Gordon Lightfoot Book, Music and More!

Canadian musicians have always flocked to New York, drawn like moths to the bright lights of the city that never sleeps. Dreams of a breakthrough in New York have inspired artists ever since Toronto vocal groups the Crew-Cuts, the Four Lads and the Diamonds all had success there, followed by Ottawa teenager Paul Anka, who ventured to the Big Apple in 1957 and scored a number one hit with "Diana," his lovestruck ode to a former babysitter. The steady stream continued during the folk boom. In November, 1965, Ian & Sylvia performed at New York's prestigious Philharmonic Hall while Gordon Lightfoot played a few days later just down Broadway Avenue at the Town Hall. Both folk acts became regu...

Gordon Lightfoot's music has always been about more than just the man and his songs. Beginning in 1965, all of Lighfoot's performances and recordings included regular band members. The first two musicians to join him were guitarist Red Shea and bassist John Stockfish. Throughout the rest of the '60s and into the '70s, Shea and Stockfish each provided key elements to the Lightfoot sound. But who were they, and where did they come from? Red Shea was born Laurice Milton Pouliot in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan. Red had a checkered past, having hopped freight trains and worked in a traveling carnival. He'd even done a stint in prison. Looking to break into show business, he ventured east with his ...

Few artists have seen their songs covered more than Gordon Lightfoot. But usually, it's the legendary singer-songwriter's tales of love and loss, of broken hearts and promises, that get reinterpreted. Rarely are his story songs offered a new spin by other performers. Now Canada's veteran punk-hard rock band Headstones have served up a feisty take on Lightfoot's famous shipwreck song. Over a driving beat and slashing guitars, Headstones frontman Hugh Dillon delivers an edgy account of the harrowing night that the S.S. Edmund Fitzgerald sank on "the big lake they call Gitchie Gumee." The video of the song shows Dillon alone on a frozen lake and later the band performing on a barren windswept l...

Gordon Lightfoot has always been fascinated by big mechanical things like trains and boats and planes, and man’s relationship to them. Three of his most famous songs, “Early Morning Rain,” “Canadian Railroad Trilogy” and “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” deal in the romance and tragedy of human interaction with the machinery of those forms of transportation. Personal and poetic, “Early Morning Rain” expressed a palpable longing while expertly contrasting the rural past and urban present in one brilliant line about freight trains and jet planes. Lightfoot placed himself directly in the story, summoning his own experience of travel and homesickness for inspiration. His memories of big 707s...

Gordon Lightfoot has had some remarkable artists record his songs. Elvis Presley, Judy Collins and Bob Dylan have all lent their distinctive voices to “Early Morning Rain” and Barbara Streisand, Johnny Cash and Diana Krall have each interpreted “If You Could Read My Mind.” “Sundown,” meanwhile, has been given wildly varied punk and hip-hop treatments by acts such as Elwood and Clawhammer. But the Lightfoot song that has attracted by far the coolest attention has been “I’m Not Sayin.’” For that, credit goes to the German-born chanteuse Nico, later of Velvet Underground fame. The influence of her 1965 version, with production and guitar accompaniment by the Rolling Stones’ Brian Jones and futu...