The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald: The legend lives on, 40 years later

Hundreds of ships lie at the bottom of Lake Superior, but the one the world remembers isn't the first, or the most catastrophic. It's "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald," immortalized in folk-music legend Gordon Lightfoot's timless song.

And it was 40 years ago today when the SS Edmund Fitzgerald, the largest vessel on the St. Lawrence Seaway, went down in a November storm, taking its 29-person crew with it. 

A hit on both sides of the Great Lakes, Lightfoot's epic song is a history lesson music fans haven't forgotten. In a recent CBC Arts interview, Patti Smith even name-checked the man, and the song, when discussing the most important Canadian music in her her life. The legend lives on, as the song itself goes. 

When the incident occurred in 1975, CBC Radio followed the story from Thunder Bay, covering the fruitless search for survivors, and that story can be heard via CBC Digital Archives.

Listen below.

It's a brief account, just a two-minute dispatch — not unlike much coverage of the disaster, as Lightfoot recalled in an "Ask Me Anything" session on Reddit last year.

"The Edmund Fitzgerald really seemed to go unnoticed at that time, anything I'd seen in the newspapers or magazines were very short, brief articles, and I felt I would like to expand upon the story of the sinking of the ship itself," Lightfoot wrote, recalling the origins of his ballad. He decided on a melody — "an old Irish dirge that I heard when I was about three-and-a-half years old" — and set about researching the details of the story before writing the lyrics. "I went and bought all of the old newspapers, got everything in chronological order, and went ahead and did it."

When new discoveries are made about the ship's disappearance, Lightfoot updates his lyrics. (Since 2010, for instance, he's sung the fourth verse a little differently so that there's no suggestion that crew error was the cause of the wreck.) 

Other rhymes, we expect, will never be altered. In 1991, CBC Radio's Peter Gzowski asked Lightfoot if he's ever written a perfect line.

His reply: "I guess 'the big lake they called Gitche Gumee, and the skies in November turn gloomy' is pretty good." 

Listen to the full interview.

If you're looking for a more in-depth history lesson, CBC Music explored the song's evolving legacy in 2012, but we'll leave you with a clip that gives some insight into all of Lightfoot's work. Shot in Vancouver in 1969, nearly a decade before he wrote "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald," Lightfoot and the Kingston Trio's Bob Shane took questions from a group of local teens. When one boy asks him about songwriting, Lightfoot shares a personal philosophy that explains why we still remember the quarter-kilometre-long freighter that went down in Lake Superior 40 years ago. He just set out to write a "good song."

"The thing that's first and foremost to me is to write a good song, no matter what the subject matter is. It has to be a good song, otherwise you could be talking about the most significant things in the world and nobody's going to listen to it."

Head to the CBC Digital Archives for more on the history of the Edmund Fitzgerald and a library of Lightfoot's CBC appearances going back to 1969.