It happened forty-nine years ago today, in the cruelest month of the year, the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, a maritime tragedy surpassed in notoriety only by the Titanic.

After listening to Gordon Lightfoot’s memorialization of this heartbreaking event for nearly half a century, I still can’t make it past these words (if I even get this far) without sobbing:

Does anyone know where the love of God goes
When the waves turn the minutes to hours?

Magellan and I haven’t travelled to the Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum at Whitefish Point or the Valley Camp Museum in Sault Ste. Marie to see the Fitzgerald’s bell, lifeboats and the few other remains from the vessel that vanished into the deep. Nor did we go to Massey Hall this May for the tribute to Gordon Lightfoot. Which is why most of the photos selected for this blog are anchored in the depth of the song’s emotion. We will though, be in the air today, possibly in the cold space above Lake Superior.

Gordon Lightfoot wrote this ballad quickly, finishing it exactly two weeks after the fatal incident. He was inspired by “The Cruelest Month,” a Newsweek article about the catastrophe, other news reports and Coast Guard documents. His bandmates Pee Wee Charles and Terry Clements came up with the haunting guitar and steel riffs.

His legendary song was recorded in December at Eastern Sound, a Toronto studio frequented by artists like Bruce Springsteen, Cat Stevens and Jimi Hendrix. For the vocal recording of this six-and-a-half-minute song, Gordon cleared out the studio and turned out the lights. Except for a small light shining on the lyrics, he sang in the dark.

In the biography Lightfoot by Nicolas Jennings, drummer Barry Keane, who worked with Gordon for 47 years, says of the recording, “Not only was it a first take, but it was the first time we’d played the entire song and the first time we’d even heard the lyrics.”

Twice as long as any hit at the time, the single version, reduced by 35 seconds, came out the following year and hit #1 on all the Canadian weekly charts. In the United States, it was #1 on the Cash Box Top 100 and #2 on the Billboard Hot 100. The New York Times music critic Ann Powers wrote that the song captures “high drama in sepia tones” and was “perhaps the only sea chantey to become a major hit in the arena rock era.” It was Gordon’s second-best selling song, surpassed only by “Sundown.” In an interview decades later, he said it was the recording of which he was most proud.

The Edmund Fitzgerald, designed and built by Great Lakes Engineering Works, was the largest vessel on the Great Lakes at the time. Built to take advantage of the new St Lawrence Seaway, it was purchased in 1957 by Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance of Milwaukee, a company that provided financing assistance for the construction and conversion of ships and river towboats and barges. The company named the 729-foot-long ship Edmund Fitzgerald in honour of its chairman of the board, who had successively worked there for twenty-five years as vice-President and president. The Fitzgerald family had a long history of marine expertise. Edmund’s paternal grandfather, John, and John’s five brothers were captains of Great Lakes sailing ships. Edmund’s father William was president of Milwaukee Drydock Company, which he merged into The American Ship Building Company.

A stickler for accuracy, Gordon’s memorialization of this Canadian catastrophe was factually correct and as time went on and new information surfaced, he changed the lyrics.

On Sunday, November 9, 1975, the 729-foot Edmund Fitzgerald left Superior, Wisconsin, with 26,116 tons of processed iron ore downbound for the Zug Island steel mill in Detroit. Onboard were 29 crew members.

Captained by the 63-year-old veteran skipper Ernest McSorley, the ship was joined by the freighter Arthur M. Anderson under Captain Bernie Cooper a couple hours into the voyage. With a November storm on the horizon, they sailed toward the north of Lake Superior on a more protected route between Isle Royale and the Keweenaw Peninsula.

As they steamed across the lake the next day, the storm intensified. The two ships were soon battered by 50-knot winds and 25-foot waves. “One of the worst seas I’ve ever been in,” Ernest, who had planned to retire after the 1975 shipping season, radioed.

“Anderson, this is the Fitzgerald. I have a fence rail down, two vents lost or damaged, and a list. I’m checking down. Will you stay by me till I get to Whitefish?” Bernie responded that he would attempt to close the gap between the two ships.

The two captains continued communicating, but high waves interrupted radar transmissions. They spoke for the last time at 7:10 p.m. The Fitzgerald was never heard from again.

In the blinding snow, both of Fitzgerald’s radars went out. The Whitefish Point light and radio beacons were down. The ship had no depth-sounding technology.

No distress call was ever sent. It is likely the sinking happened very fast. 

Of the 29 men aboard, aged 21 to 63, none survived.

No bodies were ever recovered.

