Gordon Lightfoot Book, Music and More!

I collect hats. That's what you do when you're bald.                                                              So spoketh Sweet Baby James Taylor. Gordon Lightfoot was never bald and, therefore, not much inclined to collect hats. But he did once own a distinctive Homburg. Not the formal, stately kind made famous by Winston Churchill. Lightfoot's was more flamboyant: a wide-brimmed fur one, with an array of feathers tucked jauntily into the hatband. And that Homburg traveled widely, although not nearly as far or over as long a period of ...

Dallas and Travis Good have worked with Neil Young, author Margaret Atwood, Randy Bachman, Buffy Sainte-Marie and actor Gordon Pinsent. But it was another Canadian icon—one with whom they’ve yet to collaborate—who offered some crucial wisdom. It was 1996, when their band the Sadies was getting started, and Dallas’ and Travis’ father, Bruce, of bluegrass heroes the Good Brothers, was celebrating his 50th birthday at Toronto’s Horseshoe Tavern. Into the club walks Gordon Lightfoot, who’d had the senior Goods open for him during the 1970s. “Afterwards,” Travis recalls, “Lightfoot turned to us and says, ‘The only advice I’ll give you is do your own songs.’ We took heed and started getting rid of...