R.I.P Gord
 

https://torontosun.com/entertainment...dead-at-age-84

Canadian legend Gordon Lightfoot dead at age 84
Author of the article:
Jane Stevenson
Published May 01, 2023 • Last updated May 02, 2023

Gord’s gone.

Canadian folk icon Gordon Lightfoot — arguably one of the greatest songwriters our country ever gave to the world — died Monday night at the age of 84, according to his tour publicist.

The Orillia, Ont.-born Lightfoot, known for such hits as The Wreck of Edmund Fitzgerald and dozens more dating back to the ‘60s, had recently cancelled all of his North American tour dates due to “health issues” that weren’t specified.

The publicist would only say he died of natural causes at Sunnybrook Hospital.

Lightfoot’s family released an official statement late Monday night.

“It is with profound sadness that we confirm that Gordon Meredith Lightfoot has passed away. Gordon died peacefully on Monday, May 1, 2023 at 7:30 p.m. at Sunnybrook Hospital in Toronto. He died of natural causes. He was 84 years old.”

Lightfoot, who lived in a mansion in Toronto’s Bridle Path with his third wife Kim Hasse, had been a rigorous health nut (aside from smoking) for the last two decades with daily workouts since recovering from a September 2002 stomach aneurysm in Orillia while preparing for the second show of a two-night stand there.

He is survived by his wife, six children — Fred, Ingrid, Eric, Galen, Miles and Meredith — as well as several grandchildren.

In my last interview with Lightfoot in December 2022, he said his entire career was launched by fellow Canadian singer-songwriter Ian Tyson, who died last year at the age of 89 in Alberta, when Ian and Sylvia covered his tune, Early Mornin’ Rain.

“He was the first person to record a Gordon Lightfoot song and that was Early Mornin’ Rain,” Lightfoot told me.

“The next thing I knew I was getting launched into the music business. I’ve always been eternally grateful to (then folk duo) Ian & Sylvia for getting me started in this business.”

Lightfoot, who was subsequently signed by A-list manager Albert Grossman, whose stable of talent included Bob Dylan, first saw Tyson, the composer of the Canadian folk classic Four Strong Winds, performing in Toronto’s then-vibrant Yorkville folk scene in the early 60s which Lightfoot also frequented.

Other Lightfoot-penned Canadian folk classics included Carefree Highway, Sundown, 14 Karat Gold, Beautiful, Baby Step Back, and If You Could Read My Mind.

Lightfoot’s songs were covered by dozens if not hundreds of artists — everyone from Elvis Presley to Dylan.

Along the way he got married three times and had a half-dozen children and was even the subject of a 2010 death ho

I last saw Lightfoot perform on Nov. 26, 2021, during the second of a three-night stand at Massey Hall, which had been recently renovated and was nicknamed “Gord’s room” long ago because he played there so often.

Lightfoot had been the last performer at the venue in July 2018 and before his first show on Nov. 25, 2021, he received the key to the city on the newly christened Allan Slaight stage commemorating the troubadour’s 170th performance at the venue.

“It was an emotional experience for which I am deeply honoured,” tweeted Lightfoot afterwards.

The singer-songwriter and his four-man band delivered an efficient 70-minute set consisting of just 15 songs after he broke his wrist that August during fall at home.

He told me in an November 2021 interview promoting the Massey Hall gigs: “It became my place for me to worship the crowd. Not for them to worship me.”

But worship Lightfoot we did.

Re: R.I.P Gord
 

I'm gonna find me a smilin' angel
Yes Lord to lead me home
I'm gonna get me a smilin' angel
Yes Lord to lead me home
And when he takes me by the hand
I know the Lord will understand
I'm gonna get me a smilin' angel to lead me home

Re: R.I.P Gord
 

i was called an hour after his passing and this is the OFFICIAL RELEASE from the office; Official Statement

It is with profound sadness that we confirm that Gordon Meredith Lightfoot has passed away. Gordon died peacefully on Monday, May 1, 2023 at 730 p.m. at Sunnybrook Hospital in Toronto. He died of natural causes. He was 84 years old.

He is survived by his wife Kim Hasse, six children– Fred, Ingrid, Eric, Galen, Miles and Meredith, as well as several grandchildren.

Re: R.I.P Gord
 

I'm gutted....I loved Gordon and his music so much. He gave us everything he had ....;and, like Don Quixote, he bravely and honorably titled at windmills, the real and the imagined,
'till he could no longer....

R.I.P Gordon....

Re: R.I.P Gord
 

Very sorry to hear of Gordon's passing. I've been a fan of his since 1970 after hearing the song "Poor Little Allison" on local AM radio. Later "If You Could Read My Mind" would become the big hit off the "Sit Down Young Stranger" album. I had the opportunity to meet him after shows a number of times over the years. I had seen him in concert at the Rialto Square Theater in Joliet, IL back in September and I wondered then if that would be the last time I would see him in live performance. Sadly, it was. Gordon Lightfoot's music was the soundtrack of my life and his 'legend' will live on through all the wonderful music he has left to the world. Rest In Peace, Gordon.

Re: R.I.P Gord
 

RIP, Gordon! I heard this sad news first on my home from work on the radio here in Sydney, Australia. Strangely, Richard Glover, who runs the drive show, chose a song not by Gordon to go with the story. Afterwards he explained: It was a song Keith Potger of "our" Seekers had composed and written, a tribute song for GLs 82nd birthday:
https://soundcloud.com/seekerfant/th...for-soundcloud

Re: R.I.P Gord
 

Thank you, Charlene!

Re: R.I.P Gord
 

I heard it from my sister a few hours ago. I have since seen articles on websites of Australian newspapers The Herald Sun (Melbourne), the West Australian and our national capital's Canberra Times:
https://www.canberratimes.com.au/sto...ot-dies-at-84/


I'll think of more to say later. I was already dealing with the loss of a 62-year-old friend on Apr17 (attending funeral May3) and my favourite Australian musician Broderick Smith on Apr30. It's all so sad.

Re: R.I.P Gord
 

I've been preparing for this ever since all his 2023 shows were canceled. I saw him for the last time May 2022 in Columbia MO, a show that had been rescheduled at least 3 times. I've seen him about 40 times in nearly 50 years all around the midwest.

First heard him on the radio in 1971 with If You Could Read My Mind and was hooked. Been my favorite songwriter/musician ever since.

Rest in Peace to the Minstrel of the Dawn.

Re: R.I.P Gord
 

I heard the news last night, and the grief for the stilling of this eloquent voice is deep. Memories play like a film of concerts shared with old and new friends, of chances taken, chances failed, lovers won and lost, life goes on as it must.
So much time spent on the newsgroup and Corfid - pick a potato...;)
Saving my babysitting money so I could run buy the newest album.
Convincing our high school French teacher to take our class to a concert so we could hear "Nous Vivons Ensemble" live.
Posting setlists in a Lightheaded haze.
Driving my mother crazy playing albums over and over.
Listening late at night to the college FM radio station playing deep cuts long after I should have been asleep.
Over half a century of following the music has been intertwined with life's events.
I'm grateful for this tribe of Lightfoot lovers and for the people who have given us places to share this devotion. My thoughts turn to those who made the music: the band members whose tenure was short or long, and all those who worked behind the scenes.
"Time passes, love remains." So does the music. Thank you, Gordon, we love you.

Re: R.I.P Gord
 

Rest In Peace Gordon. I believe you know how much you touched your fans lives and we are all eternally grateful to have had you and your music in our lives.

To everyone here at corfid, those I've met at concerts and shared meals with and those I've only met online here. may Peace Be With You. Until our paths cross somewhere in the future please take care of yourself and others.

Peace,
Bill :(

Re: R.I.P Gord
 

I will miss seeing Gordon every couple years. MY condolences to the Band, to Kim and his children. He was one of a kind and really cared about his fans. Fortunately he left us so much great music to listen to. RIP Gordon.

Re: R.I.P Gord
 

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/01/a...PyX3HBB-I6UUa0

Gordon Lightfoot, Hitmaking Singer-Songwriter, Is Dead at 84

His rich baritone voice and songs like “Sundown,” “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” and “If You Could Read My Mind” made him a top artist of the 1970s.

By William Grimes
Published May 1, 2023Updated May 2, 2023

Gordon Lightfoot, the Canadian folk singer whose rich, plaintive baritone and gift for melodic songwriting made him one of the most popular recording artists of the 1970s, died on Monday night in Toronto. He was 84.

His death, at Sunnybrook Hospital, was confirmed by his publicist, Victoria Lord. She did not specify a cause, but Mr. Lightfoot had had a number of health problems in recent years.

Mr. Lightfoot, a fast-rising star in Canada in the early 1960s, broke through to international success when his friends and fellow Canadians Ian and Sylvia Tyson recorded two of his songs, “Early Morning Rain” and “For Lovin’ Me.”

When Peter, Paul and Mary came out with their own versions of those songs — their “For Lovin’ Me” was a Top 40 hit — and Marty Robbins reached the top of the country charts with Mr. Lightfoot’s “Ribbon of Darkness,” Mr. Lightfoot’s reputation soared. Overnight, he joined the ranks of songwriters like Bob Dylan, Phil Ochs and Tom Paxton, all of whom influenced his style.

Mr. Dylan in turn held Mr. Lightfoot in high regard. He once said, “I can’t think of any Gordon Lightfoot song I don’t like,” adding, “Every time I hear a song of his, it’s like I wish it would last forever.” Mr. Dylan included a version of “Early Morning Rain” on his 1970 album “Self Portrait.” (Among the other singers to have covered that song is Elvis Presley.)

When folk music ebbed in popularity, overwhelmed by the British invasion, Mr. Lightfoot began writing ballads aimed at a broader audience. He scored one hit after another, beginning in 1970 with the heartfelt “If You Could Read My Mind,” inspired by the breakup of his first marriage.

That song — which begins with the memorable lines “If you could read my mind, love,/What a tale my thoughts could tell./Just like an old-time movie,/’Bout a ghost from a wishing well” — reached No. 5 on the Billboard Hot 100 and has been covered by Barbra Streisand, Johnny Mathis, Johnny Cash and numerous others.

In quick succession he recorded the hits “Sundown” (his first and only No. 1 single), “Carefree Highway” (“Let me slip away, slip away on you”), “Rainy Day People” and “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” which he wrote after reading an article about the sinking of an iron-ore carrier in Lake Superior in 1975, with the loss of all 29 crew members.

