Gordon Lightfoot’s Father Asked One Question After the Crash

Gordon Lightfoot was 16 in 1955 when he wrecked a laundry van and phoned his father. He expected a blast about the dent and the late hotel wash. The first words he got were a check on his body, not the truck.

That 1955 call is easy to file as a sweet origin myth. It is not why the catalogue feels gentle. It is why his disaster songs, and even the jealous ones, start by asking after the person in the wreck.

Four Words After a Laundry-Van Crash

The job sat on top of school and music. His father ran the dry-cleaning plant in Orillia, Ontario, and the boy had started there at 14. By 16 he was driving the van that picked up and dropped off the wash. One day he fell asleep at the wheel. Everyone walked away. The van did not. The work ran late.

He called home anyway, sure the next voice would be about the damage. Lightfoot later recalled what he actually heard.

I called my dad. And the first words out of his mouth were, ‘Are you OK?’ I was really lucky I had a kind father.

Gordon Lightfoot

Folk writing is full of fathers who swing first and ask later. This one reversed the order. Lightfoot treated that reversal as luck. The luck shows up less as cheer than as method: when something breaks, you count the living before you count the cost.

Bob Dylan, who once called him a mentor, put the result in plainer praise than most reviews ever did.

I can’t think of any Gordon Lightfoot song I don’t like. Every time I hear a song of his, it’s like I wish it would last forever. Lightfoot became a mentor for a long time. I think he probably still is to this day.

Bob Dylan

Who Was Gordon Lightfoot’s Father?

Gordon Meredith Lightfoot Jr. was born in Orillia on November 17, 1938, the second child of Gordon Meredith Lightfoot Sr. and Jessie Vick Trill. Sr. had arrived in town as a bank clerk, showed up in the 1939 directory as a salesman at Jones’ Music Store, and by 1942 was on the floor at Wagg’s Laundry. Six years later he was managing the Orillia plant.

A 1950 photograph now with the Orillia Museum of Art and History shows the Wagg’s delivery trucks in the yard, Gordon Sr. among them. The son started as a washman at 14, then took the truck. The plant handled towels and bedding from a nearby hotel. It was coal-fired work. Lightfoot told his biographer, Nicholas Jennings, that his father was plant manager and still cleaned the furnace himself because no one else would do it, then showered the dust off while the boy stood there.

THE WAGG’S YEARS

Jennings wrote that Gordon Sr. was hard to read, a man of few words with a temper that could break like weather. He also wrote that loyalty and hard work were among the small-town values he inherited from the man who ran Orillia’s laundry service. Lightfoot kept bassist Rick Haynes for decades on that same instinct. Kind, in this house, did not mean soft. It meant the first question in a crash was still the son.

He Saw a Train at an Unmarked Crossing

The van was not the first time the two of them met a machine that could have ended the story. When Lightfoot was 10, he and his father were driving home from a curling event and reached a railroad crossing with no signal lights. They arrived with the train. Gordon Sr. got them through. The boy did not shake it off.

He later told Jennings, “I came face to face with my mortality at age 10.” He added that he had been depressed ever since. That is a different inheritance from the phone call, and it sat in the same childhood. One night taught him the world could erase him. One night taught him someone would ask if he was still here.

Jessie had already spotted the voice. She pushed piano, church choir, and the local circuit. In grade 4 he sang the Irish lullaby “Too-Ra-Loo-Ra-Loo-Ral” over the school public-address system on parents’ day. Gordon Sr. watched the fuss with a plant manager’s caution. Lightfoot remembered him telling Jessie he hoped the boy would not get a swelled head. The caution and the care were the same man.

A Six-Minute Hit With No Chorus

If you want the phone call’s second life, do not start with the pretty songs. Start with the one that should not have been a hit. On November 10, 1975, the ore freighter Edmund Fitzgerald went down on Lake Superior with her whole crew. Lightfoot, then 36 and already living with the sound of “Sundown,” read the wire copy and a Newsweek piece and decided 29 men deserved more than a half page.

He bought the old papers and laid the days in order. He was a recreational sailor, and he was afraid of looking like a man cashing in on a grave. Guitarist Terry Clements finally pushed him toward what Mark Twain would have done: tell a story. John U. Bacon, in Bacon’s book on the wreck, tracks how that stubborn care got on tape at all.

THE BALLAD HE ALMOST LEFT OFF THE ALBUM

• Length: Five minutes and 58 seconds, 28 two-line stanzas, no chorus.
• Words: 478, 56 short of the Newsweek article that moved him.
• Crew: The church bell in the lyric rings 29 times, once for each man.
• Chart: No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1976, from the first take the band ever played.

