While Mark continues to recuperate, we turn to the terrible events of exactly half-a-century ago - November 10th 1975 - on Lake Superior, when a full crew of twenty-nine men from what was then the largest ship on the lake were lost in a ferocious storm. So, upon the fiftieth anniversary of a terrible shipwreck, we reprise Steyn's thoughts on the song it inspired:
When it comes to trains and boats and planes, Gordon Lightfoot hymned all three. His first enduring composition, "Early Morning Rain", was born from homesickness, when he would go to the airport in Los Angeles and watch the flights taking off back to Canada. But it's really a train song for the jet age. When he tried producing an actual train song, his "Canadian Railroad Trilogy" written for the nation's Centennial in 1967, it came out a bit musically undernourished for the lyrical weight it had to bear. So much for the trains and planes. That leaves the middle, and oldest, mode of transportation to produce the song Lightfoot insisted he was proudest of:
The ship was the pride
Of the American side
Coming back from some mill in Wisconsin
As the big freighters go
It was bigger than most
With a crew and good captain well seasoned...
In November 1975 Gordon Lightfoot chanced to be reading Newsweek's account of the sinking of a Great Lakes freighter in Canadian waters. He was a slow and painstaking author, which is one reason he eventually quit songwriting - because it was taking too much time away from his grandkids. But that day half-a-century ago the story literally struck a chord, and he found himself scribbling away, very quickly:
The legend lives on
From the Chippewa on down
Of the big lake they called Gitche Gumee
The lake, it is said
Never gives up her dead
When the skies of November turn gloomy...
"Gitche gumee" is Ojibwe for "great sea" - ie, Lake Superior - as you'll know if you've read your Longfellow, which I'm not sure anyone does these days. Evidently Hiawatha was on the curriculum back east across Lake Huron in young Gordy's schoolhouse in Orillia. The Gitche Gumee reference may be why, when my young self first became aware of "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald", I assumed its subject had sunk long before the song was written. In fact, it sank on November 10th 1975 - just a few days before Lightfoot wrote the number. When she'd launched in 1958, the Edmund Fitzgerald was the largest ship on the Great Lakes, and, when she passed through the Soo Locks between Lakes Superior and Huron, her size always drew a crowd and her captain was always happy to entertain them with a running commentary over the loudspeakers about her history and many voyages - punctuated by various discs he enjoyed jockeying. So Peter Pulcer became known as "the DJ captain" and his ship a beloved sight on the Great Lakes.
For seventeen years she ferried taconite ore from Minnesota to the iron works of Detroit, Toledo and the other Great Lakes ports ...until, that is, one November evening of severe winds and 35-feet waves:
The wind in the wires
Made a tattle-tale sound
And a wave broke over the railin'
And every man knew
As the captain did too
'Twas the witch of November come stealin'...
And about seventeen miles from Whitefish Bay the Edmund Fitzgerald sank, with the loss of all 29 lives. It remains the largest ship ever wrecked on the Great Lakes. In 1958, a year before the Queen and President Eisenhower opened the St Lawrence Seaway with an inaugural voyage by the Royal Yacht Britannia, "the Fitz" (as it came to be known) was built to take full advantage of the Seaway's possibilities, specifically constructed to be only a foot less than the maximum length permitted. Edmund Fitzgerald was the then chairman of Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance of Milwaukee, and, as far as I'm aware, remains the only insurance company executive to be immortalised in a song title. Fifteen thousand people showed up for the ship's launch at River Rouge, Michigan. It took Mrs Fitzgerald three attempts to shatter the champers against the bow, and then there was a further half-hour's delay as the shipyard workers tried to loosen the keel blocks. After which the ship flopped into the water, crashed against a pier, and sent up a huge wave to douse the crowd. One spectator promptly had a heart attack and died.
And then came seventeen happy years. Even in the twenty-first century, there is something especially awful and sobering about death at sea: it is in a certain sense a reminder of the fragility of security and modernity. Whenever I'm in, for example, St Pierre et Miquelon, the last remaining territory of French North America, I stop by the monument aux marins disparus, sculpted in 1964 and to which many names have been added in the years since - just because a ship put out, and somewhere on the horizon the great primal forces rose up from the depths and snapped it in two like a matchstick.
That said, human tragedy alone does not make for singable material. The last contact from the SS Edmund Fitzgerald was with another ship, the SS Arthur M Anderson. Yet "The Wreck of the Arthur M Anderson" would have been a far less evocative title. Arthur Marvin Anderson was on the board of US Steel, as Edmund Fitzgerald was on the board of Northwestern Mutual. But there is something pleasingly archaic about the latter name: in fact, as I think of it, I believe the last Edmund I met was one of Gordon Lightfoot's fellow Canadian singers - the late operetta baritone Edmund Hockridge. Pair "Edmund" to "Fitzgerald", and you have something redolent of Sir Walter Scott or Robert Louis Stevenson, of shipwrecks off Cornwall or the Hebrides. Perhaps that's why "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald" either sounds like an old Scots-Irish folk tune or, alternatively, actually is one. For any IRA members reading this, Bobby Sands, the hunger striker who starved himself to death in a British gaol, wrote in his cell a song called "Back Home in Derry", about Irish prison deportees en route to Australia and set to a tune remarkably like "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald", which it seems unlikely he ever heard.
I see some musicologists claim the tune is in Dorian mode, although it sounds Mixolydian to me (like "The Wexford Carol"). Whichever it is, there is a perfect union between the emphatic melody, the crash of the waves, the antediluvian moniker of Northwestern Mutual's chairman, and even the obvious filler phrases, so typical of ancient folk songs:
The lake, it is said
Never gives up her dead
- which returns far more effectively in the final verse:
Superior, they said
Never gives up her dead
- as if Gitchee Gumee is some vast ravening beast. Go back to Orillia, to Fourth Grade in 1947, and the assembled parents listening to Mr and Mrs Lightfoot's little boy sing "Too-Ra-Loo-Ra-Loo-Ral" as if a bit of synthetic shamrock from an old Tin Pan Alleyman were a genuine Irish lullaby from the mists of Emerald Isle antiquity. That's the genius of "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald": It was born sounding as if it's a hundred years old. And its agelessness is all the more amazing when you consider that it's essentially an act of journalism, an adaptation of a news report about something that happened a few days earlier - just the facts, ma'am, with minimal artistic license:
In a musty old hall
In Detroit they prayed
In the maritime sailors' cathedral...
"Maritime sailors" is surely a redundancy, and it's not a cathedral but the "Mariners' Church", which doesn't quite go the distance syllable-wise. And an irked parishioner wrote to Lightfoot to say the church isn't in the least bit "musty", so in later years he found alternative adjectives.
But that's all details. The power of the song lies in its storytelling. It immortalised the fate of the freighter not just for the families of the dead, "the wives and the sons and the daughters", but for everyone, and it made the Edmund Fitzgerald the Titanic of the Great Lakes - except that the Titanic never inspired any song like this. The mournful toll of the lakes in the penultimate stanza is Gordon Lightfoot at his very best:
Lake Huron rolls
Superior sings
In the rooms of her ice-water mansion
Old Michigan steams
Like a young man's dreams
The islands and bays are for sportsmen
And farther below
Lake Ontario
Takes in what Lake Erie can send her
And the iron boats go
As the mariners all know
With the gales of November remembered...
The gales of November howl and the waves rise up and devour the ship. And then the gales subside and the placid surface betrays no trace of twenty-nine men, taken deep into the rooms of an ice-water mansion and never to be found. And Superior sings:
~excerpted from Steyn's Song of the Week, November 18th 2018
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