The first record I ever bought was Gordon Lightfoot’s “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald”. It was 1976, I was 12 years old, and the song was everywhere.
I listened to the song again this evening, May 1, just hours after learning that Lightfoot had passed away at age 84. I’ve been listening to a lot of Lightfoot tonight, one song after the the other on YouTube, and what amazes me — apart from Lightfoot’s singular genius — is how familiar all the songs are, even ones that I have almost certainly not heard for four or more decades.
Yet here I am, recognizing chord changes and recalling lyrics of songs I last heard when Richard Nixon was president with an astounding effortlessness. It shows how omnipresent Lightfoot’s music has been for decades, how much a part of this country’s fabric he was and is and probably always shall be.
I mentioned Lightfoot’s genius, and I do not use that word lightly. Many people are poets, or lyricists, or songwriters, or musicians, or singers, but Lightfoot was all these things. More than that, he seemed to have a direct line to the heart and soul of this country, a way of tapping into something primal and only fleetingly seen or heard or sensed, then distilling it into a few perfect lines.
Many will hold up “Canadian Railroad Trilogy” as the Lightfoot song that exemplifies this best, and it’s hard to argue. Indeed, a strong case could be made for either this song or Stan Rogers’ “Northwest Passage” as the greatest song ever written about Canada. Even songs that make no mention whatever of the country seem uniquely Canadian. Take “Did She Mention My Name”, in which someone far his home town runs into someone he knows and tries to find out if a long-ago love still speaks of him.
The song aches with longing, but is interspersed with casual lines designed to hide it, and one suspects that only a Canadian could have written it. Is the ice still on the river? Is the landlord is still a loser? Does the roof still leak when the late snow turns to rain? “Is the home team still on fire, do they still win all the games / And by the way, did she mention my name?”
Writing anything is hard, but poets have it hardest of all, forced to make every word, every syllable count. Lightfoot managed it, time and time again. Consider these lines, from “Edmund Fitzgerald”: “Does anyone know where the love of God goes / When the waves turn the minutes to hours.” Or these lines, from “Race Among the Ruins”: “So take the best of all that’s left / You know this cannot last / Even though your mother was your maker / From her apron strings you pass.” Or the entirety of “Summer Side of Life” and “Don Quixote”, which are beautiful poems and even more sublime pieces of music.
As I listen to the songs, I find that they are at once both ancient and newly-learned. The lyrics which I first heard decades ago, when I was careless of time, and life stretched ahead of me along roads I could not even imagine, much less plan for, take on new meaning. Great art is like that, or should be: it stays the same yet somehow changes, deepens, takes on new and different meanings as we grow older and learn more.
Gordon Lightfoot created great art, but was clever enough to disguise it so that it could pass into the world and be heard by people who thought they were listening to a catchy song, nothing more. Judging by the outpouring of emotion that has greeted news of his passing, his work touched many people, spoke to them in ways that most songwriters can only dream of. There are multiple iterations of “His music was the soundtrack of my life/my early years/a particular time or place or event.” We have lost the man, but his music will live on, a lasting and fitting tribute to one of the country’s greatest geniuses.
editorial@accjournal.ca
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