The song "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald" has haunted me since childhood (it was played a lot on the radio at the time). I remember standing still in Woolworths when I was about 8 so I could listen to the whole thing. It is utterly beautiful. He conveys the lonely, cold peril of that night without reducing the lyrics to schmaltz (which a lesser wordsmith might so easily have done). I think any human being with a grain of empathy for their fellow man can't help but be moved by his eloquence.
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