Not a surprise, I guess - if it was possible to play it on the pipes, someone probably would have done it by now. Please thank Mr. Athena for trying.
How, or when does the guitar imitate pipes?
I came to post the exact same thing. There is something about Lightfoot’s voice…this might have been a terrible song with another singer.
Either way, I’ll get some rest.
Yar, I was a kid just outside Chicago when this happened; I would have guessed it had been at least 20 years before that.
There are some great videos on Youtube with pics of the ship…lots of them, from onboard and from outside it…but I can’t recommend anything in particular since the record company has insisted that the music is copywrited and won’t allow it to be used. Live performances are different, I suppose, since there are plenty of them.
My grandfather was a newsman, and died around age 40 when he jumped into Lake Michigan to help save a sailor who’d not made it over the bridge to a ship. The sailor lived, but my grandfather didn’t, and I always have feared Lake Michigan more than any ocean. She’s a cold and hard wench.
Thanks for the headsup about the anniversary. I have always love this song, scary as it is.
I was just a kid when this song came out, and didn’t understand the entire song, but until I watched one of the Gordon Lightfoot vids and saw his clipped singing style, I had always assumed that he was talking about “a peg-leg they call Gitchee Goomie.” I dunno, I guess I made that pirate-sea disaster connection in my head and never questioned it.
It’s the lead guitar - the sustain afforded by the distortion with which he’s playing and the tone colour it yields, coupled with the ‘droniness’ of the rest of the band, immediately takes me to a piper playing pibroch ‘great music’.
The rhythm with which he plays, too - г|l.͡|г г г |♬͡ l| sounds like the characteristic ‘Scottish snap’. Yes, it’s in the vocal melody, too, but somehow the guitarist brings it out more. (My apologies if that rhythmic transcription doesn’t come through well…)
It happens right at the opening and at every break after that - 1:37, 2:20, 3:12, 4:08, 4:53, etc.
Northern Piper - Allow me to underline that the sum total of my knowledge of the pipes is the cube root of fuck all. I thought, though, that the pipes went (bottom to top, natch) G, A, B, C natural, D, E, F natural, G, A.
If that’s the case, you ought to be able to play the vocal line as D G GAG F D D E F E D C D G (low). F F E D C E E D C D D G might pass for the rest of the lead guitar break, bends not being possible on the pipes (that I know of…) The rest of the band just have to figure it out in the key of G (Gord plays this in A capoed at the 2nd fret, giving B as the ‘concert’ key.)
If I’m wrong, feel free to tell me to shut the f*ck up.
See my above link this one has the real song.
Did the Chippewas really call Lake Superior “gitchee guumi”?
According to a website that I ran across a few years back, the cook wasn’t on board the Fitz during her fatal voyage. He’d called in sick.
Just FYI.
Gichigami is the Ojibway name for Lake Superior.
From the Wiki article on the Ojibwe:
Longfellow anglicized the name as ‘Gitche Gumee’ in ‘The Song of Hiawatha’.
That’s a very good analysis - the best I could come up with was “it sounds pipey.” 
Thanks for this - since the Cub and Mrs Piper are in bed and sound asleep, I don’t think I can try it out just at the moment :eek:, but will try tomorrow :).
As for the scale, well, it’s a bit complicated. Notionally, the base note of the scale is A, but the A has been drifting upwards over the years, becoming more and more sharp, in response to judges in competitions liking sharpness in playing. What’s noted as A is nowadays more likely to be A#/B♭, approaching B♮, and the other notes shift up accordingly. Plus, the C and the F are written as natural in our tunes, but are actually closer to C# and F#, in relation to the other notes. It’s all an approximation, anyway - the scale of the GHB is a folk scale, not the classical scale.