Gordon Lightfoot and "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald"

Canadian singer-songwriter Gordon Lightfoot, 1938-2023.

The Great Lakes freighter Edmund Fitzgerald, launched in 1958, sank in a storm on November 10, 1975.

Gordon Lightfoot, the Canadian singer/songwriter, died on May 1st at the age of 84. As a Minnesotan who has traveled to the North Shore of Lake Superior pretty much every year since I’ve been a kid, Gordon Lightfoot’s song “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” has been ingrained in my memory for a long time. I was obsessed with shipwrecks when I was a boy, and I owned several books about the shipwrecks of Lake Superior and the Great Lakes. Okay, full disclosure: I might still be obsessed with shipwrecks.  

For anyone obsessed with Great Lakes shipwrecks, the Edmund Fitzgerald is one of the most famous, as the 729-foot-long freighter is the largest ship to ever sink in the Great Lakes. To offer a quick summary of the Edmund Fitzgerald’s sinking, the cargo freighter was making her last run of the shipping season when she was caught in a terrible storm on November 10, 1975. Buffeted by gale-force winds topping 50 miles an hour, and waves between 20-25 feet high, the Fitzgerald had lost her radar, and the nearby freighter Arthur M. Anderson was giving the ship navigational guidance. Suddenly, the Fitzgerald disappeared from the radar screen of the Anderson around 7:20 PM, without sending a distress signal. All 29 men aboard the Fitzgerald were lost.  

After the sinking, a short article appeared in Newsweek magazine, titled “The Cruelest Month.” This article provided the genesis for Gordon Lightfoot’s song. Relistening to “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” since Lightfoot’s passing, I’m struck by what a fantastic song it is. In 7 verses of 8 lines each, Lightfoot paints an enduring and emotional portrait of the ship’s final journey. I can’t remember the first time I heard the song, or the first time I heard about the shipwreck, but to me as a kid, they were synonymous. Gordon Lightfoot. He’s the guy who wrote “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.” The biggest ship to sink in the Great Lakes, and the most recent Great Lakes shipping tragedy. The gales of November. My dad would often call Lake Superior “the big lake they call Gitche Gumee,” quoting the song. And the song had a special resonance, since I knew the lake he was singing about, even if I haven’t been close to the spot where the Fitzgerald was lost. And let me tell you, there’s still a lot of Edmund Fitzgerald-themed chotchkes you can buy in stores on Minnesota’s North Shore.  

Lightfoot took very little poetic license with the facts. Wikipedia has quibbles that the ship wasn’t actually headed to Cleveland but was dropping off its cargo of taconite ore at Zug Island, near Detroit, before heading to Cleveland to dry dock for the winter. Well, I think “they left fully loaded for Cleveland” is a better line than “they left for Zug Island, which is near Detroit-but it isn’t a natural island, it was created when a canal was dredged-to fully discharge her cargo of taconite ore pellets, ultimately heading for Cleveland to dry dock for the winter.” Also, Cleveland is a place that people have heard of, whereas Zug Island is not. 

The fourth verse of the song is where Lightfoot used poetic license to imagine the cook coming on deck to first say “Fellas, it’s too rough to feed ya,” and then “Fellas, it’s been good to know ya.” Obviously, no one knows what, if anything, the cook of the Edmund Fitzgerald said, but these two lines have always struck me as part of the emotional core of the song, as the difference between the two lines becomes “Wow, this is a really rough storm” to “Oh, we’re not making it out of this storm.”  

The captain didn’t really say “the good ship and crew was in peril,” as Lightfoot sang, although radio transmissions from earlier in the day had mentioned the ship taking on water. But no distress call was ever made: the last radio transmission from the Edmund Fitzgerald to the Arthur M. Anderson occurred at 7:10 PM and concluded with Captain McSorley telling the Anderson: “We are holding our own.” 

Lightfoot eventually changed the lyric “a main hatchway caved in” in live performances, in part because the lyric apparently caused people to think that the crew was somehow to blame for the tragedy because the deckhands hadn’t secured the hatch covers correctly. Documentaries have subsequently proven that the hatch covers were secured correctly, so Lightfoot changed the lyric to “At 7PM it grew dark, it was then that he said, ‘Fellas, it’s been good to know ya.’” Lightfoot said in a 2010 interview with the Toronto Sun, “The whole verse was really conjecture from start to finish anyway. It’s the only verse in the whole song where I give myself complete poetic license.”  

There are several different theories as to what caused the Edmund Fitzgerald to sink, from rogue waves to an accidental grounding. I’ve read two books about the sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald: The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald by acclaimed Great Lakes ship researcher Frederick Stonehouse, and The Night the Fitz Went Down, by Hugh E. Bishop. Both books will give you more details about the ship’s fateful voyage.  

Each year on November 10th, the Split Rock Lighthouse in Two Harbors, Minnesota, illuminates the light in honor of the men who died on the Edmund Fitzgerald. The Mariners’ Church of Detroit, immortalized in the song as “the maritime sailors’ cathedral,” used to ring the church’s bell 29 times, once for each life lost on the Fitzgerald. (Since 2006, the church holds a memorial service honoring all those who have died on the Great Lakes.) After Lightfoot’s passing, the lighthouse and the church continued these traditions to honor Gordon Lightfoot. The church’s bell rang 29 times, and then a 30th time for the man whose song lyrics immortalized the ship and her crew. I can think of no more worthy tribute.