Teh One Who Knocks
11-09-2015, 12:26 PM
By Bill Glauber of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
http://i.imgur.com/aPOjie4.jpg
Singer-songwriter Gordon Lightfoot's "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald" speaks of tragedy and sustains memory in a way no journalistic account could.
Yet it was a Newsweek magazine article of the November 1975 disaster that inspired Lightfoot to write the song that would become a classic. The 40th anniversary of the tragedy is Tuesday.
To Lightfoot, the article "was too short, too brief" — a final item in a roundup of national news. A few months after reading it, he began to work on his song, with an opening lyric that played off the first line of the magazine piece: "According to a legend of the Chippewa tribe, the lake they once called Gitche Gumee "never gives up her dead."
"The story of the sinking of the Fitzgerald stayed with me in a funny kind of a way, all by itself," he said in a Journal Sentinel interview last week before performing at Milwaukee's Pabst Theater. "I wasn't forgetting about it. I knew everyone had forgotten about it, but I knew I hadn't forgotten it."
Lightfoot was driven by a desire to memorialize the tragedy. At the time, he "had some chords and a melody I had been thinking about and didn't know where to direct it."
"It is a very good piece of work, I do believe," Lightfoot said. "It's just one of those songs that just stands the test of time and it's about something that, of course, would be forgotten very shortly thereafter, which is one of the reasons I wrote the song in the first place. I didn't want it to be forgotten."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vST6hVRj2A
As he wrote the song, Lightfoot said, he "tried to be as accurate as possible." He took some license to make the song work. The ship didn't "head fully loaded for Cleveland;" it was bound for a steel mill near Detroit. The "old cook" in the song is actually 43-year-old Allen Kalmon of Wisconsin, the second cook, who filled in for the first cook, who was sick. And the Maritime Sailor's Cathedral is actually the Mariners' Church of Detroit.
Still, the song is remarkably detailed and on target, even to the point that five years ago Lightfoot changed the line about "a main hatchway caved in." After the wreck, a U.S. Coast Guard report concluded that ineffective hatch closures likely caused the sinking, but that has long been in dispute, and the singer decided to remove the implication that human error played a role.
Over the years, Lightfoot has gotten to know some of the loved ones of those who died, and has attended memorial services with them. It reinforced to him that while he had written a memorable song, it was about real grief and loss.
"There is a responsibility," he said.
The song was released in 1976 on Lightfoot's "Summertime Dream" album. The song was a number one hit in Canada, and reached number two in the United States. The album went platinum — meaning it sold at least 1 million copies — in both countries.
He showed his appreciation for the song's success by establishing a scholarship fund for maritime students at Northwestern Michigan College.
"It still runs to this day," he said.
http://i.imgur.com/aPOjie4.jpg
Singer-songwriter Gordon Lightfoot's "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald" speaks of tragedy and sustains memory in a way no journalistic account could.
Yet it was a Newsweek magazine article of the November 1975 disaster that inspired Lightfoot to write the song that would become a classic. The 40th anniversary of the tragedy is Tuesday.
To Lightfoot, the article "was too short, too brief" — a final item in a roundup of national news. A few months after reading it, he began to work on his song, with an opening lyric that played off the first line of the magazine piece: "According to a legend of the Chippewa tribe, the lake they once called Gitche Gumee "never gives up her dead."
"The story of the sinking of the Fitzgerald stayed with me in a funny kind of a way, all by itself," he said in a Journal Sentinel interview last week before performing at Milwaukee's Pabst Theater. "I wasn't forgetting about it. I knew everyone had forgotten about it, but I knew I hadn't forgotten it."
Lightfoot was driven by a desire to memorialize the tragedy. At the time, he "had some chords and a melody I had been thinking about and didn't know where to direct it."
"It is a very good piece of work, I do believe," Lightfoot said. "It's just one of those songs that just stands the test of time and it's about something that, of course, would be forgotten very shortly thereafter, which is one of the reasons I wrote the song in the first place. I didn't want it to be forgotten."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vST6hVRj2A
As he wrote the song, Lightfoot said, he "tried to be as accurate as possible." He took some license to make the song work. The ship didn't "head fully loaded for Cleveland;" it was bound for a steel mill near Detroit. The "old cook" in the song is actually 43-year-old Allen Kalmon of Wisconsin, the second cook, who filled in for the first cook, who was sick. And the Maritime Sailor's Cathedral is actually the Mariners' Church of Detroit.
Still, the song is remarkably detailed and on target, even to the point that five years ago Lightfoot changed the line about "a main hatchway caved in." After the wreck, a U.S. Coast Guard report concluded that ineffective hatch closures likely caused the sinking, but that has long been in dispute, and the singer decided to remove the implication that human error played a role.
Over the years, Lightfoot has gotten to know some of the loved ones of those who died, and has attended memorial services with them. It reinforced to him that while he had written a memorable song, it was about real grief and loss.
"There is a responsibility," he said.
The song was released in 1976 on Lightfoot's "Summertime Dream" album. The song was a number one hit in Canada, and reached number two in the United States. The album went platinum — meaning it sold at least 1 million copies — in both countries.
He showed his appreciation for the song's success by establishing a scholarship fund for maritime students at Northwestern Michigan College.
"It still runs to this day," he said.