SOFTW RECKAFEEDB
major American concert halls (Carnegie Hall and the Lincoln Center), across Canada, and to the various summer festi- vals. He is by now a virtuoso guitarist on both the six and twelve string guitar. His record collection grows to prodigious proportions, and many of these record- ings score phenomenal successes.
A few favorites come to mind, songs that became hits and remain young. There’s Summertime Dream, at once poetic and, yes, dreamy. There’s Sun- down, a 1974 song about infidelity, which hits top spot on US pop charts. There’s Did She Mention My Name from 1968. And there’s Don Quixote, for the hero who symbolizes a search for absolutes, for whom our troubadour has an admira- tion bordering on affection.
To add to his heavy calendar, Gordon Lightfoot is also a humanist, who answers present to solicitations for numerous social or environmental causes. An example: his famous song on the Detroit race riots of 1967.
It had begun before dawn on the 23rd of July, a confrontation between Blacks and whites that turned into a
Black day in July
And the soul of motor city is bared across the land
As the book of law and order is taken in the hands
Of the sons of the fathers who were carried to this land Black day in July
In the streets of motor city is a deadly silent sound And the body of a dead youth lies stretched upon the ground Upon the filthy pavement No reason can be found
The song Black Day in July is released in April of 1968…not long after the assassination of Matin Luther King.
Black day in July
In the mansion of the governor There’s nothing that is known for sure The telephone is ringing
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And the pendulum is swinging And they wonder how it happened And they really know the reason And it wasn’t just the temperature And it wasn’t just the season
In Top 40 stations across the US there is a wind of panic, and the song is quickly boycotted, lest it stir up passions that are already overheated. As you can imagine, Lightfoot flies into a fury. “A lot of them don’t want to upset their listeners,” he says on the CBC. “It’s the housewife in the morning, let’s give her
something that’ll make her happy, why give her something that’ll make her think?”
A romantic?
How do you categorize an artist like this? Is he country? Folk? Pop, pop- rock? Why pigeonhole him at all? Is he not beyond all styles?
What is certain is that he ceaselessly searches for the perfect song. He will take hours, days, months to perfect a song. He cares for his musicians, making their work easier by giving them scores as faultless as he can make them.
Let us not mince words, then, Gordon Lightfoot is a romantic. He harnesses his poetic prose to exorcise his hyper- sensitivity to suffering, that of others or his own, and his very vulnerability is a source of pain. It is, on the other hand, his sensitivity that allows him to respond to all solicitations, to react to joy and beauty in all its forms. Stories of love, barely disguised personal experiences, anecdotes…each text provides, inside a meaningful melody, a story or a mood.
The aura about him is due in large part, I believe, to his genius for sharing with his audiences his emotions, his propensity for dreaming, his love of love itself, his intimate connection with the elements of nature. Water, for example, plays a major role in his songs, as do the forest and the wind…a waterfall deep in the forest, the gurgling of the water…
Now if only you could see
The closin’ of the day
If only you could be
Where the dawn breaks away
By the white cascade
Oh down in the glade
Where the long river flows
By my window
He dreams of leaving…the whistle of a passing train, the roar of a jet tearing the fabric of the sky. This song is one of his most famous:
In the early mornin’ rain
With a dollar in my hand
And an achin’ in my heart
And my pockets full of sand
I’m a long way from home
And I miss my loved one so
In the early mornin’ rain
With no place to go