They were finishing the Summertime Dream sessions at Eastern Sound in Toronto when engineer Kenny Friesen asked about the shipwreck song Lightfoot kept shutting down. Drummer Barry Keane had never played a note of it. Lightfoot said he would nod. The nod came at 1:34, after the line about the ship’s bell, and Keane’s tom fill is the storm arriving. Later takes got cleaner and worse. The record is the pass where nobody knew the tune and everyone played as if the men were still on the water.

That is the crash call, scaled up. The spectacle can wait. You ask how they are. Then you tell what happened, in order, without a hook to hide inside.

Why Lightfoot Changed the Edmund Fitzgerald Lyrics

He kept worrying the facts after the single was already famous. Families of the crew came backstage. He went to memorials. He treated the song as something he did not quite own. When a later dive survey argued the hatch covers had been secured, he stopped singing the line that blamed a cave-in, because that line sounded like crew error.

A parishioner at Mariners’ Church of Detroit, the hall he had dressed up as a “maritime sailors’ cathedral,” told him the place was not musty. He changed the word to rustic when he sang it live. The record stayed as it was. The living people got the correction.

The same reflex sits in a marriage song that is not a wreck at all. “If You Could Read My Mind,” a 1970 hit written as the marriage to Brita Ingegerd Olaisson came apart, originally put the missing feelings on her. His daughter Ingrid heard it, asked whether he lacked any feelings himself, and got him to change a line. He could not pull the record back. He promised her that, live, it would be “the feelings that we lack.” She had asked, in so many words, if he was okay too.

LINES HE GAVE BACK

• The hatch: After 2010, “At 7 p.m. a main hatchway caved in” became “At 7 p.m. it grew dark, it was then.”
• The hall: “Musty old hall” became “rustic old hall” once the church asked.
• The marriage: “The feelings that you lack” became “the feelings that we lack” at Ingrid’s insistence.

Accuracy nuts still pick at Cleveland versus Zug Island and at the church’s real name. He left some of that alone on purpose. What he would not leave alone was a phrase that put the dead, or his daughter’s mother, in the wrong. The argument that still follows the ballad is whether a songwriter’s job is the logbook or the care. He kept choosing the care, then amending the log when the care required it.

He Played Sundown at the Bedside

The catalogue was never a kindness seminar. “Sundown,” his only Billboard Hot 100 No. 1, in 1974, is a jealous watch on a woman leaving the house. He wrote it at dusk on a rented farm, mind on the bar and on Cathy Smith. It is a nasty, first-rate pop record. It is also a man asking, in the ugliest key, whether someone is safe and whose she is.

While he was cutting it, Gordon Sr. was in hospital with stomach cancer. Lightfoot later tied the illness to the chemicals around the dry-cleaning plant. He said his father had been sick so long that the end came as a kind of relief. Before that end, the son brought a tape to the bed and played him “Sundown.” The plant manager got the hit. He did not get a hymn.

Jessie died in 1998 of emphysema. Lightfoot nearly died in September 2002 of a ruptured abdominal aortic aneurysm before an Orillia show, six weeks in a coma and four operations. A transient stroke in 2006 took his fingerpicking for a time. He kept touring. He died of natural causes at 7:30 p.m. on May 1, 2023, at Sunnybrook Hospital in Toronto, at 84. Publicist Victoria Lord confirmed it. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said he had captured the country’s spirit in music.

The day after that death, Mariners’ Church of Detroit rang its bell 30 times: 29 for the Fitzgerald crew, once more for the man who wrote them into memory. The extra ring is the old question, asked from a different end of the line. Are you okay. Then the count of who is gone.

Frequently Asked Questions

Where is Gordon Lightfoot buried?

After a private funeral on May 8, 2023, at St. Paul’s United Church in Orillia, his ashes were buried beside his parents at St. Andrew’s and St. James’ Cemetery in the same town. The choir of that church, under choirmaster Ray Williams, is where Lightfoot said he first learned to sing with feeling as a boy soprano.

How many times did Gordon Lightfoot play Massey Hall?

He appeared there more than 170 times, starting at age 12 after winning a Kiwanis festival class for boys whose voices had not yet changed. The hall sat at the far end of a line that began with a grade-school parents’ day and a homemade disc of an Irish lullaby.

Did Gordon Lightfoot study music in the United States?

In 1958 he left Orillia for Westlake College of Music in Hollywood to study jazz writing and orchestration, then came home within two years because he missed his relatives. He worked briefly in a bank by day and played Toronto rooms at night before the folk songs took over.

How many children did Gordon Lightfoot have?

Six children by four mothers: Fred and Ingrid with Brita; Eric with Cathy Coonley; Galen, whose mother waitressed at the Troubadour in Los Angeles; and Miles and Meredith with Elizabeth. Meredith uses her mother’s maiden name, Moon, and Lightfoot once took her a sleeping bag at an Occupy camp in Toronto.