For Canadians, Mr. Lightfoot was a national hero, a homegrown star who stayed home even after achieving spectacular success in the United States and who catered to his Canadian fans with cross-country tours. His ballads on Canadian themes, like “Canadian Railroad Trilogy,” pulsated with a love for the nation’s rivers and forests, which he explored on ambitious canoe trips far into the hinterlands.

His personal style, reticent and self-effacing — he avoided interviews and flinched when confronted with praise — also went down well. “Sometimes I wonder why I’m being called an icon, because I really don’t think of myself that way,” Mr. Lightfoot told the Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail in 2008. “I’m a professional musician, and I work with very professional people. It’s how we get through life.”

May 2, 2023

Gordon Meredith Lightfoot Jr. was born on Nov. 17, 1938, in Orillia, Ontario, to Gordon and Jessie Vick (Trill) Lightfoot. His father managed a dry-cleaning plant. As a boy, he sang in a church choir, performed on local radio shows and shined in singing competitions. “Man, I did the whole bit: oratorio work, Kiwanis contests, operettas, barbershop quartets,” he told Time magazine in 1968.

He played piano, drums and guitar as a teenager, and while still in high school wrote his first song, a topical number about the hula hoop craze with a catchy last line: “I guess I’m just a slob and I’m gonna lose my job, ’cause I’m hula-hula-hoopin’ all the time.” His attempts to sell it were unsuccessful.

After studying composition and orchestration at the Westlake College of Music in Los Angeles, he returned to Canada. For a time he was a member of the Singing Swinging Eight, a singing and dancing troupe seen on the television show “Country Hoedown.” But he soon became part of the Toronto folk scene, performing at the same coffee houses and clubs as Ian and Sylvia, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young and Leonard Cohen.

He formed a folk duo, the Two Tones, with a fellow “Hoedown” performer, Terry Whelan. The duo recorded a live album in 1962, “Two Tones at the Village Corner.” The next year, while traveling in Europe, he served as the host of “The Country and Western Show” on BBC television.

As a songwriter, Mr. Lightfoot had by then advanced beyond the hula hoop, but not by a great deal. His work “didn’t have any kind of identity,” he told Irwin Stambler and Grelun Landon, the authors of “The Encyclopedia of Folk, Country and Western Music,” published in 1969. When the Greenwich Village folk boom brought Mr. Dylan and other dynamic songwriters to the fore, he said, “I started to get a point of view, and that’s when I started to improve.”

In 1965, he appeared at the Newport Folk Festival in Rhode Island and at Town Hall in New York. “Mr. Lightfoot has a rich, warm voice and a dexterous guitar technique,” Robert Shelton wrote in The New York Times. “With a little more attention to stage personality, he should become quite popular.”

A year later, after signing with Albert Grossman, the manager of Mr. Dylan and Peter, Paul and Mary, Mr. Lightfoot recorded his first solo album, “Lightfoot!” The album, which included “Early Morning Rain,” “For Lovin’ Me,” “Ribbon of Darkness” and “I’m Not Sayin’,” a hit in Canada in 1963, was warmly received by critics.

Real commercial success came when he switched to Warner Bros., initially recording for the company’s Reprise label. “By the time I changed over to Warner Bros., ’round about 1970, I was reinventing myself,” he told the Georgia newspaper Savannah Connect in 2010. “Let’s say I was probably just advancing away from the folk era, and trying to find some direction whereby I might have some music that people would want to listen to.”

Accompanying himself on an acoustic 12-string guitar and singing in a voice that often trembled with emotion, Mr. Lightfoot gave spare, direct accounts of his material. He sang of loneliness, troubled relationships, the itch to roam and the majesty of the Canadian landscape. He was, as the Canadian writer Jack Batten put it, “journalist, poet, historian, humorist, short-story teller and folksy recollector of bygone days.”

His popularity as a recording artist began to wane in the 1980s, but he maintained a busy touring schedule. In 1999 Rhino Records released “Songbook,” a four-disc survey of his career.

Mr. Lightfoot, who lived in Toronto, is survived by his wife, Kim Hasse, six children — Fred, Ingrid, Miles, Meredith, Eric and Galen — and several grandchildren. His first two marriages ended in divorce. His older sister, Beverley Eyers, died in 2017.

In 2002, just before going onstage in Orillia, Mr. Lightfoot collapsed when an aneurysm in his abdominal aorta ruptured and left him near death. After he spent two years recovering, he recorded an album, “Harmony,” and in 2005 he resumed his live performances with what was billed as the Better Late Than Never Tour.

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He suffered a minor stroke in 2006 that temporarily affected his ability to play guitar, but he continued touring. Ten years later he performed 80 concerts and told The Canadian Press, “At this age, my challenge is doing the best show I can.” But just last month, he announced that he was canceling all his scheduled concerts for health reasons.

In an interview with the CBC in 2004, Mr. Lightfoot said he wanted to be like Willie Nelson and other veteran performers: “Just do it for as long as humanly possible.”

Re: R.I.P Gord
 

OBITUARY:

LIGHTFOOT, GORDON MEREDITH (World Renowned Singer, Songwriter, & Entertainer) passed at Sunnybrook Hospital, Toronto, Ontario on Monday, May 1, 2023 in his 85th year. Gordon Lightfoot, of Toronto and formerly of Orillia, beloved son of the late Gordon & Jessie Lightfoot is predeceased by his elder sister, Beverley Lightfoot Eyers.
One of the most celebrated singer-songwriters of his generation, Gordon is remembered for a decades long career that saw him achieve international renown. A national treasure, his songs have become part of the Canadian cultural fabric, earning him legions of fans at home and around the globe.
He is survived by his cherished wife Kim Lightfoot, children Fred, Ingrid, Eric, Galen, Miles and Meredith, as well as grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
The late Gordon Lightfoot will rest at the St. Paul's United Church, 62 Peter St., N., Orillia. The public is invited to pay their respects at St. Paul's United Church on Sunday, May 7, 2023 from 1 P.M. until 8 P.M. Memorial donations to the United Way (Simcoe County Area) would be gratefully appreciated and may be made at the Mundell Funeral Home, 79 West St., N., Orillia Ontario L3V 5Cl (705 325-2231). Messages of condolence are welcome at

www.mundellfuneralhome.com

Re: R.I.P Gord
 

Thanks Charlene

Re: R.I.P Gord
 

Thanks so much, Charlene. The lyric that comes to mind might be from Gord's point of view:
"All is well
I made my peace, my highways never end.
Yesterday's a memory, today is just a friend..."

RIP, Gord. You blessed us with so much music, thoughts...even your own "sillyosophy".

Re: R.I.P Gord
 

VIDEO AND PICTURES AT LINK:
https://kitchener.ctvnews.ca/waterlo...-Mtd-NcB08nzzU

Waterloo’s Ed 'Peewee Charles' Ringwald looks back on 16 years of making music with Gordon Lightfoot

A wall of gold and platinum records paint a wall inside Ed Ringwald’s Waterloo home.

The pedal steel guitar player, known musically as “Peewee Charles,” never could’ve imagined that level of success. He already had it pretty good playing on the CTV-produced Ian Tyson Show.

Then the call came. Gordon Lightfoot wanted Ringwald to play on an upcoming album.

“‘Would you like to be part of it?’ And I was like uh yeah, I think so,” Ringwald said, laughing.

He clearly left an impression because he was later asked to join the band. It’s where he sat behind the strings for 16 years.

The steel guitar is known for its sound of loneliness in country music rather than folk. But Lightfoot didn’t care.

“He was a great guy to work for and he taught us all so much about music. Me playing steel guitar, I had to play a different style of music,” said Ringwald.

That style worked for them, leading to the highest of accolades in the music world. And they never forgot to have some fun along the way, especially when it came to music videos.

“Blackberry Wine … we were all dressed up. I was dressed up as Caesar,” Ringwald said. “And then the one we were playing poker, all the smoke I was telling you about. We had to smoke cigars, I was green after the video take.”

So when Ringwald’s wife told him his former front man had died, all the memories came flooding back, saying it didn’t feel real.

“She said that Gord had passed away and my heart just sunk. I know some day it happens to all of us but you never expect it,” Ringwald said, listening to old performances with Lightfoot.

Now, all Ringwald is left with is the memories. But some of the moments he holds closest are performing in his hometown of Kitchener, alongside the Canadian folk legend.

“He was the first act to open Centre In The Square when it opened. And I remember that. It was quite a long time ago,” said Ringwald.

Last month, Lightfoot’s health issues led to the cancellation of his entire 2023 tour. The only Canadian stop was set for Kitchener’s Centre In The Square. It’s just one many cities where Lightfoot left his footprint – imprinted on Canada’s identity forever.

Re: R.I.P Gord
 

From Kenyon..
TEXT: Photos at website.. https://www.thestar.com/entertainmen...star_web_ymbii

Those stories and that voice. Why Gordon Lightfoot’s music hit home for me and so many Canadians
Lightfoot’s gifts created devoted, decades-long fans around the world, but for Kenyon Wallace, the emotional connection — forged early — was even closer.
Kenyon Wallace
By Kenyon WallaceInvestigative Reporter
Mon., May 1, 2023
When I was five years old, like many kids that age, I was obsessed with trains.

Many a Saturday morning was spent with my father and brother down at Toronto’s Cherry Street railway bridge beneath the switching tower, watching passenger trains come and go from Union Station.

So intense was my obsession that my dad even made me mixtapes of songs about trains (this was 1985, before CDs appeared).

One of those tapes had three Gordon Lightfoot songs with locomotive references: “Steel Rail Blues,” “Early Morning Rain,” and “Sixteen Miles (To Seven Lakes).”

I must have listened to that tape hundreds of times while falling asleep at night, and I can only assume that the stories in those songs, and the voice of the man singing them, worked their way deep into my unconscious mind.

As I grew up, I became aware that this voice was the same one often coming from the radio or my dad’s record player, filling the air with beautiful melodies and words that somehow spoke to me, even if I didn’t fully understand them.

Over time, it began to occur to me that many of the songs were about where we lived: the Great Lakes, maritime waters, rivers, streams, forests, mountains, autumn hills and even my hometown of Toronto. The way the words and the melodies weaved together seemed to paint pictures of the Canadian landscape like no other music did.

