Gordon Lightfoot, the Canadian folk singer whose warm, melancholic baritone voice and gift for creating melodious music made him one of the most popular recording artists of the 1970s, died late last night. Monday in Toronto. He was 84 years old.
His death, at Sunnybrook Hospital, was confirmed by his journalist, Victoria Lord. No cause has been given.
Mr. Lightfoot, a rapidly rising star in Canada in the early 1960s, achieved international success when his Canadian friends and colleagues Ian and Sylvia Tyson recorded two of his songs, “Rainy early morning” And “For Lovin’ Me.”
When Peter, Paul and Mary came out with their own versionand Marty Robbins topped the national charts with Mr. Lightfoot’s “The Dark Ribbon,” Mr. Lightfoot’s reputation skyrocketed. Overnight, he joined the ranks of musicians like Bob Dylan, Phil Ochs and Tom Paxton, all of whom have influenced his style.
As folk music became popular, dwarfed by the British invasion, Mr. Lightfoot began writing ballads aimed at a wider audience. He scored hit after hit, starting in 1970 with the heartfelt song “If You Could Read My Mind,” inspired by the breakup of his first marriage.
In quick succession, he scored hits.”sundown,” “Carefree Highway,” “Rainy Day People” And “Edmund Fitzgerald’s Shipwreck,” which he wrote after reading an article in Newsweek about the sinking of an iron ore tanker in Lake Superior in 1975, with the death of all 29 crew members.
To Canadians, Mr. Lightfoot is a national hero, a homegrown star who has stayed at home even after achieving spectacular success in the United States and who has served his Canadian fans. with cross-country tours. His ballads are on Canadian themes, like “Canadian Railway Trio,” moved with a love for the country’s rivers and forests, which he discovered during his ambitious canoe trips inland.
His personal style, reserved and humble – he avoids interviews and flinches when praised – also goes downhill. “Sometimes I wonder why I’m called an icon, because I really don’t think of myself that way,” Mr. Lightfoot told The Globe and Mail in 2008. “I’m a musician. professional and I work with a lot of people. Professional people. That’s how we get through life.”
Gordon Meredith Lightfoot Jr. was born on November 17, 1938 in Orillia, Ontario, where his father managed a dry cleaning factory. As a boy, he sang in church choirs, performed on local radio shows, and shone in singing competitions. He told Time magazine in 1968: “God, I did it all: the oratorio, the Kiwanis contests, the operettas, the barbershop quartet.
He played piano, drums and guitar as a teenager, and while in high school he wrote his first song, a topical song about the Hula Hoop craze with a catchy ending. : “I guess I’m just being lazy and I’m going to lose my job because I’m always Hula-Hula-Hoopin’.”
After studying composition and orchestration at 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 on the television show “Country Hoedown,” but he quickly became a part of the Toronto folk scene, performing in Toronto. same cafes and clubs as Ian and Sylvia. , Joni Mitchell, Neil Young and Leonard Cohen.
He formed a folk duo, Two Tones, with a fellow “Hoedown” performer, Terry Whelan. The duo recorded a live album in 1962, “Two Melodies in the Corner of the Village”. The following year, while traveling in Europe, he was the host of “The Country and Western Show” on BBC television.
As a musician, Mr. Lightfoot has gone further than Hula Hoop, but not by much. His work “doesn’t have any kind of identity,” he told the authors of “The Encyclopedia of Folk, Country and Western Music,” published in 1969. When the Greenwich Village’s folk boom brought Dylan and other dynamic musicians to the world. First, he said, “I started to have perspective, and that’s when I started to improve.”
In 1965, he appeared at the Newport Folk Festival and made his U.S. debut at City Hall in New York. “Mr. Robert Shelton wrote in The New York Times. “If he paid a little more attention to his theatrical personality, he would become quite famous.”
A year later, after signing Albert Grossman, Dylan and Peter’s manager, Paul and Mary, Lightfoot recorded his first solo album, “Lightfoot!” With the performance of “Early morning rain,” “For Lovin’ Me,” “Dark Ribbon” And “I’m not saying that,” A record hit in Canada in 1963, the album was well received by critics.
Real commercial success came when he switched to Warner Brothers, initially recording for the company’s Reprise label. “By the time I switched to Warner Brothers, circa 1970, I was reinventing myself,” he told Georgia Savannah Connect in 2010. In that way I could have some music that people could use. want to hear.”
Mr. Lightfoot, who accompanies himself on a 12-string acoustic guitar, whose voice often trembles with emotion, provides free, direct accounts of his material. He sings about loneliness, troubled relationships, the itchiness of wandering, and the grandeur of the Canadian landscape. As Canadian writer Jack Batten put it, he was “a journalist, poet, historian, humorist, short storyteller and reminiscent of days gone by”.
His popularity as a recording artist began to dwindle in the 1980s, but he maintained a tight touring schedule. In 1999 Rhino Records released “Songbook”, a four-disc survey of his career.
Mr. Lightfoot, who lives in Toronto, is survived by his sister, Beverley Eyers; his children, Fred, Ingrid, Miles, Meredith, Eric and Galen, and his wife, Kim Hasse. His first two marriages ended in divorce.
In 2002, just before taking the stage in Orillia, Mr. Lightfoot collapsed when his abdominal aortic aneurysm burst and nearly died. After two years of recuperation, he recorded an album, “Harmony,” and in 2005 he resumed his live performances with the Better Late Than Never Tour.
“I want to be like Ralph Carter, Stompin’ Tom and Willie Nelson,” Mr. Lightfoot told CBC in 2004. “Just do it for as long as possible.”
Vjosa Isai contribution report.
