The Part Where The Heartaches Come
Canadian folk giant Gordon Lightfoot left us on May 1.
EARLY MORNING RAIN was the song that let the world know Gordon Lightfoot was a top-shelf songwriter. First released on his 1966 debut LP Lightfoot!, it was steeped in folk traditions, but instead of the protagonist longing for a freight train, he bids farewell to his true love as she leaves on a 707 jet plane – truly a 20th century folk song, with an airborne rhythm that achieves lift-off. Ian & Sylvia, Peter, Paul And Mary, Dylan and Elvis popularised it, while George Hamilton IV’s version made the country charts. Paul Weller had a UK hit with it in 2005.
“It was probably the first really good song I wrote,” Lightfoot told MOJO in 2015. “It came to me from heaven – it was a gift. That was the first one where I could say to myself I’d done something well. It was the song that got it started.”
“Dylan called him ‘the Pavarotti of folk singers.’”
And yet the song is just one of dozens of classics Lightfoot composed, recorded and performed in his immediately identifiable, sonorous baritone over a half-century career. (Dylan called him “the Pavarotti of folk singers.”) An ambitious native of Ontario born on November 17, 1938, he excelled as a boy soprano and a star college athlete, and taught himself drums and folk guitar. After studying jazz composition and orchestration in
Los Angeles, he immersed himself in the 1960s folk boom in Toronto, eventually signing with Dylan manager Albert Grossman and United Artist Records, a deal that yielded some of the greatest popular folk songs of the ’60s: Early Morning Rain, For Lovin’ Me, Did She Mention My Name? and Ribbon Of Darkness, the latter song taken to the top of the US country charts by Marty Robbins. Canadian Railroad Trilogy established Lightfoot’s stature as his nation’s greatest singing historian.
Unhappy with UA’s lack of promotion, Lightfoot signed with Reprise in 1970. Not only was his first LP with them an artistic triumph, it established the folk singer as a consistent commercial success. A slew of hit singles came to define Gord-o, as fans knew him, as one of the premier musical voices of the 1970s: If You Could Read My Mind, Carefree Highway, Sundown, Summer Side Of Life, The Wreck Of The Edmund Fitzgerald and more. His prodigious output was uncanny, and for a decade it seemed as if he owned the pop charts with songs that boasted remarkably catchy melodies, intelligent lyrics and earthy delivery.
His old pal Dylan inducted him into the Canadian Music Hall Of Fame at the 1986 Juno Awards. He never repeated his astonishing ’60s and ’70s output, but continued making fine music despite bouts with serious illnesses. “It’s what keeps my engine running,” he told MOJO, “because I love the work.”