Gordon Lightfoot’s band had never played his new song before. They hadn’t even heard it.
But in December 1975, with unused studio time left on the clock while recording his 1976 album Summertime Dream, Lightfoot strapped on his 1967 Gibson B-45-12 12-string acoustic guitar and led the musicians through a take of a new tune: “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.”
Six and a half minutes later, they were done. One take was all it took.
“The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” would go on to become a hit for the Canadian soft-rock balladeer, but it was something significantly more. In recounting the sinking of the SS Edmund Fitzgerald during a storm on Lake Superior on the night of November 10, 1975, Lightfoot immortalized a modern tragedy at a time when its pain was still keenly felt.
For the families of the men who died that night — all 29 perished — “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” enshrined the crew members’ seafaring lives and heroic deaths and ensured they would not be forgotten.
The largest ship on the Great Lakes when it launched on June 7, 1958, the 729-foot Edmund Fitzgerald was a workhorse freighter, carrying iron ore from Minnesota to ports that included Detroit and Toledo. It had a full cargo on November 10 when it was caught in a storm with near–hurricane force winds. The ship sank in Canadian waters on Lake Ontario, about 17 miles from shore.
The captain’s last message, transmitted at 7:10 p.m., said, "We are holding our own.” What happened next remains a mystery. Soon after the update, the ship either was swamped by waves, suffered fatal structural or topside damage, or grounded on a shoal — possibly a combination of these — and sank. The entire crew of 29 perished. No bodies were ever recovered.
Lightfoot immediately felt a connection to the tragedy. A native of Orillia, a southern Ontario town situated almost equidistantly from Lakes Ontario, Erie and Huron, he knew those waters well. He’d seen the great ships pass through in his youth and, later, had boated on them, racing his custom-built 45-foot sloop, Golden Goose, in the annual Port Huron–to-Mackinac yacht races.
So when the Edmund Fitzgerald went down, Lightfoot was struck by the tragedy on a personal level. To his disappointment, the news quickly disappeared in the weeks afterward. Aside from one story — “The Cruelest Month,” which appeared in the November 24, 1975 issue of Newsweek, roughly two weeks after the disaster — there was little coverage.
"The Edmund Fitzgerald really seemed to go unnoticed at that time,” Lightfoot remarked. “Anything I'd seen in the newspapers or magazines were very short, brief articles. I felt I would like to expand upon the story of the sinking of the ship itself."
Over the next month he began working on a “rough draft” of the song, as his drummer Barry Keane described it in a 2022 interview. While he was intent on chronicling the ship’s final voyage — gathering what little was known at the time from those scant news reports — his passion for sailing lent authentic detail to his verses.
The Edmund Fitzgerald really seemed to go unnoticed at that time. I felt I would like to expand upon the story of the sinking of the ship itself."
— Gordon Lightfoot
For his melody, Lightfoot drew upon an Irish folk song he’d heard as a child.
“I think it was one of the first pieces of music that registered to me as being a piece of music,” he said. “That’s where the melody comes from."
Lightfoot didn’t originally consider the song for inclusion on Summertime Dream. The tune was so fresh he hadn’t even bothered to show it to his band, which in addition to Keane included Terry Clements on acoustic and electric guitars, Pee Wee Charles on pedal steel and Rick Haynes on bass.
But with the album completed, and unused studio time available, Lightfoot decided to try out “the shipwreck song,” as he called it. They ran tape, just in case.
“Gordon gave me a nod around the third verse, I did a drum fill and came in and played,” Keane said. “We all played what we felt. And we played ‘til the end of the song. We had never heard the song.”
At 6:29 minutes in length — and with 14 four-line verses, no hook and no guitar solo — “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” seemed an unlikely song for radio play.
Nevertheless, after it was released as a single in August 1976, “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” climbed up Canada’s hit parade to reach number one on November 20, 1976, roughly one year after the disaster. In the U.S. it hit the top spot on the Cashbox chart but stalled at number two on the Billboard single chart, held off by Rod Stewart’s “Tonight’s the Night.”
Given the lack of information available at the time, Lightfoot took artistic license with his lyrics. In one instance, he attributed the shipwreck to a hatch that was left open, allowing water to enter the vessel. Relatives of the crew members took issue with that; not only was it incorrect, but it implied the crew was responsible for the sinking.
To his credit, Lightfoot took those concerns to heart.
“I rewrote the line in order to avoid upsetting family members of crewmen that operated the ship’s hatches.”
He said changing the line made him even more proud of the song.
Lightfoot — whose musical friends included fellow Canadians Joni Mitchell, Neil Young and Randy Bachman — died May 1, 2023. Over the years, he sang “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” many times, often in settings appropriate to the tune.
“We’ve been to all kinds of events,” he recalled in a 2010 interview. “I’ve been three times down to the Mariners’ Church in Detroit — one Sunday I sang in front of 18 sea captains, all lined up in a row.”
Lightfoot wrote scores of songs in his lifetime, including two that went to the top of the U.S. charts; “If You Could Read My Mind” and “Sundown.” But “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” was the song he called his finest.
"I felt it was my job to write a song about it,” he told NPR, “and that people should be aware of the fact that it was not forgotten."
