[charlene]

part 2 -
You must get weary of having to do “If You Could Read My Mind” and “Edmund Fitzgerald” and “Sundown” in every single show, when you’ve so many great songs.

Gordon Lightfoot: Sincerely, I love the songs. I really do believe in my songs a lot. I know which ones really work best on the stage. And fortunately, all those songs, they really work.

I’ve had other songs that they keep wanting to hear, which I don’t do because I know they just don’t work. There’s some kind of a redundancy factor that creeps into the situation somewhere along the line. I don’t like doing “Pony Man,” it’s an excellent song, I’m always getting requests, but I think it’s too long. It’s that simple reason. And I have so many other songs in a similar kind of approach and tempo to replace it with that are better, like “Sit Down Young Stranger” or “Don Quixote” and so forth.

I read somewhere that you don’t play “Minstrel of the Dawn” any more.

Gordon Lightfoot: I do! We play it a lot more than we have done in the past, because ever since we got our intonation right we finally started to zero in on getting a good, firm D chord. That took a lot of years.

I went to a Neil Young concert and I saw his acoustic set. And I think I learned how to tune my A string from watching him. I was picking up the tonality between the D string and the A string.

You don’t have to do this any more. What do you get out of it?

Gordon Lightfoot: I like the travel, I like the people, I like the music. It’s really an interesting way to make a living, I think. I really feel very fortunate.

“The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” is probably your most famous song.

Gordon Lightfoot: I think I found out what actually happened to the Edmund Fitzgerald. Just in the last couple of months, I issued a license for a National Geographic show called Underwater Detectives. The guy brought it over to the office and he played it for me on his laptop, before we would issue him a license to use some strains of the music for the final credits.

So what happened – it broke in half?

Gordon Lightfoot: It broke in half! That’s exactly what happened! So it was not the hatch cover.

(Editor’s Note: Part of Lightfoot’s lyrics are “At 7 p.m., the main hatchway gave in. He said fellas, it’s been good to know ya”.)

And there’s been a lot of controversy about that – at times it’s gotten quite personal, I tell you, it’s been very, very interesting.

There’s no hatch cover trouble involved, so a couple of guys are off the hook there. The mother of one of those guys, she’s worried about that for years. A lady called Ruth Hudson, her son Bruce died. He was one of the guys that was supposed to be checking the hatch covers.

Nobody’s ever come up with an actual reason why it sank, but when you see this show, you will understand why it broke in half.

Do you feel bound, in a way, to that story and to the families? You’ve performed at various memorials and commemorations over the years.

Gordon Lightfoot: I got to meet hundreds of people. We’ve been to all kinds of events. I’ve been three times down to the Mariners’ Church in Detroit – one Sunday I sang in front of 18 sea captains, all lined up in a row.

I know you’re very proud of that song.

Gordon Lightfoot: I’m going to be a lot prouder of it when I get that out about the hatchway – the very next time I sing it, I’ll tell you that. It wasn’t a hatchway. I don’t know what I’m gonna change it to, but I’m gonna change it.

I hope Ruth Hudson will be around long enough to hear it, because she’s 82 and she’s worried about that all her life.