No one was more surprised than Gordon Lightfoot when his ballad "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald" became one of the biggest hits of 1976, less than a year after the disaster it commemorates. The Canadian musician had agonized over writing the song in the first place.
"He feared being inaccurate, corny or worse, appearing to exploit a tragedy for profit," writes John U. Bacon in his new bestseller, The Gales of November: The Untold Story of the Edmund Fitzgerald. "But more than that, as a fellow sailor and a child of the Great Lakes … this song — whatever it was — was deeply personal."
The success of Lightfoot's song elevated the Edmund Fitzgerald's place in popular history. But its tragedy was hardly unique.
"From 1875 to 1975, there were at least 6,000 commercial shipwrecks on the bottom of the Great Lakes," Bacon told NPR. "So that is one shipwreck a week every week for a century. That is one casualty every day for a century."
While shipwrecks may have been common, the Edmund Fitzgerald was not. Named — perhaps ironically — for the president of the insurance company that paid for its construction, the freighter has been described as a freshwater Titanic.
"It was, in fact, the greatest ship on the Great Lakes when it launched in Detroit in 1958," Bacon said. "Fifteen thousand people came out to see the launching. When it went through the Soo Locks or Detroit or Duluth, people would wait half a day to see this ship come through. It was a rock star."
Great Lakes maritime trade first took off in the 1770s, as wealthy Europeans clamored for luxurious beaver pelts. Two centuries later, hundreds of long ships crowded the five inland seas carrying lumber, limestone, copper, cars, crops, and iron from Canada and the Midwest down to the Saint Lawrence Seaway that eventually leads to the Atlantic. The Edmund Fitzgerald was loaded with 26,000 tons of pellets containing iron ore when it sank. To slip through the narrow Soo Locks, such ships are only 75 feet wide.
"That's less than the space from home plate to first base," Bacon observed. "What's the problem with that? They can't handle rough seas." And the Great Lakes do get rougher over the winter, even more so than the ocean. Salt helps regulate and weigh down waves, so freshwater waves can become huge and erratic. The Edmund Fitzgerald was caught in a savage storm with hurricane-force winds around 100-mile-an-hour and waves up to 60 feet, crashing down on the freighter every four to eight seconds, says Bacon.
When Gordon Lightfoot read news accounts of the tragedy, it didn't feel far away. He was an experienced Great Lakes sailor who knew those waters well. He kept noodling with a ballad about the disaster during breaks while recording his album Summertime Dream in 1976. His bandmates and a studio engineer eventually talked Lightfoot into trying it out. In The Gales of November, drummer Bill Keane said that the first take — also the first time the band ever played it — was the version that ended up on the album.
"We all just played what we felt," he said.
And that's how a six and a half minute folk dirge with no hook, no guitar solo, and 28 two-line stanzas became a hit. When it came out in 1976, "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald" was the number two song on the Billboard Hot 100, right after Rod Stewart's "Tonight's the Night."
Today, Lightfoot's song is treasured by the families of sailors who died. The singer became close to these families and attended their reunions to commemorate the tragedy. And he established a scholarship fund at the Great Lakes Maritime Academy, which lost a cadet and an alumnus when the freighter sank. "On many occasions, cadets had an opportunity to meet him when [Lightfoot] performed in the area," the Academy's superintendent, Jerry Achenbach, told NPR.
Ultimately, said author John U. Bacon, the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald helped change safety standards. There has not been a single major commercial shipwreck on the Great Lakes, he says, for the past 50 years.
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