Gordon Lightfoot, the Canadian people singer whose wealthy, plaintive baritone and reward for melodic songwriting made him some of the standard recording artists of the Seventies, died on Monday night time in Toronto. He was 84.
His dying, at Sunnybrook Hospital, was confirmed by his publicist, Victoria Lord. She didn’t specify a trigger, however Mr. Lightfoot had had various well being issues in recent times.
Mr. Lightfoot, a fast-rising star in Canada within the early Nineteen Sixties, broke by way of to worldwide success when his pals and fellow Canadians Ian and Sylvia Tyson recorded two of his songs, “Early Morning Rain” and “For Lovin’ Me.”
When Peter, Paul and Mary got here out with their own versions of these songs — their “For Lovin’ Me” was a Top 40 hit — and Marty Robbins reached the highest of the nation charts with Mr. Lightfoot’s “Ribbon of Darkness,” Mr. Lightfoot’s fame soared. Overnight, he joined the ranks of songwriters like Bob Dylan, Phil Ochs and Tom Paxton, all of whom influenced his fashion.
Mr. Dylan in flip held Mr. Lightfoot in excessive regard. He as soon as stated, “I can’t consider any Gordon Lightfoot music I don’t like,” including, “Every time I hear a music of his, it’s like I want it might final endlessly.” Mr. Dylan included a model of “Early Morning Rain” on his 1970 album “Self Portrait.” (Among the opposite singers to have lined that music is Elvis Presley.)
When people music ebbed in reputation, overwhelmed by the British invasion, Mr. Lightfoot started writing ballads geared toward a broader viewers. He scored one hit after one other, starting in 1970 with the heartfelt “If You Could Read My Mind,” impressed by the breakup of his first marriage.
That music — which begins with the memorable traces “If you might learn my thoughts, love,/What a story my ideas might inform./Just like an old-time movie,/’Bout a ghost from a wishing properly” — reached No. 5 on the Billboard Hot 100 and has been lined by Barbra Streisand, Johnny Mathis, Johnny Cash and quite a few others.
In fast succession he recorded the hits “Sundown” (his first and solely No. 1 single), “Carefree Highway” (“Let me slip away, slip away on you”), “Rainy Day People” and “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” which he wrote after studying an article concerning the sinking of an iron-ore service in Lake Superior in 1975, with the lack of all 29 crew members.
For Canadians, Mr. Lightfoot was a nationwide hero, a homegrown star who stayed house even after attaining spectacular success within the United States and who catered to his Canadian followers with cross-country excursions. His ballads on Canadian themes, like “Canadian Railroad Trilogy,” pulsated with a love for the nation’s rivers and forests, which he explored on formidable canoe journeys far into the hinterlands.
His private fashion, reticent and self-effacing — he prevented interviews and flinched when confronted with reward — additionally went down properly. “Sometimes I’m wondering why I’m being referred to as an icon, as a result of I actually don’t consider myself that approach,” Mr. Lightfoot informed the Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail in 2008. “I’m an expert musician, and I work with very skilled individuals. It’s how we get by way of life.”
Gordon Meredith Lightfoot Jr. was born on Nov. 17, 1938, in Orillia, Ontario, to Gordon and Jessie Vick (Trill) Lightfoot. His father managed a dry-cleaning plant. As a boy, he sang in a church choir, carried out on native radio exhibits and shined in singing competitions. “Man, I did the entire bit: oratorio work, Kiwanis contests, operettas, barbershop quartets,” he informed Time journal in 1968.
He performed piano, drums and guitar as a young person, and whereas nonetheless in highschool wrote his first music, a topical quantity concerning the hula hoop craze with a catchy final line: “I assume I’m only a slob and I’m gonna lose my job, ’trigger I’m hula-hula-hoopin’ all of the time.” His makes an attempt to promote it had been unsuccessful.
After learning composition and orchestration on the Westlake College of Music in Los Angeles, he returned to Canada. For a time he was a member of the Singing Swinging Eight, a singing and dancing troupe seen on the tv present “Country Hoedown.” But he quickly turned a part of the Toronto people scene, performing on the similar espresso homes and golf equipment as Ian and Sylvia, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young and Leonard Cohen.
He fashioned a people duo, the Two Tones, with a fellow “Hoedown” performer, Terry Whelan. The duo recorded a reside album in 1962, “Two Tones on the Village Corner.” The subsequent 12 months, whereas touring in Europe, he served because the host of “The Country and Western Show” on BBC tv.
As a songwriter, Mr. Lightfoot had by then superior past the hula hoop, however not by a terrific deal. His work “didn’t have any type of identification,” he informed Irwin Stambler and Grelun Landon, the authors of “The Encyclopedia of Folk, Country and Western Music,” printed in 1969. When the Greenwich Village people increase introduced Mr. Dylan and different dynamic songwriters to the fore, he stated, “I began to get a standpoint, and that’s once I began to enhance.”
In 1965, he appeared on the Newport Folk Festival in Rhode Island and at Town Hall in New York. “Mr. Lightfoot has a wealthy, heat voice and a dexterous guitar method,” Robert Shelton wrote in The New York Times. “With somewhat extra consideration to stage character, he ought to turn out to be fairly standard.”
A 12 months later, after signing with Albert Grossman, the supervisor of Mr. Dylan and Peter, Paul and Mary, Mr. Lightfoot recorded his first solo album, “Lightfoot!” The album, which included “Early Morning Rain,” “For Lovin’ Me,” “Ribbon of Darkness” and “I’m Not Sayin’,” a success in Canada in 1963, was warmly acquired by critics.
Real industrial success got here when he switched to Warner Bros., initially recording for the corporate’s Reprise label. “By the time I modified over to Warner Bros., ’spherical about 1970, I used to be reinventing myself,” he informed the Georgia newspaper Savannah Connect in 2010. “Let’s say I used to be most likely simply advancing away from the people period, and looking for some path whereby I may need some music that individuals would wish to take heed to.”
Accompanying himself on an acoustic 12-string guitar and singing in a voice that usually trembled with emotion, Mr. Lightfoot gave spare, direct accounts of his materials. He sang of loneliness, troubled relationships, the itch to roam and the majesty of the Canadian panorama. He was, because the Canadian author Jack Batten put it, “journalist, poet, historian, humorist, short-story teller and folksy recollector of bygone days.”
His reputation as a recording artist started to wane within the Eighties, however he maintained a busy touring schedule. In 1999 Rhino Records launched “Songbook,” a four-disc survey of his profession.
Mr. Lightfoot, who lived in Toronto, is survived by his spouse, Kim Hasse, six kids — Fred, Ingrid, Miles, Meredith, Eric and Galen — and several other grandchildren. His first two marriages led to divorce. His older sister, Beverley Eyers, died in 2017.
In 2002, simply earlier than going onstage in Orillia, Mr. Lightfoot collapsed when an aneurysm in his stomach aorta ruptured and left him close to dying. After he spent two years recovering, he recorded an album, “Harmony,” and in 2005 he resumed his reside performances with what was billed because the Better Late Than Never Tour.
He suffered a minor stroke in 2006 that quickly affected his means to play guitar, however he continued touring. Ten years later he carried out 80 concert events and informed The Canadian Press, “At this age, my problem is doing one of the best present I can.” But simply final month, he introduced that he was canceling all his scheduled concert events for well being causes.
In an interview with the CBC in 2004, Mr. Lightfoot stated he needed to be like Willie Nelson and different veteran performers: “Just do it for so long as humanly potential.”
Vjosa Isai contributed reporting.
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