JOIN USEssential playlist of Gordon Lightfoot
In an expansive career that drew from Greenwich Village folk and Laurel Canyon pop, Gordon Meredith Lightfoot Jr, who died at 84 recently, was embraced by a diverse group of musicians: Bob Dylan, Elvis Presley, Duran Duran, Lou Rawls and The Replacements.
He sang in a rueful baritone full of tenacity, and specialised in songs that dwelled on solitude, or recounted unhappy relationships, in grounded language that drew on folk and blues modes.
Lightfoot was one of the most successful recording artistes of the 1970s. “Lightfoot’s is the voice of the romantic. For him perfection is always in view and always slipping from his grasp,” American journalist Geoffrey Stokes wrote in 1974.
A throwback to five of his biggest hits:
For lovin’ me (1966): It’s pushed along by his stout acoustic guitar strumming and David Rea’s sleek fingerpicking accents, which reinforce the lyrics’ hauteur. ‘Everything you have is gone’, Lightfoot tells the woman he’s leaving. ‘That’s what you get for lovin’ me’, he continues. Her broken heart will eventually mend, he suggests as he sings ‘I just might pass this way again’. He later felt embarrassment about the song, and said, “I didn’t know what chauvinism was.”
Black day in July (1968): The controversial track describes the July 1967 uprisings in Detroit in the US when Black residents protested police abuse. The song is full of irony, scorn and bafflement (‘The soul of Motor City is feared across the land’) and most radio stations refused to play it.
If you could read my mind (1970): Lightfoot’s commercial breakthrough is also his masterpiece. The lyrics, inspired by his impending divorce, range from poetic to stark, until he reaches the stoic summary: ‘Stories always end’. The melody inspired Duran Duran’s ‘Save a Prayer’, and the song has been covered by a who’s who of singers, including Barbra Streisand, Johnny Cash and Neil Young — and, almost, by Frank Sinatra, who tried to record it but gave up, declaring it “too long”.
Rainy day people (1975): The chords and lyrics call to mind Jimmy Webb, as Lightfoot, with his usual precise elocution, celebrates the way loyal friendships give succour to “high-stepping strutters who land in the gutters.”
The wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald (1976): His best-known song is one of the most unlikely pop hits: a six-and-a-half minute folk ballad about a freighter that sank in Lake Superior in north America a year earlier, killing 29 crew members. Rock band NRBQ sometimes played a slow, out-of-tune cover of the song, and if the audience didn’t like it, it would play it a second time as well.