The songs were about us, too: miners, truckers, sailors, rich men, poor men, old soldiers, down and out ladies, fortune tellers and lovers, lost and won.
CBC
Gordon Lightfoot in his own words
14 hours ago 2:10
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Legendary folk singer-songwriter Gordon Lightfoot dies at 84
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Lightfoot had that rare gift of being able to take the struggles, triumphs and emotions of people from all walks of life — our stories — and articulate them in a relatable way with a voice that, at its peak, was unmatched in popular music, in my humble opinion.

His was a voice that just seemed to always be there, accompanying us through life, a source of comfort, and, in the tradition of all great troubadours, teaching us lessons about the hubris of humankind.

Consider the captain of the American steamship Yarmouth Castle, who left in a lifeboat as the ship burned with 87 passengers still on board while en route from Miami to Nassau in 1965. Lightfoot wrote about the disaster, still one of the worst in North American waters, in his 1969 masterpiece “Ballad of Yarmouth Castle.”

Or recall the tanks ordered by U.S. president Lyndon Johnson to go rolling in against Black demonstrators during the Detroit riot in the summer of 1967, resulting in 43 deaths and more than 1,000 injuries. The riots were chronicled by Lightfoot the following year in “Black Day in July,” a song that was banned by several U.S. radio stations for being too controversial.

Picking up the guitar as a teenager, I was immediately drawn to Lightfoot’s intricate fingerpicking style, the rhythmic, pulsating strumming of that signature, booming Gibson 12-string and his deceptively simple arrangements adorned by always talented sidemen. I voraciously learned as many songs as I could.

Then there were the lyrics. Oh, the lyrics.

The Canadian writer Peter C. Newman once told me that he believed Lightfoot was, at heart, a poet. I’m inclined to agree.

Reading the lyrics of Lightfoot’s songs, one realizes that even if he hadn’t put them to music, they stand as brilliant works of poetry on their own.

Take this line from the 1976 chart-topper “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald”:

Does anyone know where the love of God goes

when the waves turn the minutes to hours.

Or this line from “Peaceful Waters,” the last song on his flawless debut album “Lightfoot!”:

The dead leaves of autumn that cling so desperately

Must fly before the cold October wind

Their simple life is ended

Must they be born to die again?
part 2-next post

Re: R.I.P Gord
 

part 2
Or this line from the tender ballad of unrequited love “The Last Time I Saw Her Face” from his 1968 Grammy-nominated album “Did She Mention My Name?”:

The last time I saw her face

Her eyes were bathed in starlight and her hair hung long

The last time she spoke to me

Her lips were like the scented flowers inside a rain-drenched forest

But that was so long ago that I can scarcely feel

The way I felt before

And if time could heal the wounds

I would tear the threads away

That I might bleed some more.

Or this line from “Restless,” the opening song from his underappreciated 1993 album “Waiting For You,” that evokes the coming of the winter:

The lake is blue, the sky is grey and the leaves have turned to gold

The wild goose will be on her way, the weather’s much too cold

When the muskie and the old trout too have all gone down to rest

We will be returning to the things that we do best.

I could go on. But you get the picture.

Listening to how Lightfoot married these words rich with imagery and feeling to equally beautiful and original melody lines was a revelation, at least to my teenage brain.

Now in the mid-1990s, when I was in high school, Gordon Lightfoot wasn’t exactly considered cool. I often wonder where all the fans who are my age now were when I seemed to be the youngest person lining up outside Massey Hall in 1998.

It wasn’t until the year 2000 when I stumbled upon an internet discussion group of Lightfoot devotees — many my age — from around the world that I found my kindred spirits. The next year, a convention organized by Connecticut fan Jenney Rivard brought more than 60 of these fans to Toronto from as far away as Austria, England, Ireland, Australia and the United States, for Lightfoot’s four-night Massey Hall residency. One afternoon, we all found ourselves at the home of Whitby fan Charlene Westbrook, profiled in the Star by my colleague Amy Dempsey in 2014, for a barbecue. Inevitably, the guitars came out and people from around the world who had scarcely known each other a few days before started singing Lightfoot songs for hours into the wee hours without missing a beat. Many lifelong friendships were forged that night. https://www.thestar.com/entertainmen...22dbb8a40.html

It was a microcosm of the crowds that gathered at Massey Hall or wherever in the world Lightfoot played, and a testament to his unique ability to sing and write about where he was from and simultaneously achieve mass appeal.

Before CanCon rules dictated in 1971 that 30 per cent of radio airplay here be devoted to Canadian music, Lightfoot managed to find the sweet spot between singing about our hard-scrabble land with the trials and tribulations we all face, and commercial success, especially south of the border. He arrived in the mid-1960s when a national cultural identity was burgeoning in Canada and he found a way to incorporate what many felt into voice and song, without being boastful.

Indeed, it was Lightfoot’s reserved disposition and shyness that endeared him to many fans. (He was never known for his onstage banter; the songs do the talking.) His stage show was free of artifice and gimmickry generally; just a man and his guitar tastefully backed by band of top-tier musicians. The audience always got the straight goods.

He was one of us, a small-town kid who conquered one of the planet’s most competitive businesses, and unlike many of his Canadian contemporaries such as Neil Young and Joni Mitchell, Lightfoot stayed in this country.

When the song “Sundown” and album of the same name simultaneously made it to No. 1 on both the U.S. Billboard singles and album charts in the summer of 1974, Lightfoot was quietly managing his career from Toronto, his home since the early 1960s.

Here was a guy from Orillia who sang about the Rocky Mountains, the Plains of Abraham, Yonge Street, Georgian Bay and the building of the Canadian Pacific Railroad, as well as the universal themes of love and regret, and was adored by millions around the world for it.

In doing so, he proved for countless Canadian artists to come that you could make it as a pop star without having to live in New York or Los Angeles.

“He sent the message to the world that we’re not just a bunch of lumberjacks and hockey players up here. We’re capable of sensitivity and poetry and that was a message that was delivered by the success of Gordon Lightfoot internationally. People were more willing to listen to someone from Canada because someone of such enormous talent had paved the way,” says Rush’s Geddy Lee in the 2019 documentary “Gordon Lightfoot: If You Could Read My Mind,” directed by Martha Kehoe and Joan Tosoni.

When Massey Hall’s long-overdue renovations finally came to an end in the fall of 2021, the only natural choice to reopen the 128-year-old Grand Old Lady of Shuter Street was the man who since 1967 performed at the venue more than 170 times, the most of any popular artist. (Lightfoot had also closed the iconic venue down in the summer of 2018 before its three-year makeover.)
Toronto Star reporter Kenyon Wallace and Canadian music icon Gordon Lightfoot are pictured back stage at Massey Hall on June 30, 2018.

In one of those strange ways that life has of coming full circle, I managed to get tickets to opening night and took my 75-year-old dad, who got me started on Lightfoot in the first place. We had the pleasure of seeing then-mayor John Tory present the key to the city to the songwriter and declare Nov. 25 Gordon Lightfoot Day in the city.

Opening for Lightfoot was his old friend, the American folk singer Tom Rush. In another uncanny coincidence, my dad had included one of Rush’s train songs, “The Panama Limited,” on the same mixtape from my childhood with the Lightfoot tunes. There were goosebumps.

Then, in what was more of a love-in than a concert, for an hour and 15 minutes Lightfoot played us the carefully crafted songs that had become the soundtrack of our lives — tales about riding the rails, a soldier returned from war, life on the road, the triumphs and defeats of personal relationships, a shipwreck, the longing for the hands of a lover on a long winter’s night, and the pain of being stuck in the grass in the early morning rain, homesick for the ones we love.

To be sure, the face was gaunt, the voice weathered, betraying the toll of years of touring and the bottle. But the emotion, sensitivity and musicianship were still there. At 83, he retained the ability to reflect our collective experiences and make you feel as though he was singing especially for you in a living room full of friends.

We shall not see the likes of Gordon Lightfoot again. But the music he gave us — our music — will play on.
Kenyon Wallace
Kenyon Wallace is a Toronto-based investigative reporter for the Star. Follow him on Twitter: @KenyonWallace or reach him via email: kwallace@thestar.ca

Re: R.I.P Gord
 

I have many more thing to post..Just been inundated with messages, e-mails, texts etc.


VIDEO:

Re: R.I.P Gord
 

video prior to last nights LEAFS game.. Gordon would be quite chuffed... he and I spoke often about our fandom - bleeding blue for our team..
https://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=https...r5ayxCj0ic4WGb

https://twitter.com/i/status/1653543592126824450

http://twitter.com/i/status/1653543592126824450

Re: R.I.P Gord
 

BILLY JOEL:
https://www.instagram.com/p/CrvjCtvg...H90xQ84Sx-rSNY

Re: R.I.P Gord
 

STEVE MARTIN:
https://twitter.com/unrealbluegrass/...Q0IxJRLY-7bBko

Re: R.I.P Gord
 

MARINER'S CHURCH - ringing the bell 30 times in honour of Gordon..

At 3 p.m. Tuesday, the bells at Mariners’ Church rang out again — now chiming 30 times to honor those perished sailors along with the artist who famously memorialized them in song. Lightfoot made the Detroit church bells famous in "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald." Today they chimed an additional time to mark his death.

Re: R.I.P Gord
 

BURTON CUMMINGS

https://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=https...sq9pVwtujMKif3

Re: R.I.P Gord
 

VIDEO-PICS at link
https://winnipeg.ctvnews.ca/there-wa...ipeg-1.6380133

'There was something in the atmosphere': Gordon Lightfoot's last ever show played in Winnipeg

Gordon Lightfoot fans who attended the iconic folk singer’s concert at Club Regent Event Centre last October didn’t know they had witnessed history.

“He played Club Regent a couple of times before. That was his last show at our venue, and that was his last show,” Kelly Berehulka, Club Regent’s entertainment program manager told CTV News Winnipeg by phone.

The singer-songwriter died Monday in Toronto of natural causes, his publicist confirmed. He had suffered numerous health issues in recent years.

He was 84.

Berehulka emailed his condolences to Lightfoot’s manager, who confirmed the Winnipeg concert had been his last.

Berehulka spent some time with the then-83 year-old backstage. He recalled him taking great care to tune his guitar and signed countless autographs with pristine penmanship.

