Gordon Lightfoot

From Great Lakes Wiki

History	Customs & Traditions	Visual Arts	Literature & Poetry	Music

 

 

By Carol Navarro

Gordon Lightfoot is a Canadian singer/songwriter who was born on November 17, 1938 in Orillia, Ontario, 80 miles northwest of Toronto, which is where he lives now.

If there is a single musician who is recognized for capturing images and the force of the Great Lakes, it is Gordon Lightfoot. He has survived the era of 'folk' music, surpassed the 'singer-songwriter' image and is now immortalized by his loyal and three-generation fan base. After over 40 years of Lightfoot music, he still fills concert halls throughout the United States and Canada. And on those tours, he brings a band that has been with him a good part of that life-time: Rick Haynes, bass; Terry Clements, guitar; Barry Keane, percussion; Mike Heffernan, keyboards.

As well as his long manager,Barry Harvey,he certainly deserves a loyal mention. Sadly,Barry Harvey passed away December 4th,2007 at the age of 56.

His love for the Great Lakes is the focus of many of his songs. He's a sailor and knows the water as well as the land. In "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald" Lightfoot is able to transport the listener onto that cargo ship and experience the wrath of Lake Superior on the fateful night when old timers who live in the Whitefish Bay area said, “a ship’s gonna go down tonight.” He brings images alive and the epic unfolds in a six-minute song:

"Lake Huron rolls, Superior sings in the rooms of her ice-water mansion.
Old Michigan steams like a young man's dreams;
The islands and bays are for sportsmen.
And farther below Lake Ontario takes in what Lake Erie can send her..."

He is gift for words conjure up images of a northern scene from the Georgian Bay region...

"Seven Islands to the high side of the bay across the bay, To the sunset, through the blue light of a fiery autumn haze..., We went walking on the hillside of the bay on a chilly morn, And we saw how leaves had fallen on the beds where trees are born..." Lyrics from Seven Island Suite.

Winters in the Great Lakes region are known as a time for adapting to the changes in seasons. Lightfoot's talent is romanticizing hardships. Song for a Winter's Night is a good example of his lyrical talents, especially since he claims that he wrote this song in July:

"The lamp is burning low upon my table top The snow is softly falling The air is still in the silence of my room I hear your voice softly calling If I could only have you near To breathe a sigh or two I would be happy just to hold the hands I love On this winter night with you The fire is dying now, my lamp is growing dim The shades of night are lifting The morning light steals across my windowpane Where webs of snow are drifting..."

Like most singer-songwriters, he is not without his political side. He responded to the 1967 Detroit riots with Black Day in July and dared to shame his primarily white audience by performing the song in Detroit:

"And the soul of Motor City is bared across the land,

As the book of law and order is taken in the hands,

Of the sons of the fathers who were carried to this land''

And you read your morning paper and you sip your cup of tea

And you wonder just in passing, is it him or is it me...?

And you say how did it happen and you say how did it start?

Why can't we all be brothers, why can't we live in peace?

But the hands of the have-nots keep falling out of reach"

The Vietnam Era also prompted Lightfoot to express, in a poetic tragedy form, what it was like for a young man in the prime of life before he left for war and then what's left of him returning home, after the horrors of war in The Summer Side of Life Many of these young men, like the one in this song, were left with just a shell of a soul. This song is timeless as we consider what new generation of tragic souls are being created in the present Iraq War:

"He came down through fields of green

On the summer side of life;

His love was ripe.

There were no illusions

On the summer side of life,

Only tenderness.

And if you saw him now,

You'd wonder why he would cry,

The whole day long"

When asked how and where he's able to pull the words out and put down on paper Lightfoot once replied, "I don't know, they just come to me."

More Lightfoot