Canada’s folk singer-songwriter Gordon Lightfoot dies aged 84

Gordon Lightfoot, the folks singer-songwriter recognized for If You May Learn My Thoughts and Sunset in addition to for songs that instructed tales of Canadian identification, has died. He was 84.

His publicist Victoria Lord mentioned the musician died on Monday at a Toronto hospital. His explanation for demise was not instantly accessible.

Lightfoot was thought-about one of the vital famend voices to emerge from Toronto’s Yorkville people membership scene within the Sixties. He recorded 20 studio albums and wrote a whole lot of songs, together with Carefree Freeway, Early Morning Rain and The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.

Within the Nineteen Seventies, Lightfoot earned 5 Grammy nominations, three platinum information and 9 gold information for albums and singles. He carried out in additional than 1,500 live shows and recorded 500 songs.

He toured late into his life. Simply final month, he cancelled upcoming US and Canadian reveals, citing well being points.

“We’ve misplaced certainly one of our biggest singer-songwriters,” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau tweeted. “Gordon Lightfoot captured our nation’s spirit in his music – and in doing so he helped form Canada’s soundscape. Could his music proceed to encourage future generations, and should his legacy stay on ceaselessly.”

Lightfoot was known as a “uncommon expertise” by Bob Dylan, and his songs have been coated by dozens of artists, together with Elvis Presley, Barbra Streisand, Harry Belafonte, Johnny Money, Anne Murray, Jane’s Dependancy and Sarah McLachlan.

Most of his songs are deeply autobiographical with lyrics that probe his personal experiences in a frank method and discover points surrounding the Canadian nationwide identification. Canadian Railroad Trilogy depicted the development of the railway.

“I merely write the songs about the place I’m and the place I’m from,” he mentioned. “I take conditions and write poems about them.”

Lightfoot’s music had a mode all its personal. “It’s not nation, not people, not rock,” he mentioned in a 2000 interview. But it has strains of all three.

The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, for example, is a haunting tribute to the 29 males who died within the 1975 sinking of the ship in Lake Superior throughout a storm.

The Hula Hoop Tune

Whereas Lightfoot’s dad and mom recognised his musical abilities early, he didn’t got down to turn into a balladeer.

He started singing in his church choir and dreamed of turning into a jazz musician. At age 13, the then-soprano gained a expertise contest on the Kiwanis Music Competition, held at Toronto’s Massey Corridor.

“I bear in mind the fun of being in entrance of the group,” Lightfoot mentioned in a 2018 interview. “It was a stepping stone for me.”

The attraction of these early days caught, and in highschool, his barbershop quartet, The Collegiate 4, gained a CBC expertise competitors. He strummed his first guitar in 1956 and commenced to dabble in songwriting within the months that adopted. Maybe distracted by his style for music, he flunked algebra the primary time. After taking the category once more, he graduated in 1957.

By then, Lightfoot had already penned his first severe composition, The Hula Hoop Tune, impressed by the toy that created a craze all over the world. Makes an attempt to promote the tune went nowhere, so at 18, he headed to the USA to check music for a yr. The journey was funded partly by cash saved from a job delivering linens to resorts round his hometown.

Life in Hollywood was not a superb match, nonetheless, and it wasn’t lengthy earlier than Lightfoot returned to Canada. He moved to Toronto to pursue his musical ambitions, taking any job accessible, together with a place at a financial institution earlier than touchdown a job as a sq. dancer on CBC’s Nation Hoedown programme.

His first gig was at Fran’s Restaurant, a downtown family-owned diner that warmed to his people sensibilities. It was there he met fellow musician Ronnie Hawkins.

The singer was dwelling with a couple of associates in a condemned constructing in Yorkville, then a bohemian space the place future stars, together with Neil Younger and Joni Mitchell, would be taught their commerce at smoke-filled golf equipment.

Folks music increase

Lightfoot made his in style radio debut with the one (Keep in mind Me) I’m the One in 1962, which led to numerous hit songs and partnerships with different native musicians. When he began taking part in the Mariposa Folks Competition in his hometown of Orillia, Ontario, that very same yr, Lightfoot cast a relationship that made him the competition’s most loyal returning performer.

By 1964, he was performing in entrance of bigger and bigger audiences. By the subsequent yr, Lightfoot’s tune I’m Not Sayin’ was a success in Canada, which helped unfold his identify within the US.

A few covers by different artists didn’t damage both. Marty Robbins’s 1965 recording of Ribbon of Darkness reached primary on US nation charts whereas Peter, Paul and Mary took Lightfoot’s composition For Lovin’ Me into the US High 30. The tune, which Dylan as soon as mentioned he wished he had recorded, has since been coated by a whole lot of different musicians.

That summer season, Lightfoot carried out on the Newport Folks Competition, the identical yr Dylan rattled audiences when he shed his folkie persona by taking part in an electrical guitar.

As the folks music increase got here to an finish within the late Sixties, Lightfoot was already making his transition to pop music with ease.

In 1971, he made his first look on the Billboard chart with If You May Learn My Thoughts. It reached quantity 5 and has since spawned scores of covers.

Lightfoot’s reputation peaked within the mid-Nineteen Seventies when each his single and album Sunset topped the Billboard charts, his first and solely time doing so.

In 1986, he was inducted into the Canadian Recording Business Corridor of Fame, now the Canadian Music Corridor of Fame. He obtained the governor common’s award in 1997 and was ushered into the Canadian Nation Music Corridor Of Fame in 2001.