Gordon Lightfoot's 'The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald' endures years later
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The 1976 Gordon Lightfoot song “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” remains a powerful reminder of the tragedy and cultural significance of the ship’s mysterious sinking 50 years ago.
The song off Lightfoot’s “Midsummer Dream” album immortalized the tale of the ore freighter’s sinking on Lake Superior that killed 29 people. It has an especially strong meaning to many who grew up in the upper Midwest.
“I think we can sing it before we can recite the entire alphabet,” joked Mike Horace, a life-long Michigander. Horace runs operations at public radio station WCMU in Mount Pleasant, Mich.
In 2022, Horace was at a bar in Chicago with a group of colleagues after an industry conference when the Lightfoot song started playing. A public radio host from Oregon didn’t know the song.
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“I was kind of singing along to it and she’s just looking at us like, ‘What is this song? What are you people doing right now?’” Horace remembered.
A photo from that night captures her reaction.
“She just looks this mix of horror and wonder and amusement and shock and like she’s feeling all of the emotions,” Horace said. “Which is something that I hear whenever I hear ‘The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald’ as well. You get all of the feels from it.”
The Fitzgerald was one of roughly 6,000 ships that went down in the Great Lakes before it. Maritime shipwreck author Wes Olezewski said Lightfoot captured the true essence of the disaster despite his lack of detailed information.
“All he had were a few newspaper articles from the day she sank or the day after she sank, and then the newspaper articles about the Navy finding the wreck,” Olezewski said. “That was it.”
That may be the reason Lightfoot didn’t get all his facts right, Olezewski said. Or maybe he was taking a bit of poetic license.
“The vessel was not on her way to Cleveland. She was on her way to Zug Island on the Detroit River, but Zug Island is kind of hard to rhyme when you’re singing the song,” Olezewski said. “You just can’t picture Gordon Lightfoot’s voice saying ‘Zug Island.’”
The song has been covered by many musicians over the years. Billy Strings and the Punch Brothers are just a couple of examples. A cappella group Home Free, which got its start in Minnesota, recorded a version of the song and shot a video on the William A. Irvin ore freighter docked in Duluth.
“We're not necessarily the kind of acapella group that tries to imitate instruments with our mouths all that much,” said Home Free first tenor Adam Bastien. “It comes down to the tone of your delivery and how you say the words and how you sing the lines.”
Bastine, a Michigan native, said they’ve been performing the song live on tour and feature a section where he reads the last names of all 29 crew members who died.
Lightfoot is able to paint a clear picture of the event with really simple words, he said.
“It’s just so beautiful,” Bastine said. “Then the guitar riff is so perfectly haunting. And it was really fun for us to be able to make it into the chorus of the song. Because we don’t have guitars.”
Home Free bass and baritone Adam Chance grew up in the gulf coast of Alabama.
“I knew about the song just because I was a fan of folk music,” Chance said. “I don’t think a lot of people in my area really are as familiar with the song because it wasn’t as much of a part of the history there.”
