The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald

"The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald"
Single by Gordon Lightfoot
from the album Summertime Dream
B-side	"The House You Live In"
Released	August 1976
Recorded	December 1975
Studio	Eastern Sound Studios, Toronto
Genre	Folk rock soft rock
Length	6:32 (album version) 5:57 (single edit)
Label	Reprise
Songwriter(s)	Gordon Lightfoot
Producer(s)	Lenny Waronker Gordon Lightfoot
Gordon Lightfoot singles chronology
"Rainy Day People" (1975) "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald" (1976) "Race Among the Ruins" (1976)

"The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald" is a hit 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.

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 only "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, as the scale and harmony perfectly fits in a major scale with a lowered 7th, and is confirmed often with the repeating (and only) motif. This is significantly at odds with the more common Dorian mode. Lightfoot re-recorded the song in 1988 for the compilation album Gord's Gold, Vol. 2.

Lyrics

The song contains a few artistic omissions and paraphrases. In a later interview aired on Canadian commercial radio, Lightfoot recounted how he had agonised over possible inaccuracies while trying to pen the lyrics 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". Lightfoot's passion for recreational sailing on the Great Lakes informs his ballad's verses throughout.

Deviations from the facts of the incident include:

• According to the song, Edmund Fitzgerald was bound "fully loaded for Cleveland". In fact, the ship was heading for Zug Island, near Detroit, where it was set to discharge its cargo of taconite iron ore pellets before heading on to Cleveland, her home port, to wait out the winter.
• Capt. Ernest McSorley had stated in his last radio transmission before the ship sank that he and the crew were "holding our own", not that they had "water coming in".
• In his lyrics Lightfoot employs poetic licence to describe the Mariners' Church of Detroit as "The Maritime Sailors' Cathedral".
• In a later live recording, Lightfoot recounts that a parishioner of the church informed him that the church is not "musty". From that time, instead of singing "In a musty old hall...", he now sings "In a rustic old hall..."
• In March 2010, Lightfoot changed a line during live performances to reflect new findings that there had been no crew error involved in the sinking. The line originally read, "At 7 p.m. a main hatchway caved in; he said..."; Lightfoot now sings it as "At 7 p.m. it grew dark, it was then he said...". Lightfoot learned about the new research when contacted for permission to use his song for a History Channel documentary that aired on March 31, 2010. Lightfoot stated that he had no intention of changing the original copyrighted lyrics; instead from then on, he has simply sung the new words during live performances.

Chart performance

Weekly charts

Chart (1976–77)	Peak position
Australian KMR	46
Canadian RPM Top Singles	1
Canadian RPM Adult Contemporary Tracks	1
Canadian RPM Country Tracks	1
US Billboard Hot 100	2
US Billboard Easy Listening	9
US Billboard Hot Country Singles	50
US Cash Box Top 100	1

Year-end charts

Chart (1976)	Rank
Canada RPM Top Singles	12
US (Joel Whitburn's Pop Annual)	36
US Cash Box	22

Production

The song was recorded in December 1975 at Eastern Sound, a recording studio composed of two Victorian houses at 48 Yorkville Avenue in a then-beatnik district of downtown Toronto. The famous studio, which also recorded Rush, 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

During the 1984 United States presidential election, comedian Mark Russell performed "The Wreck of the Walter 'Fritz' Mondale".

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".

The song "Back Home in Derry", with lyrics by Bobby Sands of the Provisional Irish Republican Army, was set to the tune of "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald". The song, which is about the penal transportation of Irishmen in the 19th century to Van Diemen's Land (modern day Tasmania), was first recorded by Christy Moore on his 1984 album Ride On, and has since been covered by a number of Irish artists.

A filk adaptation of the song called "The Ballad of Apollo XIII", with new lyrics by William Warren Jr., was performed by Julia Ecklar on the 1983 album Minus Ten and Counting.

Nash the Slash released a cover of The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald on his final studio album, In-A-Gadda-Da-Nash (2008).

Canadian rock group Headstones released a cover of the song on March 15, 2019.

In 2005, American metal band Jag Panzer released a cover of this song on a single.

In popular culture

In the Seinfeld episode The Andrea Doria, Elaine remarks that she "loves Edmund Fitzgerald's voice" only the be corrected by Jerry that Edmund Fitzgerald was the boat, Gordon Lightfoot is the singer.

See also

• Canadian rock
• Music of Canada

External links

• Lyrics from gordonlightfoot.com
• Column by Mark Steyn—"Of Rain and Wrecks"—Song of the Week #338