I just read the news that Gordon Lightfoot has died. Given his age and condition, it’s not surprising, but still, it’s a shock. He was my number one favorite musical artist.

I’d heard his hits on the radio, of course, all through high school, and loved “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” when it first came out, not knowing at first, that it was based on a true story, but it wasn’t until the late seventies/early eighties that I really got into his music.

Someone had left Gord’s Gold at the Cape House, and I just totally fell in love with it. A lusher re-recording of many of his hits from the sixities and early seventies, it’s a great album. I so fell in love with the storytelling of the “Canadian Railroad Trilogy”, which tells the story of the building of the Canadian Pacific Railroad, that I listened to it over and over until I knew the lyrics:

There was a time in this fair land when the railroad did not run
When the wild majestic mountains stood alone against the sun
Long before the white men and long before the wheel
When the green dark forest was too silent to be real

But time has no beginnings and history has no bounds
As to this verdant country they came from all around
They sailed upon her waterways and they walked the forests tall
Built the mines, mills and the factories for the good of us all

And whеn the young man’s fancy was turning to the spring
The railroad mеn grew restless for to hear the hammers ring
Their minds were overflowing with the visions of their day
And many a fortune lost and won and many a debt to pay

The song then switches to the viewpoint of the industrialists, who developed the land, and to the “railroad men” who envisioned “an iron road runnin’ from the sea to the sea” After this section there is a bridge, the tempo changes, and he switches viewpoints again, to the “the navvies who work upon the railway/Swingin’ our hammers in the bright blazin’ sun“. I can see this section in my mind’s eye, almost cinematically — yellow filter with the sunset behind, semi-slow motion silhouette of a worker swinging his sledge hammer to drive in the spikes.

Another bridge, and the original melody resumes, and the song’s camera pulls back, to show what the workers have accomplished, and the cost: “We have opened up the soil/With our teardrops and our toil”

The last stanza reprises the first, with one important addition:

For there was a time in this fair land
When the railroad did not run
When the wild majestic mountains stood alone against the sun
Long before the white men and long before the wheel
When the green dark forest was too silent to be real
When the green dark forest was too silent to be real
And many are the dead men
Too silent to be real

The storytelling in this song just blew me away. Pop music, at least the music you heard on the radio, was typically just love songs. This, this told a story. It was the first song I learned, (and to this day, if I want to test a keyboard, I’m apt to rattle off “There was a time in this fair land when the railroad did not run).

I fell in love with Gord’s Gold down the Cape, but it wasn’t mine, and I had to leave it there. The first album I owned was a birthday present that fall: Dream Street Rose. Again, a great combination of songs, including “Ghosts of Cape Horn” describing the sailing ships that rounded the Horn.

I started working around that time, and was able to start picking up his albums for myself. A concert of his, around the time of Shadows, was the first concert I ever went to. I must have seen him half a dozen times, at various venues in Boston, and the South Shore Music Circus. I picked up all his albums through the nineties, and most of his earlier work. When he appeared on PBS’s Soundstage, I recorded the audio off the TV, and nearly wore the tape out.

Nothing lasts forever, though, and while he never lost his songwriting ability, his wonderful baritone started to become reedy and thin. I started to find him unlistenable around the time of A Painter Passing Through, and stopped going to see him and picking up his newer music. I still love his older stuff though, especially the era from the seventies to early eighties, and feel like a big chunk of my musical life is gone.