Canadian folk music icon Gordon Lightfoot dead at 84
Canadian folk music icon Gordon Lightfoot, whose evocative and poetic songs are etched into the musical landscape of Canada, has died at the age of 84, according to his longtime publicist Victoria Lord.
Lord says Lightfoot died at a Toronto hospital on Monday evening. The cause of death was not immediately available
Born in Orillia, Ont., Lightfoot was hailed as Canada’s folk troubadour for his soulful music and stirring lyrics. In songs such as The Canadian Railroad Trilogy and The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, he explored the country’s history, geography and culture.
“He is our poet laureate, he is our iconic singer-songwriter,” said Rush singer Geddy Lee in the 2019 documentary Gordon Lightfoot: If You Could Read My Mind.
“If there was a Mt. Rushmore in Canada, Gordon would be on it,” said Tom Cochrane, in that same documentary.
“Gordon’s songs are works of art, every bit as relevant as classic poetry,” Cochrane said during his salute to Lightfoot at the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame gala in 2003.
“But even more importantly, Gordon Lightfoot led the way and he showed us … that you can be true to your roots. You can draw on your influences at home and country and you can incorporate those inspirations into the fabric of your work and still be internationally successful.”
From teen promise to folk fame
A childhood performer on local radio and at regional music festivals, Lightfoot wrote his first song, The Hula Hoop Song, in 1955, while still in high school.
“A lot of the images in my songs are drawn from this kind of country,” the singer-songwriter said of Orillia, in a 1967 interview with CBC-TV’s Telescope.
“I’ve been a lot of places and I’ve seen some nice country. I don’t think any of it will ever stay with me or impress me as much as this country here in Muskoka… It’s the country I grew up in.”
Gordon Lightfoot talks about the Canadian Shield, and how the images in his songs are drawn from around Orillia.
After graduating high school, Lightfoot moved to Los Angeles to study at the Westlake College of Music. He returned to Canada in 1959 and worked a variety of jobs in Toronto. He was a choral performer, a dancer on CBC’s Country Hoedown and a folk singer in the Two Tones with Terry Whelan.
In the 1960s, inspired by the music of Bob Dylan, Lightfoot became part of Toronto’s burgeoning folk scene. He developed his songwriting and began working on a debut album. Lightfoot! emerged in 1966.
At the same time, Lightfoot started what would become a highly anticipated, annual concert stand at Toronto’s Massey Hall. Launched in 1967, it happened every year until the mid-1980s, then dropped down to about once every 18 months. In 2005, Lightfoot resumed the Massey Hall event as an annual tradition.
International recognition
After earning accolades at home in the late 1960s, Canada’s troubadour broke through internationally in the 1970s after signing with Warner Records in the U.S., making a splash at the start of that decade with the release of the single If You Could Read My Mind, now a folk standard.
Lightfoot followed that up, over the next six years, with what became many of his best-known songs, such as Beautiful, Sundown, Don Quixote, Carefree Highway, Rainy Day People and The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.
Some of those songs were written after his first marriage ended during a mercurial, years-long relationship with Cathy Smith, who was later convicted for providing drugs to John Belushi after his overdose death.
“It was one of these relationships where you get a feeling of danger coming into the picture,” Lightfoot said in 2019’s If You Could Read My Mind.
Gordon Lightfoot talks to Vancouver teens about not writing songs about Canada — per se.
Lightfoot took to the road in the 1970s, touring the U.S. from Alaska to Hawaii and playing a host of European concert dates, including Amsterdam, Munich, Frankfurt, the Montreux Festival in Switzerland and sold-out gigs at London’s Royal Albert Hall.
Despite the decline of folk in the late 1970s and ’80s, Lightfoot continued to make his distinctive music, though he also made forays into acting, appearing in the film Harry Tracy with Bruce Dern and Helen Shaver.
In 1987, the much-admired songwriter made headlines when he filed a lawsuit against Michael Masser, who composed the tune The Greatest Love of All. The song became a massive hit after being recorded by Whitney Houston.
Lightfoot claimed Masser’s song stole 24 bars of melody from If You Could Read My Mind. The case was settled out of court, with Masser issuing a public apology.
