Gordon Lightfoot 5/2023 (83) was born on Nov. 17, 1938, in Orillia, Ontario, where his father managed a dry-cleaning plant. He was of Scottish descent. His mother recognized Lightfoot’s musical talent early on and schooled him to become a successful child performer. He first performed publicly in grade four, singing the Irish-American lullaby “Too Ra Loo Ra Loo Ral”, which was broadcast over his school’s public address system during a parents’ day event.
As a youth, he sang in the choir of Orillia’s St. Paul’s United Church under the direction of choirmaster Ray Williams. According to Lightfoot, Williams taught him how to sing with emotion and how to have confidence in his voice. Lightfoot was a boy soprano; he appeared periodically on local Orillia radio, performed in local operettas and oratorios, and gained exposure through various Kiwanis music festivals. At the age of twelve, after winning a competition for boys whose voices had not yet changed, he made his first appearance at Massey Hall in Toronto, a venue he would ultimately play over 170 more times throughout his career.
As a teenager, Lightfoot learned piano and taught himself to play drums and percussion. He held concerts in Muskoka, a resort area north of Orillia, singing “for a couple of beers”. Lightfoot performed extensively throughout high school, Orillia District Collegiate & Vocational Institute (ODCVI), and taught himself to play folk guitar. A formative influence on his music at this time was 19th-century master American songwriter Stephen Foster. “Man, I did the whole bit: oratorio work, Kiwanis contests, operettas, barbershop quartets,” he told Time magazine in 1968.
He played piano, drums and guitar as a teenager, and while still in high school wrote his first song, a topical number about the Hula Hoop craze with a catchy last line: “I guess I’m just a slob and I’m gonna lose my job, ’cause I’m Hula-Hula-Hoopin’ all the time.” He was also an accomplished high school track-and-field competitor, setting school records for shot-put and pole vault.
He moved to Los Angeles in 1958 to study jazz composition and orchestration for two years at Westlake College of Music, after which he returned to Canada. For a time he was a member of the Singing Swinging Eight, a singing and dancing troupe on the television show “Country Hoedown,” but he soon became part of the Toronto folk scene, performing at the same coffee houses and clubs as Ian and Sylvia, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young and Leonard Cohen.
He formed a folk duo, the Two Tones, with a fellow “Hoedown” performer, Terry Whelan. The duo recorded a live album in 1962, “Two Tones at the Village Corner.” The next year, while traveling in Europe, he served as the host of “The Country and Western Show” on BBC television.
As a songwriter, Gordon Lightfoot had advanced beyond the Hula Hoop, but not by a great deal. His work “didn’t have any kind of identity,” he told the authors of “The Encyclopedia of Folk, Country and Western Music,” published in 1969. When the Greenwich Village folk boom brought Bob Dylan and other dynamic songwriters to the fore, he said, “I started to get a point of view, and that’s when I started to improve.”
In 1965, he appeared at the Newport Folk Festival and made his debut in the United States at Town Hall in New York. “Mr. Lightfoot has a rich, warm voice and a dexterous guitar technique,” Robert Shelton wrote in The New York Times. “With a little more attention to stage personality, he should become quite popular.”
A year later, after signing with Albert Grossman, the manager of Bob Dylan and Peter, Paul and Mary, Lightfoot recorded his first solo album, “Lightfoot!” With performances of “Early Morning Rain,” “For Lovin’ Me,” “Ribbon of Darkness” and “I’m Not Sayin’,” a hit record in Canada in 1963, the album was warmly received by the critics.
Already a a fast-rising star in Canada in the early 1960s, he broke through to international success when his friends and fellow Canadians Ian and Sylvia Tyson recorded two of his songs, “Early Morning Rain” and “For Lovin’ Me.”
When Peter, Paul and Mary came out with their own versions, and Marty Robbins reached the top of the country charts with Lightfoot’s “Ribbon of Darkness,” Gordon Lightfoot’s reputation soared. Overnight, he joined the ranks of songwriters like Bob Dylan, Phil Ochs and Tom Paxton, all of whom influenced his style.
Real commercial success came when he switched to Warner Brothers, initially recording for the company’s Reprise label.
When folk music ebbed in popularity, overwhelmed by the British invasion, Lightfoot began writing ballads aimed at a broader worldwide audience.
