Fifty years ago this week, on 10 November 1975, the stormy waters of Lake Superior claimed another ship, the SS Edmund Fitzgerald, and the lives of all crew on board. Within a year, Canadian folk rock artist Gordon Lightfoot had written and released a ballad memorialising the disaster.
Lightfoot’s hit ‘The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald’ reached number one on Canadian charts and number two in the United States. As a result, the shipwreck has maintained relevance in popular imagination. With a melody swaying to and fro in a mimicry of waves, the lyrics provide a narrative account of the fateful tragedy. Lightfoot highlights the industrial purpose of the freighter, “bigger than most,” which carried “a load of iron ore… from some mill in Wisconsin.” The unforeseen tempest begins with the “tattle-tale sound” of wires clanging but quickly escalates to “a hurricane west wind”, as the crew do everything they can to steer the ship onwards.
Unfortunately, they were overpowered by the extreme conditions. The 29 crew on board, including Captain Ernest McSorley, all perished. Their bodies were never recovered. Or, as Lightfoot rhythmically phrases it, “all that remains is the faces and the names / Of the wives and the sons and the daughters.”
It is unclear exactly what caused the SS Edmund Fitzgerald to sink, with theories arising on rogue waves, shoaling, structural failures, and more. In Lightfoot’s first version, one verse claimed that the crew were partially at fault for not fastening the ship’s hatches securely enough. After its release, the singer-songwriter had to alter this verse following complaints from the victims’ families. In its revised form, the crew’s competency is never questioned and the weather is entirely to blame.
A memorial service is held each year at the Old Mariners’ Church in Detroit; this is the “dusty old hall” Lightfoot references in the song. The bell rings 29 times for each mariner, and then a replica bell rings 29 times for each family plus once more in honour of all lives lost at sea. A similar tribute is conducted by the Great Lakes Maritime Academy, though with an extra ring of the bell since Gordon Lightfoot’s death, in honour of the singer who immortalised the shipwreck.
Several artists have covered ‘The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald’ since the 1970s, including Rheostatics, Headstones, and Billy Strings.
“Edmund Fitzgerald, 1971, 3 of 4 (restored; cropped)” by Greenmars is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.