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Gordon Lightfoot Read About a Shipwreck. Then He Wrote One of Music’s Most Unusual Hit Singles
In an excerpt from The Gales of November: The Untold Story of the Edmund Fitzgerald, author John U. Bacon chronicles Lightfoot’s determination to get the facts of the tragedy right in his epic ballad
September 30, 2025
On the night of Nov. 10, 1975, Gordon Lightfoot was perched in the attic of his Toronto home, working on a song. By then, the 36-year-old was already one of the most successful figures of the singer-songwriter era, having penned coffeehouse standards like “If You Could Read My Mind” and “Early Morning Rain,” and he earned the admiration of Bob Dylan (who once said, “I can’t think of any Gordon Lightfoot song I don’t like.”) His 1974 album, the folk-country opus Sundown, had recently hit Number One on the Billboard 200, spawning hits with both the title song and “Carefree Highway.” But it wasn’t all chart success and good vibes; in the Seventies a bout of Bell’s palsy would partially paralyze Lightfoot’s face, and later in the decade he developed a severe drinking problem. The songs weren’t so mellow, either — the easy-grooving “Sundown,” for example, was about infidelity, the chorus a warning to another man pursuing his girlfriend.

On that November evening, Lightfoot was playing around with a melody from an old Irish dirge he’d heard as a kid; he had the tune, but no lyrics — not yet. Around 10 p.m., Lightfoot took a break and headed down to his kitchen for a cup of coffee. Lightfoot, a recreational sailor, took note of the rough weather. “The wind was howling even in Toronto,” he said, “and I went back up to the attic thinking, ‘I wonder what it’s like up on Lake Superior.’ It must’ve been awful.”
It was: That same night, the Edmund Fitzgerald, a mighty Great Lakes freighter, would sink, taking the lives of its 29 crew members with it. The tragedy would soon reverberate around the country — and give Lightfoot the inspiration for his next song.
“The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” is a remarkable pop artifact — a wordy six-minute ballad with no chorus and a deep devotion to the facts of what really happened on Nov. 10, 1975. Despite — or, more likely, because of — these qualities, the song reached Number Two on the Hot 100 in 1976 and became one of Lightfoot’s best-known songs.
In his new book, The Gales of November: The Untold Story of the Edmund Fitzgerald, bestselling author John U. Bacon tells the story of the Fitzgerald in compelling detail, in the process delivering a rich history of Great Lakes shipping. (The oceans tend to get the glory, but the seasoned sailors say the Great Lakes are at least as fearsome, and Great Lakes shipping, in so many ways, made America’s auto industry possible.)
Late in The Gales of November, Bacon — who’s written books on leadership and college football, among other topics — devotes two chapters to Lightfoot’s epic ballad. So much of the unlikely story is about Lightfoot’s obsessive attention to detail and commitment to getting the story right, which resulted in a classic ballad that has helped keep the ship’s memory alive.

“Anyone writing a book about the Edmund Fitzgerald has to be humble enough to acknowledge that without the song, there is no book,” Bacon says. “How can I be so sure? Between 1875 and 1975 the Great Lakes claimed a staggering 6,000 shipwrecks — that’s an average of one per week, for a century — yet most people can only name one. Clocking in at over six minutes, with no chorus or hook, Gordon Lightfoot’s song never should have become a hit. But it did, and I think it’s because of the bone-deep sincerity he brought to the task. He meant every word, and listeners can tell — including the victims’ families.”

Read an excerpt from The Gales of November on the making of “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” below.

After the Edmund Fitzgerald sank on Monday, November 10, 1975, Gordon Lightfoot read Harry Atkins’s Associated Press story in the Los Angeles Times, then Jim Gaines’s piece in Newsweek two weeks after the wreck.

Lightfoot biographer Nicholas Jennings tells us Lightfoot read the opening line of the Newsweek story “and was instantly captivated.” “When the Edmund Fitzgerald went down I imagined what that wave might have been like,” Lightfoot said. He added that the Newsweek piece “really moved” him, but it struck him that the twenty-nine men deserved more than a half page in a national news magazine.
Lightfoot felt that he was getting close on his sea shanty melody, which seemed to fit his subject’s somber and mysterious mood, so he started working on the words.

“It was quite an undertaking to do that,” he said. “I went and bought all of the old newspapers, got everything in chronological order.”

With the AP, Newsweek, and other stories laid out in front of him, Lightfoot began by writing about “the big lake they call Gitche Gumee,” the “load of iron ore” that weighed twenty-six thousand tons, “the gales of November,” and “the maritime sailors’ cathedral,” where “the church bell chimed ’til it rang twenty-nine times/For each man on the Edmund Fitzgerald.”

The troubadour had done his homework.

The song’s 478 words, just 56 shy of the Newsweek article itself, told the story with both economy and feeling, two masters that are hard to please in one song.

Still, Lightfoot remained deeply unsure of this piece, particularly his lyrics, due to the sensitivity of the subject. He feared being inaccurate, corny, or worse, appearing to exploit a tragedy for profit. But more than that, as a fellow sailor and a child of the Great Lakes, and as a musician whose first song he ever recalled was now playing in his head, decades later, this song — whatever it was — was deeply personal. It was something he felt.
Lightfoot couldn’t put the song out of his mind, tinkering with it for months — but always keeping it to himself.

BY DECEMBER OF 1975, Lightfoot felt he had enough songs ready for his next album, Summertime Dream. It was time to gather his longtime bassist Rick Haynes, guitarists Terry Clements and Pee Wee Charles, and a new drummer, Barry Keane, to rehearse the tunes in the solarium of Lightfoot’s home.

Lightfoot took a working man’s approach to his music, and he expected his band to do so, too. After practicing long hours Monday through Friday, Keane recalls, they had about a dozen songs “in pretty good shape. But at the end of each rehearsal Gord started strumming this new song, in six-eight time, which you don’t hear very often. Terry and Pee Wee would work out parts of it. Rick might have played a note or two, that’s all, and I never played a single beat on it.

“But before they ever got going on it Gord would always stop and say, ‘No no. It’s not ready yet. Don’t worry about it. Look, this is a song about a shipwreck — a real one.’ ”

Then Lightfoot would drop the subject, every time.

In the spring of 1976 Lightfoot summoned his band to Eastern Sound Studios on Yorkville Avenue in Toronto for a five-day session, noon to six each day, to put Summertime Dream on vinyl. In the meantime Lightfoot had figured out how the guitar parts for his new sea shanty would go, but he still wouldn’t dare sing the lyrics to anyone, nor did he plan on recording the song for this album, if ever.
But the pattern held. On Monday, after getting a handful of songs polished enough to put “in the can,” Lightfoot started fiddling with the sea shanty again, but shortly after the others joined him he abruptly stopped.

“No, no, we’re not doing it.”

The same thing happened Tuesday, and again Wednesday: After getting a few more songs on tape, he’d start playing the new song, and then shut it down.

“It isn’t ready,” he insisted. “And it’s not going to be on the album.” The band still hadn’t heard the whole song, just some chords and bars, and no lyrics.

By 3 p.m. on Thursday they had finished recording ten songs for the new album, a full day and a half before their studio rental ran out.

“Gord said, ‘Okay, we’re done. Thank you guys.’ ” Keane says. “This was back in the Seventies, when no one finished early. But we were a tight group, and knew what we were doing.”

The bandmembers had already started packing up when studio engineer Kenny Friesen hit the talk-back button in the booth to speak to the band. “What about that shipwreck song?”

Lightfoot once again protested that it wasn’t ready.