“For a ship to disappear with all hands is very rare,” said Admiral Jerry Achenbach, superintendent at the Great Lakes Maritime Academy. While more than a thousand ships have gone down in the Great Lakes, the Edmund Fitzgerald is still the largest. In the wake of the Fitzgerald’s fatal accident, Canada mandated depth finders, survival suits, positioning systems and emergency beacons.

An upside stern was found 535 feet below Lake Superior’s surface with the name “Edmund Fitzgerald” on the side. The wreck became a trophy hunt for professional divers. Encouraged by the survivors’ families, in 2006 the government of Ontario finally adopted a law making it illegal to dive to the wreckage of the Edmund Fitzgerald.

Initially, it was believed the wreck was caused by poorly secured hatch covers, as per Gordon’s lyrics: “At 7 p.m. the main hatchway caved in.”

But National Geographic proved it wasn’t the hatch covers—its research found that rogue waves had snapped the Edmund Fitzgerald in half.

When this news surfaced, Gordon changed the words to, “At 7 p.m. it grew dark, it was dim.” And when filmmakers Mike and Warren Fletcher asked his permission to use the song in their documentary about the tanker’s sinking, he insisted they use his revised lyrics. As Roger McBain wrote in the Guelph Mercury Tribune,

An avid sailor, he knew it was a loaded lyric from the start, raising culpability questions for the deck hands responsible for securing the freighter’s hatch covers.

Even so, it remained a difficult line for Lightfoot, especially when he sung it for sailors, skippers and friends and relatives of the doomed ship’s crew.

There are a few other minor slips in the lyrics. The Fitzgerald was heading to Zug Island not Cleveland, but after unloading it was going to Cleveland for the winter, so it’s a low-tide error. Ernest didn’t send a transmission saying, “water comin’ in”; his last words were, “We are holding our own.” The reference to the “Maritime Sailors’ Cathedral” in the lyrics is the Mariners’ Church of Detroit. George Bulanda tells the story of Gordon’s attendance at the church to mark the tenth anniversary of the Fitzgerald, the service led by Rev. Richard W. Ingalls Jr.:

“He didn’t want [the occasion] to be about him, so we took him up a back stairway,” Ingalls says. “We put him in a front pew with his back to the congregation, so they didn’t know who he was. “We always had a choir member perform the ballad, but when it came time for it, Lightfoot slipped out of his pew, sat on a stool, picked up his acoustic guitar, and played. First, there was a gasp, but after that, you could hear a pin drop.” On that occasion, Ingalls says that Lightfoot turned to the congregation and announced he would henceforth change the lyrics.”

(It almost feels like a hymn was sung, doesn’t it?)

For years, Gordon performed at reunions for the crew’s families. He kept newspaper clippings and items given to him by the families in his home. “I stay in touch with them all the time,” he said. “It’s a responsibility that will not leave me.”

“It takes a great deal of strength to keep November out of the soul,” wrote another of Canada’s great poets, Patrick Lane.

Here in Vancouver, days of pounding rain and gloomy darkness are not unusual—conversely, it can be also be a solemn time of quiescence, of reflection, as Nina MacLaughlin writes:

November holds the in-between. Between warmth and cold, between light and dark, between living and dying. The eleventh month, getting darker, getting colder, echoes our own eventual winding down and gives chance to live in the richest, deepest way…November opens a path to those deeper layers unavailable to us during the rest of the year. It’s an approximation of the expiration date stamped on our foreheads.

November, time to celebrate this ageless classic, the mastery of storytelling, clarity of lyrics and empathy of voice in the haunting songwriting of Gordon Lightfoot. It is his birthday next Sunday, November 17, (he would be 86) so why not play, sing and celebrate this song all week. And consider joining almost 20,000 others in signing the Change.org petition to rename Highway 400 Gordon Lightfoot Memorial Highway.

"The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald”

The legend lives on from the Chippewa on down
Of the big lake they call Gitche Gumee
The lake, it is said, never gives up her dead
When the skies of November turn gloomy
With a load of iron ore twenty-six thousand tons more
Than the Edmund Fitzgerald weighed empty
That good ship and true was a bone to be chewed
When the gales of November came early

The ship was the pride of the American side
Coming back from some mill in Wisconsin
As the big freighters go, it was bigger than most
With a crew and good captain well seasoned
Concluding some terms with a couple of steel firms
When they left fully loaded for Cleveland
And later that night when the ship's bell rang
Could it be the north wind they'd been feelin'?

