Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald

(Editor's Note: The following was written during that brief window on Thursday afternoon when it appeared that Gordon Lightfoot had actually passed away. Happily that proved to be a Twitteriffic over-exaggeration – the man was in his dentist's chair when the "news" broke – but we present it unedited as a heartfelt and poignant reflection on what he means to music fans everywhere.)

Gordie. Our man of the mountain, our homie who stayed home, our Early Morning Rain and our Sundown, our Wreck of the Working Canadian. Rest in Peace and Joy, my heroic brother.

The Master of Light wove many a colourful quilt, and sang with an instantly recognizable tenor that voiced the prairies and the big skies and the rugged life of plaid-shirted snow-shoveling Canadians from the Maritimes to the Rockies.  He took us away without ever leaving us.

But now he has sailed over the horizon — after influencing every ship captain who came after him and took to the musical seas from our tiny northern port.   Gordie was our Magellan who first charted transcendence.  Who first made it to the other side of the treacherous river, and who wrote about the peril in his epic Wreck of The Edmund Fitzgerald.

A song that made Chippewa and Lake Gitchie Gumee famous, a song heard and sung around the planet about the most Canadian of Great Lakes, the bitter and deadly Superior when the gales of November come slashing.  There are few if any early versions of Gordie doing his classic, but as his voice and stage stamina lessened over the years, here he is in remarkably fine form, full of breath, voice, and a dense burning fire.

“Edmund Fitzgerald” is Canada’s “Moby Dick” — man against nature — that so many Canadians live with.  We know death by the elements and don’t need to see movies about Perfect Storms.  We live them every winter.   And here is the most Canadian of voices plaintively singing the hope, the strength, the loss, the honour and the eternity of Canadians.

In the middle of hosting an Olympics, Canada lost a great Gold Medalist.

— Brian Hassett