When he took the stage, his presence was palpable.

“There were three standing ovations through the night, so really well deserved for a Canadian icon, music legend, really the spirit of Canada. Just amazing the aura that he brings into the room,” Berehulka said.

'CANADA LOST A LITTLE BIT OF ITSELF'

Brenda Morrisseau was one of the lucky audience members who got to witness the performance. She came to his music later in life, frequently hearing him on an oldies radio station on her morning drive to work.

“I really enjoyed his music,” she said. “’Oh So Sweet’ – it’s a very lovely farewell song. It chokes me up to hear the words.”

Morrisseau went by herself to see the show, and quickly made friends with other fans who were equally excited to see a living legend perform.

“There was something in the atmosphere that showed that honour and respect for him,” she recalled. “It wasn’t just about hearing the old hits. It was about seeing the man that he is and getting a glimpse of the young man that he used to be.”

Susan Phillips has been a Gordon Lightfoot fan since she was a girl. His records were in constant rotation at her childhood home.

“I probably learned every word to every song, so that just kind of carried with me my whole life,” she said.

Phillips first saw him perform in the early 2000s at Pantages Theatre, and then again in October 2022 at Club Regent. While both were special, she is honoured to have been in the crowd for his last show.

“When he talked, everybody listened. You could hear a pin drop. He was very cordial. He talked about his early career and he made jokes,” she said.

“I really feel that Canada lost a little bit of itself last night.”

Lightfoot was one of the acts on Brian Gilchrist’s live music bucket list.

“There are people that you have to see in concert at least once in your life. He was one of them,” Gilchrist said in a phone interview.

He scooped up tickets to the Lightfoot show at Club Regent, which was originally scheduled for 2020 and then moved to 2022 because of the pandemic.

He said Lightfoot sat for most of the concert and used an inhaler during breaks.

“It didn’t distract from the show at all. You could tell he loved to be out there.”

Morrisseau says she is forever thankful to have seen his final performance. Tuesday, she put on the t-shirt she bought at the concert to mark his passing.

“All over the world, people are singing his songs,” she said. “He was a storyteller.”

Berehulka too sees Lightfoot’s death as an immeasurable loss to Canadians and the world.

“Everyone will be playing Gordon Lightfoot songs today, for sure.”

RADIO PERSONALITY RECALLS MANY MEETINGS WITH LIGHTFOOT

Veteran radio personality Beau Fritzsche has a long history with Gordon Lightfoot.

Fritzsche got his start in radio in the ‘70s, in an era when Lightfoot rose to prominence with hits like “Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” and “If You Could Read My Mind.”

Their paths didn’t cross until the late ‘80s, however, when Fritzsche had an unexpected guest join his table at a Juno Awards after party in Toronto, Ont.

“All of a sudden, here comes Gordon. He comes in, grabs a beer, sits across from us, and he starts chatting like we're old friends,” Fritzsche recalled.

The two spent most of the night talking.

In 1993, the two met again backstage at Lightfoot’s show at the Centennial Concert Hall.

Fritzsche took his wife Sharon, a fellow Lightfoot fan, and his then-nine-year-old son with a fitting name.

“We actually did name him - not just for Gordon Lightfoot. My wife's dad, his name was Gordon as well, but we named him for both of them - Gordon and Gordon.”

Fritzsche counts Lightfoot as one of the greatest songwriters of all time, and cherishes the time they spent together over their decades-long careers.

“I don’t think there will ever be another Gordon Lightfoot.”

TWITTER PICTURE - https://twitter.com/Concert_Hall/sta...183872/photo/1

- With files from the Canadian Press

Winnipeg, Manitoba
Club Regent Casino
October 30, 2022
Winnipeg, MB

The Watchman's Gone
Sweet Guinevere
Did She Mention My Name
Ribbon Of Darkness
Sundown
Carefree Highway
14 Karat Gold
Make Way For The Lady
If You Could Read My Mind
I'd Rather Press On
Beautiful
Song For A Winter's Night
Fine As Fine Can Be
Cotton Jenny
The Wreck Of The Edmund Fitzgerald
Early Morning Rain
Rainy Day People

Re: R.I.P Gord
 

https://www.thestar.com/entertainmen...ongwriter.html

Sylvia Tyson remembers Gordon Lightfoot as shy, reserved and a meticulous songwriter
DF
By David Friend The Canadian Press
Wed., May 3, 2023

TORONTO - Sylvia Tyson saw something special in a young and unknown Gordon Lightfoot on the night she caught one of his sets in the mid-1960s.

He was in the midst of an extended run of shows at Steele’s Tavern on Yonge Street in Toronto, a series of performances a newspaper advertisement summed up as “Gordon Lightfoot: folk singer — ballads, etc.”

Yet it was immediately clear to Tyson, one half of Yorkville folkie duo Ian & Sylvia, that Lightfoot wasn’t just any old balladeer.

“We recognized him as a great songwriter,” she recalled in a phone interview from her Toronto home.

“It was a small room. He performed alone. He didn’t have a band. So really, it was all about his voice, the guitar playing and the songs.”

That night, Sylvia, her soon-to-be husband Ian and Lightfoot struck up a friendship that would last for decades. Lightfoot died Monday at age 84 of natural causes.

Back in the 1960s, Toronto’s music community was a tight-knit place, which meant one act’s success would often trickle down or be shared with others, Tyson said.

For instance, the respect Ian & Sylvia had for Lightfoot’s work led them to record covers of “Early Mornin’ Rain” and “For Lovin’ Me. The latter Lightfoot song would inspire another take by U.S. trio Peter, Paul and Mary that became a stateside hit.

“Gordon always joked that he knew it was our version they’d listened to because we used a minor chord that he didn’t,” Tyson chuckled.

The U.S. exposure gave Lightfoot’s career a boost, helped further by Ian & Sylvia connecting him with their New York manager Albert Grossman, who took the singer under his wing and got him a record deal.

All of that wouldn’t have been possible without Lightfoot’s sheer talent, undeniable work ethic, and skill for storytelling, Tyson noted.

“He sweated blood over those songs,” she said.

“It’s a very special skill to be able to put an entire story into a (three-and-a-half) or four-minute song. You learn a certain economy of language.”

Ian & Sylvia saw their own careers blossom shortly before Lightfoot’s took off. Their trajectories sent them on different paths.

“We didn’t see each other that much, since we were both on the road very busy. You might meet in an airport,” she said.

“But because we’ve been friends you could sort of pick up where you left off even over a year later.”

Knowing Lightfoot as long as she did, Tyson said there were a few things most listeners probably didn’t pick up on.

“One of the common misconceptions about Gordon was that because his songs were so articulate, he was a great conversationalist,” she said.

“He actually was very shy and reserved in that respect.”

Tyson also described Lightfoot’s tendency to be a “workaholic,” which was most apparent to outsiders with his consistent tour dates that continued up until last year when he fell ill.

“He even had separate studio space for many years that was strictly for writing,” she said.

Tributes to Lightfoot continued to roll in this week.

Fellow Yorkville folk musician Buffy Sainte-Marie said in a statement there was a “freshman class in heaven with Harry Belafonte.”

Neil Young called him “a great Canadian artist. A songwriter without parallel” in a message posted on his website, while Toronto-raised actor Kiefer Sutherland tweeted: “Canada lost part of itself. And I lost a hero.”

Amid these reflections, Tyson considered a generation of folk memories that are slowly fading, even if the music isn’t.

In December, she lost her ex-husband and singing partner Ian Tyson, who Lightfoot described as “the older brother I never had” in an interview with The Canadian Press at the time.

“One of the things that one realizes as one gets older — and I’m 82 at this point — is that you start to lose people at a rather more rapid rate,” Sylvia Tyson said.

“And that one of the things you mourn, as much as the person, is the loss of a shared experience.

“Never again will I be able to say, ‘Do you remember that?’ Because the person you’ll be talking to is much younger than you are. And they won’t remember it at all.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published May 3, 2023.

Re: R.I.P Gord
 

https://www.orilliamatters.com/local...qv-GHQcQu1lCiU

'Huge event': Orillia prepares to say goodbye to Gordon Lightfoot
Special service, open to the public, expected to draw thousands, will be held Sunday at St. Paul's, where Lightfoot's legendary career began when he was a choir boy

A final send-off for Canadian folk music legend Gordon Lightfoot, Orillia’s favourite son, will be held Sunday at the church where the choir boy’s career was launched.

St. Paul’s United Church, now known as St. Paul’s Centre, where Lightfoot was a soprano in the boys’ choir, will host a public service this Sunday from 1 to 8 p.m. All members of the public are welcome pay their respects.

Peter Street will be closed to traffic between Coldwater and Neywash streets in anticipation of thousands of expected guests.

“This is a very huge event, not just for St. Paul’s, but for Orillia, and I would say this is going to be a very singular and momentous event for both,” said Katrina Hunt, facilities administrator at St. Paul’s.

“We are expecting, probably, numbers in the thousands, so it’s going to be pretty busy here in Orillia on Sunday.”

Hunt said members of the public will be able to line up and enter the church from its Peter Street entrance. They will then be guided into the church’s sanctuary, where Lightfoot’s coffin will be, to pay their respects before leaving through the west atrium.

“Anybody from the public who wishes to pay their respects and say a last goodbye will be able to come through St. Paul’s building, visit (Lightfoot’s coffin) very briefly … keep their feet moving, and then go out through the sanctuary and exit,” Hunt said.

Church members have been working hard to prepare for the event.

“We’ve been preparing ever since we found out on Tuesday afternoon that this would be his final spot to have a goodbye, and we’ve been working closely with Mundell Funeral Home, who has been working with (his) family,” she said.

“It’s been a lot of our time and energy, along with lots of volunteers in St. Paul’s, who have been happily spending their time contributing to this, but I know that everybody is very much willing to contribute. They look upon Gordie, as many of us do, as a Canadian idol, as an icon for our country, and we’re happy to have him coming back.”

Blair Bailey, organist/choir director at the St. Paul’s since 1984, said Lightfoot’s roots in the church run deep.

“His family attended St. Paul’s United Church and, all those years, he was right through in the Sunday school, and he was always in the choirs and the children’s choir in there,” Bailey said. “We still have photos of him in his choir gown, singing in the children’s choir at the church.”