The wind in the wires made a tattle-tale sound
And a wave broke over the railing
And every man knew, as the captain did too
T'was the witch of November come stealin'
The dawn came late and the breakfast had to wait
When the gales of November came slashin'
When afternoon came it was freezin' rain
In the face of a hurricane west wind

When suppertime came, the old cook came on deck sayin'
"Fellas, it's too rough to feed ya"
At 7 PM, a main hatchway caved in, he said
"Fellas, it's been good to know ya"
The captain wired in he had water comin' in
And the good ship and crew was in peril
And later that night when his lights went outta sight
Came the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald

Does any one know where the love of God goes
When the waves turn the minutes to hours?
The searchers all say they'd have made Whitefish Bay
If they'd put fifteen more miles behind her
They might have split up or they might have capsized
They may have broke deep and took water
And all that remains is the faces and the names
Of the wives and the sons and the daughters

Lake Huron rolls, Superior sings
In the rooms of her ice-water mansion
Old Michigan steams like a young man's dreams
The islands and bays are for sportsmen
And farther below Lake Ontario
Takes in what Lake Erie can send her
And the iron boats go as the mariners all know
With the gales of November remembered

In a musty old hall in Detroit they prayed
In the maritime sailors' cathedral
The church bell chimed 'til it rang twenty-nine times
For each man on the Edmund Fitzgerald
The legend lives on from the Chippewa on down
Of the big lake they call Gitche Gumee
Superior, they said, never gives up her dead
When the gales of November come early

Navigation

Bulanda, George. “Anchored in Rich History”. The Insider. November 2010.

Change.org petition to Rename Highway 400 as ‘Gordon Lightfoot Memorial Highway’

Cristal, Philip N. The EDMUND FITZGERALD – Summer 1958. National Museum of the Great Lakes. Summer 1958. Philip was the Manager of Transportation Investments of The Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance Company, Milwaukee, Wisconsin. 

DeYoung, Bill. “If you could read his mind”. Connect Savannah. March 2, 2010.

“”Edmund Fitzgerald: Why this tragedy sticks with us after 40 years.” Michigan Live. November 8, 2015.

Friend, David. “Hope for a museum dedicated to Lightfoot ‘still very much alive’ in his Ontario hometown”. Globe and Mail. November 4, 2024. The Orillia City Council is consulting with Lightfoot’s estate on memorabilia that might be made available for display. An online auction of dozens of his belongings is currently underway, closing on his birthday, November 17. You can view the items here.

Gordon Lightfoot Facebook Page.

Heffner, Matt. “Guide to the SS Edmund Fitzgerald Ship & Crew”. Miawesomeitten. November 7, 2023. This article includes the names and some details of the 29 men onboard.

Ives, Mike. “How The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald’ Defied Top 40 Logic”. The New York Times. May 2, 2023.

Jaekel, Brielle. “Was Gordon Lightfoot’s song about the Edmund Fitzgerald accurate?” Freight Waves. May 11, 2023.

Jennings, Nicolas. Lightfoot. Toronto: Penguin Random House Canada. 2018. A 2023 Rolling Stone recommended book that I gave a 4/5. From Penguin: “Nobel Prize-winner Bob Dylan once listed “Sundown” and “If You Could Read My Mind” among his favourite Lightfoot songs, before adding, “I can’t think of any I don’t like.” In addition to winning nearly every Canadian music award, in 2012, Lightfoot was inducted into the American Songwriters Hall of Fame alongside such luminaries as Leonard Cohen, Kris Kristoffersen, and Dylan; it honoured Lightfoot as a singer who helped “define the folk-pop sound of the 1960s and ’70s.

“Biographer Nick Jennings has had unprecedented access to the notoriously reticent musician. He chronicles Lightfoot’s early efforts–his school principal recorded a disc of “Gordie” singing at age 9–to his beginnings as a songwriter to his heyday in concert halls around the globe. Possessed of a strong work ethic and a perfectionist bent, Lightfoot brought discipline to his craft and performances. But he partied just as hard in that rock ‘n’ roll era, and alcoholism began to take its toll. Lightfoot toured relentlessly and his personal life suffered as marriages and relationships unravelled. At 63, he suffered an aortic aneurysm that nearly killed him and kept him in a coma for six weeks. But his amazing stamina helped him survive and miraculously saw him on stage once again, resuming his touring and yearly sold-out show at Massey Hall.

“Jennings paints an unforgettable portrait of an artist in the making, set against the turbulent era of sex and drugs and rock ‘n’ roll. Voices from the music industry mix with loyal fans to illustrate how the boy from small-town Ontario became the legendary bard of Canada. Stuffed with anecdotes and the singer’s own reminisences, Lightfoot is an exhilarating read.”

MacLaughlin, Nina. “The Dark Feels Different in November”.  The Paris Review. November 8, 2017.

The quote in our title (“a damp, drizzly November of the soul”) comes from Herman Melville’s Moby Dick.Steyn, Mark. “Of Rain and Wrecks“. The Mark Steyn Club. November 18, 2018.