A HOMAGE TO LIGHTFOOT
Apart from the inevitable aches and pains, one of the drawbacks to aging is that you think the singers who were your soundtrack are forever the age they were when you first heard them, and only really accept that they’re not when they die. And so it was this week with Gordon Lightfoot.
I’m willing to bet a case of beer that pretty much every Canadian of my generation can identify a Lightfoot song by the opening chords.
Each one of them sparks a memory, and many carry a personal meaning.
Canadians tend to be intensely, if restrainedly, proud of being so, although we generally have difficulty articulating the what and why of our nationalism.
“Canadian Railroad Trilogy”, which most of us just call “Trilogy”, probably sums it up better than anything. It’s practically our national anthem, after all.
It resonates with me not least because I grew up around and worked on trains, and laboured at drilling and blasting the granite that forms the Canadian Shield. It was my ‘lived version’ of the line: “We are the navvies who work upon the railway/swingin’ our hammers in the bright blazing sun.”
I can sing (tunelessly) “Trilogy” and many more Lightfoot songs word for word from memory, and those I can’t remember perfectly, I can sing along with, only a word or two behind, so close that in my head I’m in perfect sync.
I can do the same with Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen songs, and, odd as it may seem, ABBA and even a few Bee Gees, but nowhere even close to the number of Lightfoot’s that I remember.
A lot of them were embedded during my student days in Montreal, when many a Saturday night was spent with friends in somebody’s basement.
One of our number played great twelve string guitar. There were a couple of six string strummers and a banjo picker. Another had a “gut bucket”, which is a metal wash tub with a broken ski pole attached by a single cord, to pluck bass.
Everybody chipped in whatever they could for a couple of ‘two-fours’ (a case of 24) of Molson Canadian, and what more did we need?
We paid homage to other folk singers, but mostly, we sang Lightfoot.
ONE OF “US”
The music apart, what made Lightfoot “a national treasure” and “a Canadian icon” was that while a host of American singers covered his songs, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, and four-fifths of “The Band”, among other Canadians, migrated to the U.S. to make their names and fortunes; Lightfoot “stayed home”, both literally and in his music.
Can the lines“Is the home team still on fire/Do they still win all the games” from “Did She Mention My Name”, be about anything but small-town hockey?
“Mountains and Marian” takes you a thousand miles in two lines: “And the prairie towns go sailing by, Saskatchewan there’s mud in your eye/I’m leaving you behind”.
Whenever I think back on driving from Toronto to the northwest corner of British Columbia to start my first full-time job, the endlessly straight “ribbon of highway” from Manitoba to the Rockies brings back a line from “Crossroads”: “And on the golden prairie I rode the big combines.”
All of that may come across as slightly jingoistic. It isn’t meant to, but if so, so be it.
Every person, every nation and indeed ethnicity has songs they would and can say represent who and what they are.
Gordon Lightfoot can lay serious claim to having written the ones for my generation of Canadians. The only lines we don’t want to take to heart are from “Cold on the Shoulder”:
“And you know that we get
A little older every day”.
Comments are welcomed. Click CONTACT on the site header.
To receive e‑mail alerts to new posts, Click SIGN-UP on the header.
11 thoughts on “A HOMAGE TO LIGHTFOOT”
Very moving tribute!
Before my Canadian citizenship I lived as a Landed Immigrant in P.E.I. for several years in the ‘70s. A few years back I was visiting there buying something at the local liquor store. The cashier asked me if I was Don McGuire. On answering yes, she said you might not remember this, but back in the ‘70s you used to invite a bunch of us over to your place to listen to the latest Gordon Lightfoot album. I’d forgotten that, but remember when that was a think & Lightfoot songs were easy to sing along with.
So well done this reflective piece about Gordy. Canada is a vast country yet one-tenth the population of the US. Due primarily to climate, most of its citizens gather along the US-Canadian border. We get bombarded by US culture, yet we contribute much back (actors, singers, writers, comics, philosophers) larger than our population. I think there’s a reason (beyond how you put it so well in the column) that Lightfoot has connected deeply to Americans, is that we’re a younger country by about 100 years. So the purity of Gordon’s storytelling is OF Canada, but also an earlier US (railroad building, shipwrecks). The first time I heard Gordon’s voice (while in the States) I marvelled at how pure a folk sound it was, yet with orchestra behind him it wasn’t hokey. The music plus the amazing lyrical poetry was descriptive and classic in a traditional sense. Listening to his music melts the borders: both of nations, genders, demographics. It just doesn’t get any better! In his house once, post his concert in downtown Toronto, he softly played “Beautiful” for his girlfriend sitting next to him. When finished he asked me how I felt about it. Although new at the time, I told him it felt like your favourite pair of shoes or best gloves that fit perfectly the first time you wore them; you could swear they’d been with you forever; likewise that song and his music, were “home” in the heart.
gordon lightfoot was a terrific singer, writer,
and musician…
his six-minute musical documentary about
the Edmund Fitzgerald hooked me…
we also heard a lot of “carefree highway” and
“sundown” in the states…enough that I bought
his albums and discovered much of his best
ballads never were heard by American ears…
what a shame…
Gord holds a very special place in my heart, and it may surprise you to learn it all began for me in Cleveland. And it’s not because he wrote the beautiful “Song for a Winter’s Night” during an August thunderstorm in a Cleveland hotel room.
