Released August 1976 Genre Folk rock | Format 7" 45 | |
B-side "The House You Live In" Recorded December 1975
Eastern Sound Studios, Toronto Length 6:32 (album version)
5:57 (single edit) | ||
"The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald" is a song written, composed, and performed by Canadian singer-songwriter Gordon Lightfoot to commemorate the sinking of the bulk carrier SS Edmund Fitzgerald on Lake Superior on November 10, 1975. Lightfoot drew his inspiration from Newsweek's article on the event, "The Cruelest Month", which it published in its November 24, 1975, issue. Lightfoot considers this song to be his finest work.
Contents
Appearing originally on Lightfoot's 1976 album Summertime Dream, the single version hit number 1 in his native Canada (in the RPM national singles survey) on November 20, 1976, barely a year after the disaster. In the United States, it reached number 1 in Cashbox and number 2 for two weeks in the Billboard Hot 100 (behind Rod Stewart's "Tonight's The Night"), making it Lightfoot's second-most-successful single behind "Sundown". Overseas it was at best a minor hit, peaking at number 40 in the UK Singles Chart.
The song is written in Mixolydian mode.
Artistic license
The song contains a few artistic omissions and paraphrases. In a later interview aired on Canadian commercial radio, Lightfoot recounted how he had agonised while trying to pen the lyrics over possible inaccuracies until Lenny Waronker, his long-time producer and friend, finally removed his writer's block simply by advising him to play to his artistic strengths and "just tell a story". On the other hand, Lightfoot's personal passion for recreational sailing on the Great Lakes informs his ballad's verses throughout.
Production
The song was recorded in December 1975 at Eastern Sound, a recording studio made out of two Victorian houses at 48 Yorkville Avenue in a beatnik district of downtown Toronto, Canada. The famous studio, which also recorded Cat Stevens, Bruce Springsteen and Jimi Hendrix, was later torn down and replaced by a parking lot.
The song was the first commercial early digital multi-track recording tracked on the prototype 3M 32-track digital recorder, a novel technology for the time.
Pee Wee Charles and Terry Clements came up with "the haunting guitar and steel riffs" on a "second take" during the evening session.
"Lightfoot cleared the studio and killed all the lights save the one illuminating his parchment of scribbled words" when recording his vocal part.
Derivative works
The Canadian art-rock group The Rheostatics recorded a version of the song for their 1991 album Melville.
In 1995, two decades after Lightfoot's original song was written, singer-songwriter Camille West recorded a parody song with a similar rhythm titled "The Nervous Wreck of Edna Fitzgerald," about a well-to-do family's disastrous day at sea. She recorded and released it on her album Mother Tongue (subtitled "Maternal Madness, Month by Month") that year. Ten years later, after she had joined the band Four Bitchin' Babes, she and the band performed the song live, prefacing it with the comment, "With apologies to Gordon Lightfoot." It was included on their album of that year, Gabby Road.
Executive producer Paul Gross wanted to use the song for the Due South episode "Mountie on the Bounty." Lightfoot agreed, but only if Gross gained approval from the families of all the men who lost their lives in the wreck. Gross and Jay Semko instead created a song about a fictional shipwreck on the Great Lakes - "32 Down on the Robert McKenzie"
NRBQ frequently performed "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald" live, though in a less than serious manner. Video shows vocalist Terry Adams, reading from a lyrics sheet, chuckling as his voice cracks, while audience members throw debris at the stage. They did this to mock the song, not as a serious cover version.
Portland based music group The Dandy Warhols performed a cover of the song in 2009.