“By the time I changed over to Warner Brothers, round about 1970, I was reinventing myself. Let’s say I was probably just advancing away from the folk era, and trying to find some direction whereby I might have some music that people would want to listen to.”
In the following years he scored one hit after another, beginning in 1970 with the heartfelt “If You Could Read My Mind,” inspired by the breakup of his first marriage.
In quick succession he recorded the hits “Sundown,” “Carefree Highway,” “Rainy Day People” and “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” which he wrote after reading a Newsweek article about the sinking of an iron-ore carrier in Lake Superior in 1975, with the loss of all 29 crew members.
In 1972, Lightfoot contracted Bell’s palsy, a condition that left his face partially paralyzed for a time. The affliction curtailed his touring schedule but Lightfoot nevertheless continued to deliver major hits: in June 1974 his classic single “Sundown” from the album Sundown went to No.1 on the American and Canadian charts. It would be his only number one hit in the United States.
He usually accompanied himself on an acoustic 12-string guitar, in a voice that often trembled with emotion, gave spare, direct accounts of his material. He sang of loneliness, troubled relationships, the itch to roam and the majesty of the Canadian landscape. He was, as the Canadian writer Jack Batten put it, “journalist, poet, historian, humorist, short-story teller and folksy recollector of bygone days.”
His popularity as a top selling recording artist began to wane in the 1980s, but he maintained a busy touring schedule and released no less than 7 albums by 1998 . Lightfoot was a featured musical performer at the opening ceremonies of the 1988 Winter Olympic Games in Calgary, Alberta..
In 1999 Rhino Records released “Songbook,” a four-disc survey of his career.
In 2002, just before going onstage in Orillia, Lightfoot collapsed when an aneurysm in his abdominal aorta ruptured and left him near death. After two years spent recovering, he recorded an album, “Harmony,” and in 2005 he resumed his live performances with the Better Late Than Never Tour.
“I want to be like Ralph Carter, Stompin’ Tom and Willie Nelson,” Mr. Lightfoot told the CBC in 2004. “Just do it for as long as humanly possible.”
On September 14, 2006, while in the middle of a performance, Lightfoot suffered a minor stroke that temporarily left him without the use of the middle and ring fingers on his right hand. He returned to performing nine days later and for a brief time used a substitute guitarist for more difficult guitar work. Full recovery took longer, “I fought my way back in seven or eight months”. In 2007, Lightfoot had full use of his right hand and played all of the guitar parts in concert as he originally wrote them. While a tour was being planned for 2008, Lightfoot’s manager, Barry Harvey, died at age 56 on December 4, 2007. But in late 2009, Lightfoot undertook a 26-city tour.
Even by 2012, Lightfoot was still performing on average 60 shows a year, not bad fora guy who was declared dead in a 2010 death hoax.
Lightfoot had said in 2016 that he was not planning to return to songwriting later in life as he had concluded it was “such an isolating thing” for him earlier in his career, affecting his family life. However, in 2020 Lightfoot announced plans for a new studio album for the first time in nearly two decades. On March 20, 2020, Lightfoot released Solo without the accompaniment of other musicians, while during the Corona Virus restrictions all concert activity was halted. It was his 21st studio album, released more than 54 years after his debut album. Gordon Lightfoot played his final concert on October 30, 2022, in Winnipeg, Manitoba.
Rapidly declining health in March and April of 2023, led to to a swift passing of Gordon Lightfoot on May 1, 2023, after a lifetime in music.
Fellow Canadian music legend Robbie Robertson, who died just three months later, said: “For Canadians, Gordon Lightfoot was a national hero, a homegrown star who stayed home even after achieving spectacular success in the United States and who catered to his Canadian fans with cross-country tours. His ballads on Canadian themes, like “Canadian Railroad Trilogy,” pulsated with a love for the nation’s rivers and forests, which he explored on ambitious canoe trips far into the hinterlands.
His personal style, reticent and self-effacing — he avoided interviews and flinched when confronted with praise — also went down well. “Sometimes I wonder why I’m being called an icon, because I really don’t think of myself that way,” Mr. Lightfoot told The Globe and Mail in 2008. “I’m a professional musician, and I work with very professional people. It’s how we get through life.”