His experiences in the church choir were important developmental steps in Lightfoot becoming a world-renowned singer, Bailey said, highlighting how the church’s previous organist, Ray Williams, entered Lightfoot in the Toronto Music Festival.

“He won first prize there in the Toronto Music Festival and got asked to sing at Massey Hall in their final concert, and that was his first performance in Massey Hall, as a boy soprano, before his voice changed,” Bailey recalled. “He had all that training as a boy.”

Throughout his life, Bailey said, Lightfoot kept in touch with not only his hometown, but the church as well.

“We invited him to come back for the St. Paul’s congregation’s 175th anniversary, and that was in 2006, and he accepted our invitation. He did an afternoon of performing some of the songs; he brought two of his band mates with him — Rick Haynes and then his other guitarist,” Bailey said.

“That was a wonderful afternoon in 2006, (and) one of the things he said (was), ‘This is where it all started.’”

Bailey said the church is busy putting together a fitting celebration of Lightfoot’s life.

“It has been said, continuously, since the news of his passing came out, we’ve lost a great Canadian. It’s very touching and moving for us that he has indicated that he wants this to be in his hometown and in his home church growing up,” he said.

“We just hope that this will be able to be a wonderful celebration of a great Canadian figure, so (we are doing) everything we can, hopefully, to make that possible.”

Coun. Ralph Cipolla, who grew up with Lightfoot, said it is no surprise to see him return to his roots for his final goodbye.

“Gordon Lightfoot put Orillia on the map. He came back for every (Mariposa) Folk Festival — just about every one — and he’d wander around in the audience ... He loved Orillia; he really did,” Cipolla said.

“He also donated back to Orillia whenever he did a concert, and he contributed to the opera house and to Soldiers’ Memorial Hospital, and he donated the bust just outside the opera house.”

Cipolla spoke highly of Lightfoot’s character, recalling childhood memories when Lightfoot — who was several years older — would stick up for him in the neighbourhood park.

“Some of the older kids would bully us, and Gord would come and protect us and tell the older kids to bug off,” he said. “In our neighbourhood, he was highly regarded. He was a good guy.”

Those qualities shone through his whole life, Cipolla said.

“He was one of the celebrities that it wasn’t about him — it was about the people that knew him, and about people that asked him an for autograph, asked him for a picture,” he said. “I had a lot of respect for him, and I go back a long, long time with memories of him.”

Following Sunday’s service, Lightfoot will go to his final resting place with his family.

“He’s going to be, ultimately, cremated and going to be resting with his mom and his dad and his sister, who predeceased him, just up the hill at St. Andrews’s-St. James’ Cemetery,” Hunt said.

Re: R.I.P Gord
 

https://www.villagereport.ca/village...1031-318369853



Orillia mourns loss of legend, 'small-town boy who made it big'
'Today in Orillia, our community is mourning together along with the rest of the world,' mayor says, calling Lightfoot 'an incredible artist'
Greg McGrath-Goudie Greg McGrath-Goudie

The morning after folk music legend Gordon Lightfoot’s death, people from around his hometown of Orillia have begun paying tribute to him and mourning his loss.

Local fans left bouquets of flowers at his Tudhope Park monument and at the bust outside the Orillia Opera House. They recounted their personal experiences with Lightfoot and his effect on Orillia, Canada and the world.

“He’s a big deal (here), but I think he means more to Canada than he does to just one town — a small-town boy who made it big and represents the country really well,” said Orillia resident Al Byrnell, who was outside the opera house taking photos of Lightfoot’s bust Tuesday morning.

“He’s an icon in the country itself. Elvis Presley performed his songs, (as did) lots of other people, Bob Dylan — just everybody had tremendous respect for him and his ability to write music.”

Byrnell, a lifelong fan, recalled studying in university when the SS Edmund Fitzgerald sank in Lake Superior in 1975, and how well Lightfoot captured the tragic loss of the 29 souls on board.

“I remember the night when that happened because I was in university, and I was sitting at my desk with the radio on and they kept announcing the situation that was happening out on Superior,” he said. “Then he wrote the song afterwards and it was so appropriate, like he really nailed it.”

Although Lightfoot achieved international fame in his illustrious career, he carried an approachable demeanour and made a point of acknowledging and helping out his hometown, residents recounted.

“For someone of his stature to always acknowledge that he came from Orillia is huge. A lot of performers don’t do that,” said Orillia Opera House general manager Wendy Fairbairn. “A lot of performers don’t look back on their cities and acknowledge them like he has. As part of his CBC interviews — everything — he’s always acknowledged the fact that he’s from Orillia.”

Fairbairn recalled the last time Lightfoot performed at the historic downtown venue in the main auditorium that is named after him.

“He celebrated his 80th birthday (the) last time we had him here at the opera house, which was just a beautiful ceremony,” she said. “He came out and stood up on stage and performed, and we all sang Happy Birthday to him in the audience. It was just a lovely event, and he’s just such a lovely man.”

Although the crowd sang Happy Birthday to him, it was Lightfoot who gave the city gifts that year.

“Fifty per cent of the ticket sales went to the Soldiers’ Memorial Hospital and 50 per cent went back to the opera house for restoration purposes, so he paid for his band to be here. He paid every cent. (He was a) very, very generous man … and he loved his city. He loved Orillia.”

Resident Don Cook, similarly, recalled how Lightfoot supported the city.

“He would show up for these things,” Cook said. “We had Hockey Night in Canada come up here … and they put up the statue in front of the (opera house). Sure enough, he was there for that. He showed up for these things every day, and just didn’t mail in a video or something — he showed up in the city.”

Cook noted Lightfoot was not a scheduled performer at the Mariposa Folk Festival in his twilight years but would often show up to give a surprise performance.

“I remember about five years ago, they were doing a tribute … and Gord just comes waltzing in with his guitar,” he said. “He comes walking up on stage and these young performers are singing Gordon Lightfoot covers, and he says, ‘Do you mind if I join you?’”

Lightfoot did not want to steal the tribute band’s thunder, so he sang one song with the group before sitting down to enjoy the festival.

“That was just the type of guy he was,” Cook said. “He didn’t want to take over their performance. He just wanted to be there and enjoy the crowd.”

For Jocelyn Coleman, all it took was meeting Lightfoot to make her a lifelong fan.

“I walked into McCabe’s one day and he was at a birthday party, and his nephew was playing at the same time, and I just got introduced to Gord that way and I’ve been following his music for a very long time,” she said.

“He was a great guy: funny, nice, charming. His music has held me up since I found out about his music ... and he’s been a legend and a very lovely guy around here.”

Lightfoot was born Nov. 17, 1938, in Orillia, and he is often referred to as Canada’s most gifted songwriter.

His publicist announced Monday night Lightfoot had died of natural causes at a Toronto hospital at 7:30 p.m. He was 84.

The Orillia Opera House has set up a guest book for residents to sign in memory of Lightfoot. It is available until 8 p.m. Tuesday and 12 to 8 p.m. Wednesday.

“You get an opportunity to stand on the stage that Gordon has stood on, write your thoughts, your stories, your history, what you feel for Gordon and how he’s contributed to your life,” Fairbairn said. “Just come in and be here. We have this piano from his school teacher, who donated it to us a number of years ago, and it’s on stage. Although it’s not play-worthy, it’s still on stage as part of his history.”

On Thursday and Friday, the book will be at the Orillia City Centre.

Mayor Don McIsaac referred to Lightfoot as “an incredible artist.”

“Our community is deeply saddened to learn about the passing of Gordon Lightfoot. Mr. Lightfoot was highly regarded in his hometown of Orillia and has had an immense impact on our community,” he said in a statement.

“His deep roots in our city are woven into the fabric of Orillia with tributes from the Gordon Lightfoot Auditorium stage and his bust at our iconic Orillia Opera House, to the Lightfoot Trail and to the Golden Leaves series of bronze sculptures within J.B. Tudhope Memorial Park.

“Many of us who knew him will remember his soft-spoken demeanour, generous personality and infectious laugh.

“Today in Orillia, our community is mourning together along with the rest of the world.”

The city has lowered its flags to half-staff in honour of Lightfoot.

A Lightfoot tribute concert will take place at the opera house Saturday, with tickets available through its website.

Re: R.I.P Gord
 

https://www.cbc.ca/music/in-gordon-l...eeMzYhitegrVcc

In Gordon Lightfoot's songbook, art is for everyone

How the songwriter’s utilitarian approach to inspiration proved beauty belongs to all of us
Andrea Warner · CBC Music · Posted: May 02, 2023 1:14 PM EDT | Last Updated: May 2

For Gordon Lightfoot, there was never a right or wrong way to draw inspiration. He was a prolific, award-winning songwriter who made meaning out of the mundane and observed the macro and micro of everyday in his lyrics and lines. He turned a commission into a Canadian classic, a breaking news story into the "best song" he ever wrote, and a stolen glance at an Arizona road sign into a hit song.

"You can start with a title if you want, or go fishing for words in a magazine, like People magazine or something, you'll see an ad with some fancy language to it," Lightfoot told CBC Music in 2013. "I've done that, honestly, I've even gone into a paint store and picked up the titles of paint samples."

'Golden forever': musicians and fans react to Gordon Lightfoot's death

Gordon Lightfoot's life in 10 songs

Lightfoot was not an overly precious writer, a cultured aesthete wrenching words and phrases from a head stuffed full of canonical greats. Instead, Lightfoot's omnivorous approach to creation made him an accidental disrupter of the highbrow, a brilliant songwriter subverting the vaunted purity of divine artistic genius.

"I'm a fairly normal sort of person," he said in a 1975 interview. "I'm not particularly smart and I'm not particularly stupid. Maybe it's the general normality of it, with a touch of art."

Lightfoot may not have set out to democratize the playing field with his unpretentious approach to music, but the staying power of his songs acts as radical permission for other aspiring writers and artists. The source of the inspiration doesn't matter; it's what you do with it that counts.

