I haven’t thought abut Gordon Lightfoot since he died at the age of 84 in 2023. Yesterday Albert O played “Canadian Railroad Trilogy” on WUMB’s Highway 61 Revisited and it brought back the memories. Borrowing from what I wrote in 2023, I want to recall him briefly this morning.
Lightfoot was a proud Canadian, but one wouldn’t call him a Canadian folk giant. He was a folk giant simply — a brilliant songwriter, an old-fashioned carouser who was also an incurable romantic, and a pensive kind of man’s man. William Grimes’s New York Times obituary is posted here.
In 1999 Warner Archives/Rhino issued a boxed set of Lightfoot’s work that it titled Songbook. It covers roughly thirty years and 88 songs. When I went to the cashier to pay for it at the Electric Fetus in Minneapolis — a store that specializes in music cooler than Lightfoot — the cashier started singing “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” to give me grief. It’s a fantastic song in the great tradition, but even so, he knew nothing! It took four discs to do justice to Lightfoot’s career.
I first saw Lightfoot perform live in 1970 at Dartmouth’s Spaulding Auditorium in the Hopkins Center for the Arts just after he had jumped to Warner Bros. from United Artists and released Sit Down, Young Stranger (renamed If You Could Read My Mind to take advantage of the hit the album produced). It was a terrific show with his sidekick Red Shea on lead guitar and Rick Haynes on bass backing him.
Lightfoot was a songwriter’s songwriter. He wrote “Canadian Railroad Trilogy” on commission. He said he probably wouldn’t have been able to pull it off without the model of Bob Gibson’s “Civil War Trilogy.” He recalled Canadian author Pierre Berton complimenting him on an elevator one day: “You know, Gord, you said as much in that song as I said in my book [about the building of the Canadian railroad].” It first appeared on his The Way I Feel (1967).
Lightfoot stuffs a lot of himself into “Apology.” I think it foretells or documents the end of the relationship — his first marriage — that he looked back on in “If You Could Read My Mind.”
To exaggerate with some justification, Lightfoot’s songs can basically be divided into two — those about the dissolution of a romantic relationship and those about the (usually guilty) start-up of a romantic relationship during the dissolution of an old one. As Lightfoot explained to Bill Bennett on Bill’s Morning in America show, “If You Could Read My Mind” falls into the former category (more here at Performing Songwriter).
A few of Lightfoot’s songs combine the themes of old love and new love. Among those I would cite “Same Old Loverman” and “Shadows.” Not coincidentally, they are special. Of the 88 songs included on Songbook, the only one Lightfoot declined to comment on was “Shadows.” On the theme here see also “The Mountains and Maryann” and “Long Thin Dawn.”
The late Tony Rice is the musician who first drew my attention to “Shadows” on his 1988 album Native American and on the 1996 collection Tony Rice Sings Gordon Lightfoot. Rice was a huge influence on Alison Krauss. She called on him to join her cast of great musicians for her moving cover of “Shadows” in the video below. Dobro virtuoso Jerry Douglas and Rice take turns on the solos.
When we saw Lightfoot at the State Theater in Minneapolis 20 or so years ago, he had survived devastating challenges to his health and become something of a shadow himself. See, for example, Jay Gabler’s TC Daily Planet review “Gordon Lightfoot at the State Theatre: Still standing.”
“10 Degrees & Getting Colder” is peak Lightfoot. The weather serves as a rich metaphor here much as it does in the poetry of Robert Frost.
“Beautiful” is a knockout of a love song. What a legacy he left.
“I’ll Tag Along” is a lesser-known gem dating to 1986. “This time tomorrow we might all be packed and gone/I believe it’s best we carry on.”
