using new underwater evidence and modern hydrodnamic modeling had concluded that the Edmund Fitzgerald had not gone down because of an open hatch. She had likely been overwhelmed by a rogue wave, a single massive swell. No ship of her design could have survived in that seaate.

 In other words, the crew had not made a mistake. Lightfoot listened to the findings. Then he made a decision. He would not alter the copyrighted studio recording. It was in the world. It was history. But from that day forward, every time he performed the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald on stage, he would sing a different line. At 700 p.m.

, it grew dark. It was then, he said. He explained the change in a press statement. He said it finally vindicated and honored not only all of the crew who had lost their lives, but also the family members who had survived them. He had already changed one other lyric in the same song years earlier.

 A parishioner from the Mariners’s Church of Detroit had gently pointed out that Lightfoot had described their sanctuary as a musty old hall. He rewrote the line to say rustic old hall. For nearly 50 years, he had attended memorial services at the Mariners’s Church. He met the crews families in Whitefish Bay. He supported a scholarship at the Great Lakes Maritime Academy.

 When Gordon Lightfoot died on May 1st, 2023, the bell at the Mariners’s Church of Detroit was rung 30 times. 29 strokes for the crew of the Edund Fitzgerald. And one final stroke for the man who made sure the world would never forget them. If a song can outlive the man who wrote it, this one already had. But the man himself had almost been taken from the story 21 years before that bell rang.

 Number nine, the day the artery gave out. September 7th, 2002, Aurelia, Ontario. The same small town where a boy soprano had once sung in a church choir. He was scheduled to play two nights at the Aurelia Opera House. He had finished the first. He was preparing for the second when he suddenly felt what he later described as searing pain in his abdomen.

 He would use in interviews afterward an expression his fans had grown used to. He said he went down like a ton of bricks. An artery had ruptured. Specifically, his abdominal aorta, the main blood vessel running through the torso, had blown open. Most people who experience it never reach a hospital. He was airlifted to the McMaster University Medical Center in Hamilton.

 The surgeons opened him up. He survived the first operation. He would survive three more. Then he entered a coma that lasted 6 weeks. He was given a tracheotomy, a surgical opening cut into the front of his throat for a breathing tube. That tube would permanently alter the vocal cords a nation had grown up listening to.

 The clean boyish tenor of early morning rain and sundown would come back in a lower, rougher sandpaper register. He knew it. His audience knew it. He would later tell Rolling Stone with a cander that startled the interviewer that he was ashamed of how much blood the surgeons had used to keep him alive. He put the figure at 28 units.

 He said softly that it would have been better if he had died. His family had been told to prepare. He came home in December of 2002, 3 months after he collapsed. In July of 2004, he walked out onto the stage at the Maraposa Folk Festival. Yun announced the audience took a second to understand who they were looking at.

Then they stood up. Two years later, in 2006, he had a small stroke that briefly affected two fingers on his right hand, the fretting hand of a guitar player. He practiced until, in his own words, he had come back to about 98%. He kept touring for another 16 years. The voice was different. The hair had gone white.

 The stage banter was shorter, but the song still landed. There would be one final show, and the internet oddly keeps getting it wrong. Number 10, the final show and the day he heard of his own death. In February of 2010, a false rumor spread across the wires that Gordon Lightfoot had died. The source turned out to be a prank phone call to Ronnie Hawkins’s management.

 Someone claiming to be Lightfoot’s grandson had told Hawkins that Gordon was gone. Hawkins passed the news on. Within an hour, it was on Twitter and Canadian television. Lightfoot was at that exact moment driving home from a dental appointment. He heard the news of his own death on his car radio. He picked up his phone. He called Toronto’s CP24 television station.

 He said politely that he was fine, that everything was good, that he had not, in fact, had this much airplay in weeks. He lived 13 more years after that phone call. He kept touring. He shortened his sets to about an hour. In his last two years on the road, he began performing seated. In March of 2020, he released his final studio album.

 It was called Solo, just his voice and his acoustic guitar. No band, no overdubs. The songs on it had actually been written before the aneurysm in 2001 and early 2002. He had rediscovered them and released them as a summing up. On October 30th, 2022, he played what would be his final concert. The venue was not the Falls Casino in Niagara Falls, as many online sources still state.

 The venue was the Club Regent Event Center in Winnipeg, Manitoba. He was 83 years old. He played about an hour. He sat down. He sang the songs the crowd wanted. He said, “Good night.” On April 11th, 2023, he canled a planned North American tour citing health issues. He said he expected to recover. 20 days later, on May 1st, 2023, he died of natural causes at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Center in Toronto.

 He was 84 years old. The Canadian House of Commons observed a moment of silence. Randy Bachmann said Canada had lost a national treasure. Robbie Robertson, who would himself be gone before the year was out, quoted the lyric of rainy day people and left the tribute at that. More than 2,400 people passed through the doors of St.

 Paul’s United Church in Aurelia for his public visitation. The same church where a boy soprano had first learned to sing with emotion. His ashes were buried beside his parents in a cemetery a few blocks from where he was born. Bob Dylan hands out compliments about as often as he hands out interviews. When he does, it counts. He once said that every time he heard a Gordon Lightfoot song, he wished it would last forever.

 He also called Lightfoot a mentor. Neil Young called him a songwriter without parallel. Ronnie Hawkins called him the greatest songwriter in the world. Getty Lee of Rush called him our poet laurate. Elvis Presley recorded him and sang him on the final tour of his life. Johnny Cash called Canadian Railroad Trilogy an extremely fine piece of songwriting.

 He was inducted into four halls of fame. He was made a companion of the Order of Canada, the highest civilian honor his country can bestow. He played Massie Hall in Toronto more than 170 times, more than any other artist in the building’s history. He was nominated for five Grammy awards. He won none of them. He was eligible for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame from the late 1980s onward.

He was never once placed on a ballot. Rolling Stone magazine on the occasion of his death called that omission a raging injustice. He did not seem to mind. Or if he minded, he did not say so. What he did instead was right. Roughly 4 to 500 songs. He recorded more than 200 of them. He toured until 83. He gave the country that raised him an anthem for its 100th birthday, a song about a shipwreck that made a great lake sacred, and a divorce ballad that 50 years later still stops radio listeners cold when it comes on. If you have not

heard the 1976 recording of the Wreck of the Edund Fitzgerald in a while, go find it. Turn it up. Remember as you listen that the version you are hearing is the very first time those musicians ever played it together. If this story moved you, hit like. Tell us in the comments the first Gordon Lightoot song you can remember hearing and who you were with when you heard it.

 Subscribe and turn on notifications. The next singer we cover was called a national treasure in one country and a curiosity in the other. And what he chose to do with that gap is a story you will not have heard before. Until then, peace, love, and the northern sound. We will see you in the next