Lightfoot died on May 1, 2023. This year also marks the 65th anniversary of Lightfoot's foray from Orillia, Ont., to Los Angeles to study music composition and the beginning of his "official" music career (even though he'd been singing and performing since his youth). Lightfoot wrote his first song in 1955 but it would be a full decade of playing and performing before he shifted to sets comprising mostly his own tunes. "I didn't have to rely on my own material at the beginning," Lightfoot told American Songwriter in 2008. "There were so many good songs around that I kept learning them."
Rain, planes and trains

But in 1965, that all changed. Lightfoot began performing his own songs, and other bands began recording them. By the time he released his debut album, Lightfoot!, in 1966, the record's biggest success, "Early Morning Rain," had already been a hit for Ian & Sylvia and Peter, Paul and Mary. Lightfoot once called it "the most important song I've ever written," and estimated that it was nine years in the making. The inspiration came years earlier during his time in Los Angeles when, in a fit of homesickness, he went to the airport to watch the planes come and go. It was in the morning, and, yes, it was raining.

In the early morning rain with a dollar in my hand
With an aching in my heart and my pockets full of sand
I'm a long way from home and I miss my loved ones so
In the early morning rain with no place to go

Lightfoot abided by a key rule of good writing: "Show, don't tell." He didn't specifically say he was broke and lonely in L.A., but the "dollar in his hand" and "pockets full of sand" and "no place to go" conveyed his situation perfectly.

On his second record, 1967's The Way I Feel, Lightfoot showcased his ability to thrive creatively under commission. CBC tasked Lightfoot with writing a song that would celebrate the history of the country for the Canadian Centennial, which would kick off with a televised event on New Year's Day, 1967. According to scholar Chris Hemer, since Lightfoot had already written a couple songs about trains at that point, CBC suggested something on the Canadian Pacific Railway and recommended a book from the CBC library on William Cornelius Van Horne, who designed Canada's first transcontinental railway. Lightfoot wrote "Canadian Railroad Trilogy" in just three days, and it quickly became one of the country's most celebrated folk songs, though its legacy has been recontextualized over the years.

Given the source material and the purpose of the commission, it's not surprising that "Canadian Railroad Trilogy" embraces a certain kind of nationalism. Lightfoot does reference the lives lost in the building of the CPR, but the lack of specifics contribute to Canadian myth-making. There's no mention of the settler-colonial violence inflicted on Indigenous people who were displaced and whose lands were stolen, nor the more than 15,000 exploited Chinese migrants who helped build the railroad — and an estimated 600 of whom were killed on the job. In a video essay about the song, journalist Nick Lefevre acknowledges the CPR was "a feat in engineering and it did change the country, but from a humanitarian perspective, it was a tragedy and a crime."
Love undone

Lightfoot also mined his own relationships and love affairs for inspiration and catharsis.

"In some cases the songs are autobiographical; some events and traumas that have to get handled, one way or another, go into the tunes," Lightfoot said in a 1998 interview. "And it's easier and cheaper than going to a shrink."

"If You Could Read My Mind" is one of those songs, written in the midst of the breakup of his first marriage. He had a new home on a small farm in the country, a new record label, and he was drinking "quite a bit." (He quit in 1982.) The song is a series of devastating lines that capture the haunted longing and bittersweet aftertaste of a breakup.

If I could read your mind love, what a tale your thoughts could tell
Just like a paperback novel, the kind the drugstores sell
When you reach the part where the heartache come
The hero would be me, but heroes often fail
And you won't read that book again because the ending's just too hard to take

It's a song written from the perspective of a narrator not quite ready to contend with their own accountability, who masks his willful ignorance in a performance of vulnerability. But Lightfoot's own child called him on this early on. "There's a line in the song that goes, 'If you read between the lines, you'll know that I'm just trying to understand, the feeling that you lack.' My daughter, who was just a girl at the time, heard the song and asked me, 'Don't you lack any feelings, daddy?' She got me to change the line to 'the feelings that we lack.' She said I was putting the whole onus of the divorce on her mother."
PART 2 - next post

Re: R.I.P Gord
 

The title track of his 1974 album, Sundown, is another song inspired by Lightfoot's volatile love life. The music has a darkly rhythmic groove, irresistible and insistent, and the words convey an urgency and tension that skew toward the sinister.

I can see her looking fast in her faded jeans
She's a hard loving woman, got me feeling mean
Sometimes I think it's a shame
When I get feeling better when I'm feeling no pain
Sundown you better take care
If I find you been creeping 'round my back stairs

The "muse" behind "Sundown" was Lightfoot's then-girlfriend Cathy Smith. According to Lightfoot, one night Smith went out partying with her friends, leaving him home alone, restless, jealous and watching the sunset. He channelled his frustration into writing "Sundown." But according to several publications, including the Globe and Mail, Lightfoot's jealousy turned to violence at least once when he allegedly broke Smith's cheekbone during a fight.

Within the first decade of his solo career, Lightfoot released 10 studio albums. During this time, his record labels also released six compilations of his greatest hits and best songs. The most successful, by far, was 1975's Gord's Gold, a sprawling double vinyl featuring 22 of his most popular tracks. Many of these songs are considered foundational to the Canadian music canon. But one of the biggest and most surprising hits of Lightfoot's career was still to come.

Lightfoot released "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald" in 1976, a re-telling of the tragic real-life sinking of the SS Edmund Fitzgerald on Lake Superior, Nov. 10, 1975, which claimed the lives of all 29 people on board. "I saw the story on TV, about five hours after it happened, so I collected every newspaper for the next couple of weeks and the song came out," said Lightfoot, who wrote and recorded the song in a rare one-week burst. "It's basically a straightforward account of how the events actually unfolded."

When suppertime came, the old cook came on deck saying
Fellas, it's too rough to feed ya
At seven PM a main hatchway caved in, he said
Fellas, it's been good to know ya
The captain wired in he had water coming in
And the good ship and crew was in peril
And later that night when his lights went out of sight
Came the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald

Writing: a life's work

Most of Lightfoot's songs were written over months, sometimes years, and he devoted decades of his life to the practice. In a 2010 interview, Lightfoot assigned a numerical value to his songwriting process, telling the Montrealer that it was "15 per cent inspiration and 85 per cent perspiration. I will stand by that — it's hard work. Writing is a solitary process, and it can be exciting and draining at the same time. I wrote songs under contract for 33 years, and now I can relax a little and focus on our performances."

In another 2010 interview, Lightfoot described recording 20 albums under contract as "pretty rough work… That caused a lot of the bumpiness too, because it caused me to be isolated and cut myself off from my people and my kids, so I could work on the songs. I wanted to do it because by that time I was supporting a band, was supporting a crew, and had acquired two or three children. But I don't regret any of it."

Lightfoot was under contract and writing was his job. I have always appreciated his matter-of-fact honesty about spending 33 years and 20 albums doing that work and the effort that he put into it, that it was thrilling, isolating and exhausting. It was also labour. He couldn't afford to be too high-and-mighty to turn up his nose at People magazine or to make a trip to the paint store to find what he was looking for in "Bitter Green" (just a guess on my part).

But in that work, in these songs, we see how beauty — or the illusion of it — can be coaxed from violence and tragedy, the mundane, the everyday and the unexpected. For 65 years, he showed us how beauty belongs to all of us, not just the classically educated or the affluent and cultured. Art is for everybody in the landscape of Gordon Lightfoot's greatest hits.

Re: R.I.P Gord
 

https://globalnews.ca/news/9667091/r...tered-so-much/

RIP Gordon Lightfoot. Here’s why he mattered so much.
By Alan Cross Corus Radio
Posted May 2, 2023 7:46 am
Updated May 2, 2023 10:51 am

When I first heard the news last night (May 1), I wrote this on my personal website. It’s reprinted here. -AC]

By now you’ve heard the news of Gordon Lightfoot‘s passing at the age of 84. There’s also a good chance that you’ve been moved to review Lightfoot’s insane accomplishments. No? Let me school you.

First, for those who may not be a fan (or if you’re a younger music fan): This is every bit as sad as the death of Gord Downie. Without that first Gord, there would have been no Gord Downie.

For everyone else, Lightfoot is revered as one of the world’s greatest singer-songwriters. His songs have been covered by Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Barbra Streisand, Neil Young, Glen Campbell, The Grateful Dead, Nico, Olivia Newton-John, Jimmy Buffett, Sarah McLachlan, John Mellencamp, Johnny Mathis, Paul Weller, The Tragically Hip, Jim Croce and about a dozen other big names.

The biggest, though, was Bob Dylan, the greatest singer-songwriter of the 20th century. I quote Zimmy: “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.”

Yes, Lightfoot was considered a mentor by BOB DYLAN.

Sidebar: In 1987, he sued songwriter Michael Masser, accusing him of stealing 24 bars of If You Could Read My Mind for The Greatest of Love of All,” which had just been recorded by–wait for it–Whitney Houston. The case was settled out of court; the settlement did not include Lightfoot’s name being added to the writer’s credits. Still, given the success of the single (top 10 in a dozen countries and sales of over 2.5 million copies PLUS the royalties derived from its parent album, which sold somewhere north of 25 million), the settlement must have been pretty sweet.

Meanwhile, for a guy who wrote a lot about trains and shipwrecks (and peppered his songs with Canadianisms), he sure sold a lot of albums. Millions of them globally. There were all the hit singles that climbed to the top of the American charts: “Early Morning Rain” (also a hit for Elvis), “If You Could Read My Mind,” “Sundown,” “Carefree Highway,” “Rainy Day People,” and the masterful “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.”

Lightfoot was given just about every honour a Canadian could receive including a couple of doctorates, the Governor General’s Performing Arts Award, induction in the Songwriters Hall of Fame plus the Canadian Music Hall of Fame (Dylan did the induction), and a Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee medal.

There was even a whiff of Hollywood scandal. Back in the early 70s, he got himself into an entanglement with a Toronto scenester named Cathy Evenlyn Smith. Gordon knew there was something dangerous about her and wrote both “Sundown” and “Rainy Day People” about her. Smith made her way to Los Angeles in 1976 where she became a drug dealer who listed both Keith Richards and Ron Woods as clients. She later became infamous as the person who helped John Belushi inject that fatal speedball in March 1982.

Years ago when I was on a walkabout between jobs, I auditioned for an on-air position at the CBC. It had to be in-person during the same hours I’d be working if I got the job. I’d been allowed to prepare for the audition as if it were a real radio show, so I was in control of everything.

Halfway through, the woman conducting the audition broke in. “Okay, now let’s see how you think on your feet. I’m going to give you a scenario and you just go with it, okay? Here it is: Gordon Lightfoot has just died. Break the news.”

Wow, I thought to myself, That’s the most CBC thing EVER.

