Michiganders pay tribute to Gordon Lightfoot, his iconic ‘Wreck of the Fitzgerald’ song

Michiganders remembered Gordon Lightfoot, a Canadian folk singer who died Monday at 84 and who told stories through song, one of the best known being “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” an unlikely 1976 hit about a freighter that sank in a violent storm.

Michiganders recalled Tuesday on social media and in conversation what Lightfoot, and his songs, meant to them.

“If it wasn’t for him, and it wasn’t for his song, the awareness of the Fitzgerald wouldn’t be what it is now,” Bruce Lynn, the executive director of the Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum in Whitefish Point, said Tuesday morning. “It’s the No. 1 reason why people come up to the museum.”

Lynn — who said he grew up listening to Lightfoot’s songs, saw him perform, and met him at the museum in 2015 — praised Lightfoot for helping others to understand a slice of Michigan, and American history, and plans to find a way to memorialize and honor him.

Lightfoot, who sailed on the Great Lakes, reportedly read about the sinking in a Newsweek magazine article, “The Cruelest Month,” which was about how the Fitzgerald sank on Nov. 10, 1975. The article’s title was an allusion to T.S. Eliot’s poem “The Waste Land,” and Lightfoot turned the first few lines into a song.

The singer later said it was one of his proudest works.

More: The 5 best Gordon Lightfoot songs from the late singer-songwriter’s amazing career

Social media tributes

The song faithfully recounts the freighter’s tragic, final voyage as it got caught in a storm while heading to Detroit. Although, in one of the few details that the song got wrong, it noted instead that the ship was bound “fully loaded for Cleveland.”

“The legend lives on from the Chippewa on down / Of the big lake they called Gitche Gumee / The lake, it is said, never gives up her dead / When the skies of November turn gloomy,” the song begins. “With a load of iron ore twenty-six thousand tons more / Than the Edmund Fitzgerald weighed empty / That good ship and true was a bone to be chewed / When the gales of November came early.”

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It quickly became popular.

The song — more than six minutes, about twice as long as most pop tunes — was “an unlikely hit” and “one of the top records on AM radio,” a Free Press report published on Sept. 5, 1976, said. Yet, as a result of the one song that listeners wanted to hear over and over, the album was “No. 1 in Great Lakes cities” and released as a single.

Stories about the Great Lakes freighter Edmund Fitzgerald were on the front page of Detroit Free Press’ Nov. 12, 1975 edition. The ship disappeared on Nov. 10 on Lake Superior and was later found hundreds of feet underwater. There were no survivors reported.

One father noted on social media early Tuesday that if not for Lightfoot neither of his daughters would remember the Fitz each November, and recalled the many road trips they took “singing together every word” of Lightfoot’s song, even if a few things in it weren’t quite right.

Great Lakes awareness

Others said Lightfoot was their favorite singer. He captured deep emotions and brought stories to life. One fan recalled meeting the celebrity, who tended to shun the spotlight, at the Royal Oak Music Theater and other venues.

One Michigander posted on Facebook that Lightfoot’s death made her sad, “mostly because a teenaged boyfriend once sang his songs to me.”

Others said they associated Lightfoot with loved ones who also sang his songs — or had died too soon.

A Coast Guard report in 1977 said the cause of the sinking could not be determined conclusively, but noted that “the most probable cause” was the “loss of buoyancy and stability resulting from massive flooding of the cargo hold,” according to the Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum in Whitefish Point.

A 1959 file photo shows the Great Lakes freighter Edmund Fitzgerald, which disappeared Nov. 10, 1975, in a storm on Lake Superior. The Great Lakes have claimed some 6,000 ships since European explorers began navigating the waters in the 1600s, but few have captured the public’s imagination as has the Edmund Fitzgerald.

And perhaps more than anything else, the museum’s executive director added, Lightfoot’s song helped raised awareness about the dangers of sailing and the Great Lakes, the planet’s largest group of freshwater lakes. There are, he explained, more than 6,000 shipwrecks on the Great Lakes.

Lightfoot’s song references the landmark Mariners’ Church of Detroit, calling it the “maritime sailors’ cathedral.” And it memorializes the lost crew: “The church bell chimed ’til it rang twenty-nine times / For each man on the Edmund Fitzgerald.”

But perhaps why the song has endured for so long is that it’s also a ballad honoring lost sailors everywhere.

Contact Frank Witsil: 313-222-5022 or fwitsil@freepress.com.

This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Gordon Lightfoot and ‘Edmund Fitzgerald’ song loved by Michiganders