On “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald”

Gordon Lightfoot (1938-2023) died on May Day of this year.

Sometimes I’m ready and able to do a rapid response tribute to somebody when they suddenly pass away (much as Lightfoot did for a certain Great Lakes freighter), but in Lightfoot’s case I wanted to give the matter a little thought if I was to mark his passing at all. I never heard most of his music. I never listened to his LPs, I only knew a handful of his songs. I had second-hand 45s of two of his hit singles when I was a kid, the melancholy, beautiful “If You Could Read My Mind” (1970), and the jaunty but weirdly ominous “Sundown” (1974). The somewhat lesser “Carefree Highway” (1974) and “Rainy Day People” (1975) I knew from the radio, but had to remind myself how their tunes went went right now by looking them up on Youtube. And then there was his 1966 “Early Morning Rain”, which had been covered by artists like Bob Dylan and Peter, Paul and Mary.

Anyway, I quickly realized there was one song I could write about with real enthusiasm and that’s of course “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” (1976). It’s based on a real event. On November 10, 1975, the SS Edmund Fitzgerald, the largest and proudest freighter on the Great Lakes sank without warning in a serious squall, with all 29 hands lost. To this day no one knows precisely what happened, though it’s plain that her circumstances in the last minutes were dire: waves as high as 35 feet, damage to the vessel, loss of critical navigational functions. When they found her at the bottom of Lake Superior several days later, she had been broken in two, her load of iron ore scattered around the lake bed. Not a single body was ever recovered.

There’s something really freaky about the mysteries that go with foundered ships. Some people (I’m one of them) obsess about such disasters. This blog has an entire section devoted to the Titanic sinking; my second favorite movie of all time is this one. I picture the actual people aboard the doomed vessels. It’s not an abstraction to me. I grew up in a fishing village. My dad worked in a shipyard. One of my mom’s ancestors was a boat captain who’s buried at Sailor’s Snug Harbor on Staten Island. My grandfather and brother and father-in-law were in the Navy. An uncle was in the coast guard. During the pandemic I found myself binge-watching the Smithsonian TV show Disasters at Sea, all three seasons, in about a week, like eating popcorn. And I’m sure I’m not the slightest bit unique.

At all events, inspired by news accounts at the time, Lightfoot immediately set about commemorating the Edmund Fitzgerald event in song and recorded it just a few weeks later. It’s a remarkable achievement, not just his best, most haunting song, but — incredibly — it went all the way to #2 on the American pop charts. I’ll ask you to contemplate that for a second. This was in 1976: when the hit records were all by the likes of K.C. and the Sunshine Band, Elton John,The Bee Gees, Kiss. This guy releases a folk ballad commemorating a sea disaster, a form as old and as basic as humankind itself. This is a song that uses the place name Gitche Gumee — unironically — in a lyric, perhaps for the first time since Longfellow’s “Song of Hiawatha”. Yes, folk music had experienced a huge revival (Lightfoot had been part of that boom) but it had peaked about a decade earlier. It was over. Yet radio stations played the hell out of this tune.

Maybe the country was in a mood for mourning. We’d just lost our first war, and the President had recently resigned in disgrace. We’d stopped going to the moon. New York was nearly bankrupt, the cities were all on fire. It was a time when America’s ostensibly perpetual upward trajectory no longer seemed foreordained. Plenty of people seemed inclined to dance it off at this historical moment. Yet this one song was powerful enough to make people stop, take off their hats, and (if unconsciously) grieve. I love that Lightfoot was inspired to write the song, was audacious enough to follow through, and did such a great job with its execution. It’s the sort of thing anyone might have done a thousand years ago…or a hundred…but few were doing anymore. And now he knows the whereabouts of those 29, because he’s gone there himself.

For some related posts: see my visit to the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy Museum, and my tour of a genuine World War II Liberty Ship.

Also: Today (November 10) at 4:30 Central Time, (5:30 Eastern) the Minnesota Historical Society will live stream their annual tribute to the lost crew of the Edmund Fitzgerald. It will livestream on the MNHS YouTube channel and on the Split Rock Lighthouse Facebook page.