Does anyone know where the love of God goes when the waves turn the minutes to hours?
Last fall, as we hit the anniversary of the Edmund Fitzgerald disaster, I sat down to play Gordon Lightfoot’s epic song for what may well have been the millionth time. It was the first song that I ever learned to play on the guitar, and I remember being struck by a realization that hadn’t occurred to me before.
It seems likely that the first song you learn to play on the guitar is the reason you learn to play the guitar. And last night, hearing of Gordon’s passing, I was transported back to that time when his amazing catalog pushed me to figure out the magic hidden in those six steel strings.
Your father’s pride was his means to provide and he’s serving three years for that reason.
Circle of Steel was the other song that I so desperately wanted to learn in those days. I may have learned it before I had memorized all 14 verses of Fitzgerald, I can’t remember. But those two songs were the catalysts for my now nearly lifelong love affair with guitar and songwriting. Gordon has often been referred to as a troubadour and I don’t know if I can think of a better job to have. And I often bristled at those who wanted to reduce him to his easy listening hits, as classic as they might be.
You can’t jump a jet plane like you can a freight train.
His musical world was filled with seafaring men, thoughtful poets, broken hearts, pioneers, and whiskey soaked lost causes like the drunk near the runway staring at the roaring plane overhead in Early Morning Rain. Like great novelists that I admire, people like John Irving, his work intimidated me as much as it enraptured me. I saw him as the state of the art when it came to songwriting (as did Bob Dylan who thought of Gordon as his favorite songwriter). Hoping to emulate such a titan is, of course, tortuous. But what’s the point of a hero if it isn’t a star so distant as to seem unreachable?
See the children of the earth who wake to find the table bare. See the gentry in the country, riding off to take the air.
His songs were often seeped in social consciousness, as you would expect from any founding father of the folk movement. And his finesse with heaviness was thrilling. The song Don Quixote makes an extraordinary turn from the tale of the knight tilting at windmills to the traps of the modern ghetto so seamlessly that you want to look back at your horse’s footprints to figure out how he got you here. And that song is also a classic example of Gordon’s guitar gifts. Far from three chords and a cloud of dust, the intricacies of his playing and musicianship still confound me. (If you’re a guitarist, maybe you’ve taken a whack at If You Could Read My Mind. But songs like Don Quixote and, a personal favorite, Miguel are next level.)
Across the wide prairies our loved ones lie sleeping, beyond the dark ocean in a place far away…
And I would be remiss not to mention my admiration for his being stubbornly Canadian. Early in his career, his only successes were coming through others singing his songs. Gordon’s version of Ribbon of Darkness didn’t get far, but for Marty Robbins, it sat on top of the country charts for seven weeks. Peter, Paul and Mary turned Early Morning Rain into a classic. The pull must have been strong for Gordon to leave Canada for the U.S. But he resisted, and it finally paid off when his version of If You Could Read My Mind took flight. (That one, too, has been sung by others; at last count, there are more than 300 recorded versions of the song, everyone from Cher to Johnny Cash.)
Not growing up here, Gordon was in many ways my foundation on Canada — songs of winter nights with “webs of snow” drifting in the windows. I can still remember him singing Alberta Bound at the opening ceremonies of the Calgary Olympics in 1988. And I remain slack-jawed still at the majesty of Canadian Railroad Trilogy, the song I was moved to share on social media when I learned Gordon had died (in Toronto, of course).
He is a Canadian treasure and institution. But Gordon was mine, too.
When I arrived in Detroit for my first job interview at WDIV, then news director Carol Rueppel drove me to lunch and casually motioned to the Mariners’ Church on Jefferson Avenue. She had no idea that a chill was running down my spine from seeing that “musty old hall” in Detroit where “the church bell chimed till it rang twenty-nine times.” Such is the hold of the first song you learn to play on guitar, and of the man who penned it.
That kid from Kansas will be forever grateful to the Canadian Troubadour for that beautiful nudge to take up those six strings. May I never recover.