It began in September, 1975. I was beginning a job at an all-news radio station in Cleveland, and was moving into a high rise apartment building a block from my station and overlooking Lake Erie.
As I finished arranging the furniture, I paused to look out my 22nd floor window, and admire my view of the lake. The afternoon sun was at an angle where, as it reflected off the water, it bounced seemingly right into my eyes. I had to squint to see what was out there.
To my far right, at the dock, was the longest ship I had ever seen. It was long, low to the water, and impossibly red. It seemed to stretch halfway to Toronto. I learned it was an ore carrier. The Edmund Fitzgerald. The sun shone so brightly against the water, I could barely make it out, and I only saw her a few times after that, as she spent most of her time going back and forth, sailing, carrying ore from the ports of Lake Superior to the manufacturing centers of the upper midwest.
One early morning, ten weeks after my first glimpse of the big red boat, I walked in darkness the block and a half into work to prepare my morning drive shift. As I entered the newsroom, a colleague thundered, “have you heard? The Eddie Fitz is missing!”
Later that morning, when we were speculating about recovery, my colleague Brian Hodgkinson told me “Lake Superior doesn’t give up her dead. The water is too cold down there and the bodies don’t decompose.” “Hodge,” a tall, dapper Canadian with a fantastic deep baritone radio voice, would be my teacher, instructing me on the history, and the ways and traditions of the Lake.
A former RCAF pilot and POW (his Spitfire was shot down and he was captured, and helped plan the Great Escape from his POW camp), he lived on a houseboat on the lake.
As the hours turned to days and weeks, we worked the phones at our station, calling other radio stations in Sault Sainte Marie and Detroit for the sounds of bells ringing at the two Saults and at the Mariner’s Church. Many of the 29 lost on the Eddie Fitz were from the Cleveland area, and we covered local memorials. And, of course, we covered the investigations and studies.
Months later, when I first heard Gord’s ballad on the radio, I savored every word. “Yes,” I said to myself, upon hearing each detail. I was as though he had been with me for every step, and every word of his was true. Every. Single. Word. As I listened, I relived it all.
It was the Edmund Fitzgerald that drew to me discover the full brilliance of Gordon Lightfoot and to a profound appreciation of his Canadian roots.
Canada has contributed so much to our music, and so many Canadian artists have become part of our shared culture. You’ll find a lot of them in LA, New York, or Chicago. But Gord stayed home.
Like another Gord — Gord Downie of the Tragically Hip — he told the stories of HIS land, his people, and proudly sang of them. He gave them a deeper sense of pride and identity, and gave the rest of us an appreciation that Canada is much more than just Uncle Sam’s northern suburb.
One of my fellow Western Pennsylvania heroes, Arnold Palmer, told his 50th high school reunion class that “your home town isn’t just where you’re from, it’s who you are.”
To that end, Gordon Lightfoot wasn’t just from Orillia, Ontario, Canada. He was Canada. He was Ontario. He was Orillia. As one who takes pride from the American side, I understand why Canadians loved him so and have a very special place in their hearts for their Gord.
That’s a great post. Thank you for visiting my perch.
Her eyes were bathed in starlight
And her hair hung long
And if you saw them now
You’d wonder why they would cry
The whole day long
He had a distinctive voice both in his poetic stories and in the way he sang them. He was popular with those of us in that slice of the boomer generation inching our way into adulthood. Or toward Vietnam. His death is terrible news.
what’s really gratifying is how many american perch readers have commente. good to know gord touched so many.
Before starting college in the fall of 1968 I had the exceptional good fortune to see him in person at the Troubadour in West Hollywood. His artistry mesmerized the audience and undoubtedly many Los Angelenos left with a newly found appreciation of such a gifted singer / songwriter. Not only did he perform his own music, but interpreted those of Phil Ochs, “the Crucifixion” and “Pleasures of the Harbor” in a stunning melodious way that Ochs could never have done. A consummate artist and storyteller. Thanks for that tribute Pizzey!
Well done Pizz. It was ” a magnificent outpouring of that old familiar story…” that we “don’t know what we’ve got till it’s gone”. With apologies to two of Canada’s great troubadours.
Gord was indeed the sound track of our youth. I can remember a fellow student rushing into the library at Clarke Road with the latest Lightfoot album and demanding that the librarian, (who had more in common with Guy Lombardo than Lighfoot), play it over the PA. She did reluctantly and we savoured every word and by the third playing were singing the choruses ‑and still are.
A few days ago we visited our daughter in Orillia and went by the statue of Gordon in front of the opera house. It was festooned with flowers by the grateful people of his home town. Touching.
One last thing. When Tim and I hitch hiked across Canada from London to Victoria after grade thirteen graduation, we often spent many hours…“standing on the broad highway, will you give a ride”… We filled the time with song. I was good at the tunes and Tim had an uncanny memory for all the words to the songs so prompted me when I faltered. We “sang up every song we ever knew” from the Lightfoot collection.
The Trilogy was my favourite but there were so many close seconds.
Anyway Allen you have kindled some great memories and from the wonderful and insightful comments have struck a Gord chord within us all.
Thank you.
And by the way…did she mention my name?
I think she did mention it…but this is potentially a family blog, so we’ll leave it at that