http://www.orilliapacket.com/2016/07...ture-unveiling
The second in a series of bronze leaves honouring the songs of Gordon Lightfoot was unveiled Sunday.
“Black Day in July” was the song featured in a sculpture by Timothy Schmalz, who also created “Golden Leaves,” the overarching tribute to Lightfoot unveiled at Barnfield Point last fall.
The 1968 song details the five day riot which occurred in Detroit in July 1967. Several commentators at the unveiling of the sculpture noted the song's continued relevance, given the latest rounds of racial unrest in the United States.
Lightfoot was somewhat humble about the tune. “It's a good song,” he said.
Although it's a song he wished he never wrote.
He wrote “Black Day in July” as a Canadian with empathy, based on what he was seeing during his initial shows in the United States. He recalled opening for Oscar Peterson in Detroit, and playing bars and coffee houes on both sides of the river during this time.
The overt political interpretation was much more a product of the song getting Top 40 airplay – and subsequently banned - particularly in the Windsor-Detroit market, he said.
“I felt I had no business commenting on it in the first place, as an outsider looking in,” Lightfoot told the gathered media after the unveiling.
Not that Lightfoot didn't dabble in writing songs with a message. He later added he wrote a number of socially-inspired songs during the late 1960s, thanks in part to the inspiration and friendship of Phil Ochs, the late folk troubadour.
One thing he's sure of when it comes to “Black Day in July” is how The Tragically Hip do an incredible cover of the song. During his remarks to the crowd, Lightfoot said Gord Downie and The Hip do “the devil out of this tune.”
“I love the way Gord does the song,” Lightfoot said of the ailing Hip frontman. The Hip's cover appeared on a Lightfoot tribute album released in 2003.
In 2015, the first bronze leaf was unveiled on the Lightfoot Trail, based on “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.”
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