…of the sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald. Gordon Lightfoot’s song was remarkable in conveying the feeling as well as the facts (within artistic license) of the event.
I saw Lightfoot in concert sometime after the song came out, and two things he said stuck in my mind. One was that of all the songs he had written, this was probably the one he thought least likely to be a chart hit (it went to #2). The other was “I got thousands of letters about the song; I answered twenty-nine of them.”