1), “Carefree Highway,” “Rainy Day People,” “Beautiful” and others that became staples of adult contemporary radio. Lightfoot’s record was the first in a string of hits in the ’70s that also included “Sundown” (Lightfoot’s only Billboard Hot 100 No. That song reintroduced him - or at least his name - to a new generation when a 1998 remix version became a dance club hit. ![]() Records in 1970 and released “If You Could Read My Mind” that he gained mainstream fame. It wasn’t until he left United Artists for Warner Bros. While the songs never reached Billboard’s album charts, they constituted what former Times pop music critic Robert Hilburn called “some of the best music ever made by one of the most gifted folk-flavored artists of the modern pop era.” They contained many songs that were quickly recorded by other musicians, among them “Early Morning Rain,” “Did She Mention My Name,” “For Lovin’ Me” and “Ribbon of Darkness.” He recorded five albums for United Artists Records starting in 1965. He won exposure in 1962 as the neo-folk boom was blossoming when Peter, Paul and Mary recorded his song “Early Morning Rain.” It helped establish a popular theme among modern-day troubadours with its tale of a lonely and destitute wanderer far from home “with a dollar in my hand, and an aching in my heart.” It was like seeing the light of day.”Īs his reputation grew, Lightfoot was signed by the same company that handled Ian & Sylvia and Dylan. A turning point came when he heard Ian & Sylvia sing Merle Travis’ coal-mining tragedy “Dark as a Dungeon,” of which he later said, “When I saw that combination of folk and country music, I knew it was what I had been looking for. By the early 1960s, he’d written dozens of songs, but later said those early songs meant little to him. He cited Dylan, Pete Seeger and fellow Canadian folkies Ian & Sylvia as major influences, but also said he was a devotee of country singer Ernest Tubb. In the 1950s he moved to Los Angeles to study orchestration at the Westlake College of Modern Music in Hollywood, earning a living on the side writing advertising jingles and vocal arrangements for other singers. He gravitated to the region’s folk and country music scene as he got older, appeared on Canadian television in talent contests and then as a performer and, briefly, as the reluctant host of a country-western variety show. He made his first record when he was in fourth grade, a recording of “Irish Lullaby,” which was played over the school’s public address system. ![]() His mother noticed Gordon humming himself to sleep as a child, and both parents encouraged his innate musical talent, expressed early on when he joined the choir of the United Church in Orillia. Despite the Indigenous-sounding surname, Lightfoot said he was of Scottish extraction. His parents, Gordon and Jessie Vick Lightfoot, ran a dry cleaning business. ![]() 17, 1938, in Orillia, Ontario, about 80 miles north of Toronto. He also was elected to the Canadian Country Music Hall of Fame in 2001. The Canadian music industry treated him as royalty, bestowing him 16 Juno Awards, its equivalent of the Grammys, and inducting him into the Juno Hall of Fame, where Dylan, both a rival and a longtime admirer, made the award presentation. Elvis Presley, Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, Barbra Streisand, Jerry Lee Lewis, Marty Robbins, and Peter, Paul and Mary are among the artists who recorded Lightfoot compositions. Lightfoot was a gifted and prolific writer of hundreds of songs. It was one of many historically based Lightfoot compositions, and over the course of 21 albums recorded over five decades, he touched often on the character and people of his native country, most notably in “Canadian Railroad Trilogy,” revered by many Canadians as an unofficial national anthem. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1976, told the true story of an ore freighter that sank in a storm in Lake Superior a year earlier, claiming the lives of all 29 crew members. Along with Joni Mitchell and Neil Young, Lightfoot is regarded as one of the most important Canadian pop musicians of the ’60s and ’70s, best known in the States for his mournful hits “If You Could Read My Mind,” “Sundown” and “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.”
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