Tonight, though, it’s real. Gordon Lightfoot has passed away at the age of 84. Fans had a feeling last month when all dates on his 2023 schedule were canceled.

Lightfoot had been in frail health for years. In 2003, between shows in his hometown of Orillia, his aorta suddenly ruptured in his abdomen. He was airlifted to Hamilton’s McMaster Medical Centre and spent the next six weeks in a coma. Imagine the doctor who had to perform the tracheotomy on the neck that contained one of Canada’s most-treasured voiceboxes. It was three months before he could go home and a full two years before he returned to normal. It was something of a miracle he pulled through.

He returned to work, writing songs, recording albums, playing gigs, and even appearing on Canadian Idol. But then on September 14, 2006, he suffered a minor stroke in the middle of a show, leaving him unable to use the middle and ring finger of his right hand for a while and necessitating that another guitarist sub in for his parts.

We thought he was dead a second time in February 2010 when a Twitter hoax declared him dead. He heard about his demise on the radio on the way back to his hotel the dentist while in Winnipeg. Gordon had to call up Charles Adler, a talk show host on CJOB, to prove that he wasn’t dead yet and was actually feeling much better.

The next years were among Lightfoot’s most productive, playing dozens of shows including the 100th Grey Cup, Canada’s 150th birthday celebration, and tours across North America and the British Isles. The worst health scare he had was an injury while working out in the gym in the middle of a tour (To stay as healthy as possible, he put in gym time six days a week.) That was enough to pull a couple of shows.

Then came COVID. Lightfoot, frail and in his 80s, still managed to put out his 21st studio album in 54 years. And then on December 18, 2020, he performed a paid live stream at a quarantined El Mocambo in Toronto. There was a bonus segment of that concert. After it was over, fans were able to purchase a little overtime with Gord in a sit-down interview with me. His frailty was even more apparent up close, even though he’d seemed in strong voice during the show. But he was determined that no matter what–not even a Global pandemic–was going to stop him from fulfilling his touring obligations which began the following May. And as far as I remember, he played as many of those shows as COVID restrictions would allow. But then earlier this year, ahead of another ambitious tour schedule, every show was canceled with no promises of make-up dates. That was a sure signal that something was very wrong. The four-metre bronze statue of Gord in his hometown of Orillia will see a lot of visitors for the next while. And what’s to become of Massey Hall without the traditional Lightfoot residencies? It’s unimaginable that they won’t happen anymore. Some of his last words were to his manager, Bernie Fiedler: “We had a good run.” Yes, Gord, you did. A very good run.

I have sent a correction to the site regarding the location of Winnipeg when the TWITTER hoax happened. He was in Toronto not Winnipeg.

Re: R.I.P Gord
 

https://www.wbur.org/cognoscenti/202...mMAla8PT--ONiU

Commentary
In Gordon Lightfoot’s lyrics, I still hear the sounds of home
May 05, 2023

Julie Wittes Schlack

Gordon Lightfoot made me appreciate men. Not romantically — I’d had crushes on boys well before I ever heard his music — but empathetically.

Though best known for his 1970s pop tunes like “Sundown” and “If You Could Read my Mind,” the Canadian singer-songwriter who died a few days ago was rivaled only by John Prine in his ability to animate the stories of ordinary working-class men doing extraordinary things. His characters were the men I didn’t know but wanted to. The drowned sailors of “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.” The railroad “navvies” of “Canadian Railroad Trilogy.”

The drunken marooned ne’er do well from “Early Morning Rain”

With a dollar in my hand

With an aching in my heart

and my pockets full of sand.

These were the people whose stories were all too rarely acknowledged, let alone told with both sympathy and dynamism.

My older brother brought home Lightfoot’s eponymous debut album in 1966. We played that record obsessively, the stylus of our mono record player deepening its grooves. The record’s spare, singable, but narratively rich tunes wore out the needle long before wearing out our imaginations.

Of course, some of the emotional power of these songs derived from the circumstances under which we listened to them. We were adolescents, filled with inchoate longing to be out in the big world, lost to the expectations of others. We wanted to be swingin’ the hammer, not studying for the quiz; to be hopping onto a freight train, not a school bus. We ached to abandon the insular comfort of our middle-class home even if, like the narrator of Steel Rail Blues, we didn’t have a destination.

I haven't found a place that I could call my own

Not a two bit bed to lay my body on

I bin stood up I bin shook down/I bin dragged into the sand.

We were also recent ex-pats, transplanted Montrealers who had only recently moved to the American Midwest and were still homesick, not just for the friends and family we’d left behind, but for Canada itself. And Lightfoot was profoundly Canadian.

The man could make you feel the ruthlessly damp, unforgiving city winter in your bones, as in this poignant song about a forlorn old man stumbling “Home From the Forest:”

Oh the neon lights were flashin'

And the icy wind did blow

The water seeped into his shoes

And the drizzle turned to snow

His eyes were red, his hopes were dead

And the wine was runnin' low

But he could also paint a picture of winter’s brilliant hush with equal vividness. And Lightfoot could do romance without treacle. No chewing gum love songs or self-indulgent tunes about being sad or lonely or blue ever emerged from his pen. No, his love affairs ended with sorrow, regret, and sometimes self-recrimination, but always with lyricism. Softly is evidence of that.

Softly she goes

Her shining lips in the shadows

Whispers goodbye at my windo

Having immigrated to the most powerful country in the world as it waged the war in Vietnam, my brother and I longed for our homeland’s lack of imperial ambitions. In 1967, Canada’s population was only 20 million, an astonishingly low number for the world’s second largest country. But that created a spaciousness in the culture, a tolerance for a “cultural mosaic” that stood in contrast to an American melting pot that boiled away our differences.

To celebrate the country’s centenary, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBS) commissioned Lightfoot to write a song, and the resulting “Canadian Railroad Trilogy” captured that unique national spirit of optimism without jingoism.

But time has no beginning and the history has no bound

As to this verdant country they came from all around

They sailed upon her waterways and they walked the forest tall

Built the mines, mills and the factories for the good of us all.

Like the country he came from and returned to, Lightfoot was wry without being cruel, modest without any disingenuous self-effacement. In the 2019 documentary, “If You Could Read My Mind,” he ruefully acknowledges the sexism of some of his early songs. “I didn’t know what chauvinism was then,” he said. And when interviewed in 2008, he resisted the hagiography that surrounded him as a national hero and one of Bob Dylan’s favorite songwriters. “Sometimes I wonder why I’m being called an icon, because I really don’t think of myself that way,” he explained. “I’m a professional musician, and I work with very professional people. It’s how we get through life.”

I don’t have an encyclopedic knowledge of his work — I’ve never even listened to many of his later albums. But I know his first two albums, released in 1966 and 1967, like I knew my parents’ lullabies. They inspired me, soothed me, ushered me into dreams both sleeping and awake. In Gordon Lightfoot’s songs I heard the sun going down and rising again.

Open your heart, let the life blood flow

We got to get on our way 'cause we're movin' too slow

(Candian Railroad Trilogy)

Re: R.I.P Gord
 

Randy Bachman remembers:

When we were younger, Burton Cummings and I went to a Gordon Lightfoot concert. We sat there mesmerized the entire time at the way he sang and the stories his lyrics told. It was poetry, folklore, legend and music. Spellbound would be a good way to describe what we felt. Sending love to his family and friends today at his passing. I knew him a long time and he was a wonderful person.
AUDIO

https://dcs.megaphone.fm/CORU5057504...a-fb44d1eee1fb

Re: R.I.P Gord
 

BILLY JOEL pays his respects at MSG concert 5/5/2023

Re: R.I.P Gord
 

ED RINGWALD - Pee Wee - video at link - Ed at home

https://kitchener.ctvnews.ca/waterlo...-Mtd-NcB08nzzU

VIDEO LINK: https://kitchener.ctvnews.ca/video?c...13&jwsource=em

A wall of gold and platinum records paint a wall inside Ed Ringwald’s Waterloo home.

The pedal steel guitar player, known musically as “Peewee Charles,” never could’ve imagined that level of success. He already had it pretty good playing on the CTV-produced Ian Tyson Show.

Then the call came. Gordon Lightfoot wanted Ringwald to play on an upcoming album.

“‘Would you like to be part of it?’ And I was like uh yeah, I think so,” Ringwald said, laughing.

He clearly left an impression because he was later asked to join the band. It’s where he sat behind the strings for 16 years.

The steel guitar is known for its sound of loneliness in country music rather than folk. But Lightfoot didn’t care.

“He was a great guy to work for and he taught us all so much about music. Me playing steel guitar, I had to play a different style of music,” said Ringwald.

That style worked for them, leading to the highest of accolades in the music world. And they never forgot to have some fun along the way, especially when it came to music videos.

“Blackberry Wine … we were all dressed up. I was dressed up as Caesar,” Ringwald said. “And then the one we were playing poker, all the smoke I was telling you about. We had to smoke cigars, I was green after the video take.”

So when Ringwald’s wife told him his former front man had died, all the memories came flooding back, saying it didn’t feel real.

“She said that Gord had passed away and my heart just sunk. I know some day it happens to all of us but you never expect it,” Ringwald said, listening to old performances with Lightfoot.

Now, all Ringwald is left with is the memories. But some of the moments he holds closest are performing in his hometown of Kitchener, alongside the Canadian folk legend.

“He was the first act to open Centre In The Square when it opened. And I remember that. It was quite a long time ago,” said Ringwald.

Last month, Lightfoot’s health issues led to the cancellation of his entire 2023 tour. The only Canadian stop was set for Kitchener’s Centre In The Square. It’s just one many cities where Lightfoot left his footprint – imprinted on Canada’s identity forever.

Re: R.I.P Gord
 

https://broadview.org/gordon-lightfoot-orillia/

My good friend Gordon Lightfoot was also a friend to so many

The minister who is presiding over his memorial service shares her memories of the Canadian icon
By Karen Hilfman Millson | May 5, 2023
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On the evening of May 1,, when I heard of Gordon Lightfoot’s death, I experienced an overwhelming flow of tears. He was all the things people are saying about him: the soundtrack of our lives, a poet and storyteller who touched our hearts, a weaver of the threads of our lives creating a tapestry filled with our experiences, our humanity, and the joys and struggles of living. For me, amongst the many gifts Gordon shared was his incredible capacity to be present to people, making people feel special.

