Bob Dylan once called Gordon Lightfoot one of his favorite songwriters, calling the musician “someone of rare talent” when inducting him into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame in 1986. On Dylan’s 1970 album “Self Portrait,” he even took Lightfoot’s “Early Morning Rain,” and the respect was mutual — Lightfoot listened closely to Dylan’s songs, which “instilled in him a more direct approach away from the love songs,” he said ever.
Gordon Meredith Lightfoot Jr., who died Monday at age 84, was embraced by a diverse group of musicians: Elvis Presley and Duran Duran, Lou Rawls and the Replacements. He sang with a mournful baritone full of tenacity and an almost professorial air, specializing in songs that dealt with loneliness, or unhappy relationships, in grounded language that drew on folk and blues modes.
“Lightfoot’s is the voice of the romantic,” wrote Geoffrey Stokes of The Village Voice in 1974. “For him (as for Don Quixote, one of his chosen heroes), perfection is always in sight and always slipping from his grasp.”
Nowhere was Lightfoot more loved than in his native Canada, where he helped transform the music industry into a global force. “He sent a message to the world that we’re not just a bunch of lumberjacks and hockey players here,” said Rush’s Geddy Lee in “If You Could Read My Mind,” a 2019 documentary. “We’re capable of sensitivity and poetry .” In doing so, Lightfoot became one of the most successful artists of the 1970s.
Here are 10 of Lightfoot’s most loved and impactful songs.
“For Lovin’ Me” (1966)
The folk tradition in which Lightfoot initially worked is full of boastful songs about creeping men heading for territory, but this one is uniquely brutal. It’s propelled by his chunky acoustic guitar strumming and David Rea’s streamlined fingerpicking accents, which enhance the lyrics’ hauteur. “Everything you’ve got is gone,” Lightfoot tells the woman he’s leaving. “That’s what you get for loving me.” Her broken heart will eventually heal, he adds, and at that point “I might pass this way again.” He was later embarrassed by the song, saying “I didn’t know what chauvinism was.”
“Early Morning Rain” (1966)
Lightfoot grew up in rural Central Ontario, which couldn’t be further from Memphis, but he sounds almost southern on this simple, lively folk song, which Presley recorded a few years later. The theme is homesickness (Lightfoot lived in Los Angeles when he wrote it); the narrator, who is “as cold and drunk as I can be,” in addition to being broke, watches a 707 fly overhead and envies his freedom as he pines for his hometown.
“Did She Call My Name” (1968)
In this shrewd display of wounded pride, Lightfoot reunites with an old friend to blast the wind into the air, but amid the chatter of sports and mutual acquaintances, he casually slips in a question that reveals his agenda: “By the way, has she my name?” This song and “For Lovin’ Me” are fraternal twins, joined by their fascination with male pride.
“Black Day in July” (1968)
Lightfoot worked mostly on the personal relationship side of folk music, leaving the political side to others. The controversial “Black Day in July” has a restless, troubled drum track and chronicles the July 1967 riots in Detroit, in which black residents protested police abuse, prompting the governor to send in the National Guard and the president to send in the military. The song is full of irony, scorn and bewilderment (“The soul of Motor City is feared across the land”) and most American radio stations refused to play it.
“If You Could Read My Mind” (1970)
Lightfoot’s commercial breakthrough (reaching No. 5 on the Billboard Hot 100) is also his masterpiece, with help from Nick DeCaro’s cascading string arrangement. The lyrics, inspired by his impending divorce, range from the poetic to the grim, until he arrives at the stoic summary: “Stories always end.” The tune inspired Duran Duran’s “Save a Prayer,” and the song has been covered by a who’s who of singers, including Barbra Streisand, Johnny Cash, and Neil Young — and, almost, by Frank Sinatra, who tried to record it but gave up , who declare it “too long”.
“Sunset” (1974)
Lightfoot was an alcoholic and rounder who knew a lot about tempestuous relationships. He wrote “Sundown” while in a jealous fit of fantasy about Cathy Smith, a girlfriend whose cheekbone he once broke in a fight. The lyrics typify his dark, concise romanticism, and the winding guitar solo is one of the great Red Shea’s finest moments. The song has been covered by goth legends Scott Walker and Depeche Mode, among others.
“Rainy Day People” (1975)
The mid-1970s was Lightfoot’s commercial peak, but this follow-up to the Top 10 pop hits “Sundown” and “Carefree Highway” didn’t get the reception it deserved. The chords and lyrics are reminiscent of Jimmy Webb, while Lightfoot, with his usual precise diction, celebrates the way loyal friendships help “high steps landing in the gutters.”
“The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” (1976)
His best-known song is one of pop’s most unlikely hits: a six-and-a-half-minute folk ballad about a freighter that sank in Lake Superior a year earlier, leaving 29 crew members. It’s also certainly the only Top 40 song to ever mention Gitche Gumee, the Chippewa name for Lake Superior. The naughty rock band NRBQ would sometimes play a slow, off-key cover of the song, and if the audience didn’t like it, they would play it a second time as well.
“The Circle Is Small” (1978)
In some of Lightfoot’s lyrics, it’s hard to tell whether the conflicts he describes are factual or just by-products of a suspicious imagination. In this gently disdainful song about cheating, which he recorded in 1968 and re-recorded 10 years later, in a superior version, he believes his lover is using a friend’s apartment to engage in an affair, and he suggests that he will eventually catch her saying, “The city we live in may be quite big, but the circle is small.”
“Harmony” (2004)
In the 1980s, as music moved away from acoustic sounds, Lightfoot pursued pop success using synthesizers, drum machines and producer David Foster, but he didn’t sound like himself. By the time of ‘Harmony’ he was working again with guitarists Shea and Terry Clements. Tobacco use had eaten away at the top of his range, but the title track of his penultimate studio album has a fragile, hard-won tenderness that seems to look back on his career (and his life) with peaceful regret.