Gordon Lightfoot F

From east to west, up into the Arctic and all the other wild places I’ve been, so many have poetic imagery that, fortunately, I’ve had the ability to translate into words, into songs. They get your imagination working for you. But of all places, Orillia, Ont., my hometown, was the greatest influence. There was always music. In Grade 7, I made my first recording for a parents’ day event. It was “Irish Lullaby,” and it got played over the school sound system. I was taking music classes, then, performing the Irish tunes Bing Crosby was recording at that time for Orillia’s ladies' committees and the men’s Lions Club, and all through high school I sang with a dance band. My girlfriends used to sit on the sidelines at the big school dances and wait for me. They were very good about waiting. My friends and I fished winter and summer on Lake Simcoe and Lake Couchiching. I remember one winter that had been so cold, all of Lake Couchiching was covered by black ice and no snow whatsoever. But mostly we fished in Simcoe, off Eight Mile Point. Every winter for five years, we’d go half a mile out, each in our own huts, and pull up whitefish and lake trout. We used to take that lovely whitefish down to the Buehler Bros. meat market and sell them to the guy who ran the place. In the summertime we caught bass and perch up on Couchiching’s east shore. The memory of it all! I mean, I was like Huck Finn. You could name any number of streams and we’d fished them, including the North River area where we went for speckled trout. We could make it out there on our bicycles, you see. All of that rubbed off and it kept working its way into my tunes. It’s everywhere. My song “Pussywillows, Cat Tails” — that’s a perfect description of what it’s like there.

The legendary singer-songwriter recalls his childhood exploits in Orillia, Ont., and the surrounding lake country