I remember the night he received The Heart and Vision Award from the Toronto United Church Council. The line to greet him was long. I stood back and watched as he made eye contact with each person asking them where they were from, often sharing a story of someone he knew from their community. People walked away, delighted at their connection.

The second time Gord came to St. Paul’s United in Orillia, Ont., while I was working there, it was for a worship service. Gord grew up going to St. Paul’s and he’s often been heard to say it was there that he got his start and learned about singing with emotion.

That day, he and I, along with my two colleagues, Blair Bailey and Fred Joblin, spent time together reflecting on his song “Sit Down Young Stranger” and how he gets inspired for his writing. He wanted two things to happen that day. He wanted to sing in the choir and step out from there to do his solo like he did as a young person and he wanted to have tea with the ladies after church. Even though he was a shy person and spent many hours in solitude as he crafted his lyrical and musical poetry, connections and relationships were a key theme of his life.

I first met Gord and his sister Bev in 1998 when their mom Jessie died and we met to plan her funeral. My favourite memory from that conversation was when Gord serenaded me with “Jesus Loves Me.” Several years later, I wrote to Bev to ask if she would pass on an invitation to Gordon to come for an interview to be part of the celebration of the 175th anniversary of St Paul’s. I’d almost given up hope that it would happen when several months later, I received a phone call at home late one evening. He was calling to say he could come to do an interview on Sunday afternoon, Dec. 4, less than a month away. I immediately said yes, not knowing what was happening in the church that day. He then started telling me about his life and why St. Paul’s was so important to him.

That was the first of many late-night conversations leading up to the interview. We would talk for an hour or two. I would never know when a call would come, but I loved every minute of him sharing his story as I frantically wrote down every detail. Those stories became the focus of the interview. Blair Bailey, our music director, and I would encourage him to retell the stories of our late-night conversations. The only question that he wouldn’t answer publicly was about his experience of coming close to death in 2002. He talked to me about it but when we came to that moment in the interview, he stood up and said it was time for another song.

part 2 in next post

Re: R.I.P Gord
 

After the interview, I told Gord that we hadn’t had a chance to ask him before we started if it was okay if we recorded our talk. I told him there were two copies and we would do what he wanted with them. Rick Haynes, his bassist of 37 years at that time, stepped up and said he should take a copy because it was the best interview he’d ever given.

While I did four public interviews with Gordon, plus umpteen private conversations for the purpose of preparing for interviews and writing an article about his childhood in Orillia, the one where Gord was most at ease, and we had the most fun, was at a United Church event called Worship Matters. The room was full of preachers, so I reflected with him on how his work aligns with the task of a preacher to name the realities of life so we can reflect on the kind of world we want to be creating. I also spoke with him about the theme of my life’s work, of the gift and power of authenticity, noting that being authentic, which he is, is a critical part of being able to touch lives. I shared with him that for me, he did that so clearly in “If You Could Read My Mind,” letting us into the recesses of his soul to discover ourselves.

My heart is warmed by the opportunity to fulfill his funeral plans in which I was named to be the minister for the private family service. The chance to be with the people who were intimately connected to his day-to-day life is a gift at this time when the world is grieving.

As I have read the ways people are eulogizing Gordon, I hear a recurring theme of being seen and heard by him. To me, that is what a good friend does. He will always be a cherished friend to me, but in so many ways, he was like a friend to people all across Canada and beyond as he lifted up our stories, our foibles and our connection to the land as a reflection of our reality, helping us to see ourselves more clearly and dream our dreams of the kind of life we want to create.

Rev. Karen Hilfman Millson is a retired United Church minister who was at St Paul’s United in Orillia for 17 years. She is a published author of The Mended Mirror with two new books coming called Pilgrimage with Cancer and a Collection of Poetry.

Re: R.I.P Gord
 

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/06/w...l04G15pgFzUeSc

By Shawna Richer
May 6, 2023
You’re reading the Canada Letter newsletter. Back stories and analysis from our Canadian correspondents, plus a handpicked selection of our recent Canada-related coverage. Get it sent to your inbox.

When I was growing up, Gordon Lightfoot songs played on the living room stereo, on the radio in the kitchen and in the family car and on my dad’s guitar so continuously that it felt like the Canadian singer-songwriter, who died in a Toronto hospital on Monday at 84, lived with us.

I talked this week with my mom and dad, who are 82, about the musician who made the soundtrack to our lives. My father recalled the first time they saw Lightfoot, who had been making a name for himself in 1965 on the folk music scene in Toronto. He is near certain it was in a union hall in nearby Hamilton, a few years before I was born. Lightfoot was a part of my family before I was.

In the early days his 1966 debut record — “Lightfoot!” — lived on the turntable of our mahogany console stereo that took up nearly as much space as the couch, but was the far more essential piece of furniture.

As his popularity grew through the 1960s and ’70s, Lightfoot was prolific, releasing an album each year, and they stacked up at our place, leaning against the stereo and within easy reach. All the covers featured Lightfoot, sensitive and brooding. His good looks of the 1970s were lost on younger me. But Lightfoot was the one artist that my parents could always agree on playing any time at any volume. Saturday nights. Sunday mornings. Home alone. With a house full of company. It was always Lightfoot.

My dad learned to play his whole catalog by ear on an acoustic six-string.

Nature and the wilderness were central themes for Lightfoot, as they were for my mom and dad and for me and my younger brother. His sense of place made me curious about Canada beyond my backyard. His few political songs — particularly “Black Day in July,” about the Detroit race riots of 1967 — sparked a fascination with the United States.

“Canadian Railroad Trilogy,” a panoramic suite that tells the story of Canada’s founding in 1867, was a history class set to music. Lightfoot wrote perfect three-minute ballads and sweeping seven-minute narratives, what the American musician Steve Earle, in the excellent 2019 documentary “If You Could Read My Mind” called “story songs.”

A Gordon Lightfoot album was packed with intrigue: songs about trains, shipwrecks, forests, lakes and rivers, with a throughline of melancholy that was mysterious and irresistible to an introverted kid who spent most of her time reading and writing.

I loved his melodic guitar and supple baritone. But his simple, succinct songs were a master class in narrative storytelling and wordcraft. Lightfoot’s songs, precise and profound, read like poems and unfolded like three-act plays.

Re: R.I.P Gord
 

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toron...l04G15pgFzUeSc

video at link - caught me getting a hug from Carter.. !
2nd video is of Rick Haynes

Fans pay respects at Gordon Lightfoot visitation in Orillia, Ont.

The legendary Canadian artist died May 1 at the age of 84 from natural causes
David Friend · The Canadian Press · Posted: May 07, 2023 9:48 AM EDT

More than 2,400 fans poured through a public visitation Sunday in Gordon Lightfoot's hometown in central Ontario to say goodbye to the folk singer-songwriter.

As rain fell, a line grew on the street outside St. Paul's United Church in Orillia, Ont., where Lightfoot once sang as a choir boy.

Inside, each person had a moment with the late musical legend as the line slowly passed by his closed casket. It was adorned with a large bouquet of red roses, as well as a single pink one.

Within the bouquet, a card handwritten by his widow, Kim Lightfoot, read: "My heart's treasure." For the first hour, she greeted visitors near where they entered the building.

Throughout the visitation, which is to run until 8 p.m. Sunday, a continuous flow of Lightfoot's songs played over the sound system.

Two hours after it began, security for the event estimated nearly 1,700 people had gone through the church.
Members of the public line up to pay their respects at visitation for singer-songwriter Gordon Lightfoot at St. Paul's United Church, in his hometown of Orillia, Ont., Sunday, May 7, 2023. The legendary Canadian artist died May 1, at the age of 84 from natural causes.

Steve Porter and his wife, Diane Porter, were first in line at the church at 10:30 a.m., two and a half hours before the doors opened. Not knowing how big the crowds would be, they wanted to show up early to pay their respects.

"I feel like I'm honouring Gord in my own little way," he said while standing in line.

"I'm representing my family and my ancestors who are all gone and who loved him dearly."

Myeengun Henry travelled from the Chippewas of the Thames First Nation near London, Ont, with a gift of tobacco to honour Lightfoot.

He also carried an eagle feather in hand, which he said was a symbolic gesture of the highest-flying bird.

"It can see the farthest and I kind of relate that to Gord," he said.

"He could see things other people couldn't and the eagle feather is perfect for thinking about Gordon. [He] sent the truth to many people and so I have so much respect for his legacy."

Antonette Dinovo and her husband, Vince Dinovo, travelled a couple of hours from Markham, Ont., outside of Toronto.

Antonette said they planned to visit a local record store and walk through nearby Mariposa, home of the music festival where Lightfoot often performed.

"I think it's important to be here today," she said. "It represents the loss we feel and a celebration."

Many local establishments took those sentiments to heart. Several bars and one of the local record stores planned to recognize Lightfoot's influence through live music performances this weekend.

David LaBute, who drove four hours from Windsor, Ont., for the weekend with his friend, said the spirit of Lightfoot could be felt in the streets of the city.

"There are tributes all over the place," he said. "It's really nice to see a town take ownership of one of their own."
'An emotional day,' longtime friend says

Rick Haynes was Gordon Lightfoot's bassist, and a longtime friend. He said it was "an emotional day" for him.

"There's a lot of memories connected to Gordon around Orillia here today, as well as thousands of his fans, so … it's very surreal and poignant," Haynes told CBC News.

Haynes said he's reflecting on 55 years with Lightfoot "and all of the good times we had, and he has said 'it's been a great ride.'"

"It's been a real honour to have worked for Gordon all these years," he added.

Haynes described his friend as "a very humble man," an adventurer, a philanthropist and "a very shy person. Some people mistook that for being aloof or arrogant, but he wasn't aloof or arrogant at all. He was shy and humble."

At 2 p.m., church bells at St. Paul's rang 30 times, 29 for the crew of the Edmund Fitzgerald and once in honour of Lightfoot.

After Lightfoot's death on May 1, Orillia residents began placing flowers on two monuments to the singer in the city.

On Saturday, a previously planned concert tribute to his career at the Orillia Opera House became a celebration of his life and career.

Elsewhere, a book of condolences can be signed at Toronto's Massey Hall, a venue where Lightfoot frequently performed throughout his career. It's to be available from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m.

A private funeral is to take place in Orillia, where he will be buried alongside his parents.