HE IS FINE - the rumour of his death was a mistake!

[timetraveler]

Ya know, I think that I'd just LOVE to get close enough to the fat headed twits who started the friggin' rumour & give them not just a slap in the face, but a well deserved kick in the seat of the pants & a major wedgy to boot! It really does seem that bean heads like that have no life beyond scaring the wits out of people. I'd almost be willing to bet that when they were children, they used to drown ants or use magnifying glasses to fry them. Anything to get a stir going. Barbarians!!!

Originally Posted by Jesse Joe

Search for someone dead or alive, just type in the name of the person in the bar.


http://www.deadoraliveinfo.com/dead....ghtfoot+Gordon

Creepy...but it works http://www.deadoraliveinfo.com/dead..../Bush+George+W

[charlene]

National Post - week in review - Cartoons
http://network.nationalpost.com/np/b...b-20-2010.aspx

[vlmagee]

Lightfoot never recorded it with "pavement" but he definitely sang it that way for a short time in the 60s. There is at least one live recording that definitely has "pavement" and "never grows". It's one of 4 GL songs on a strange MP3 compilation of "country, blues and western classics":

www.gordonlightfoot.com/LiveLightfootCutsfromthe1960s.shtml

I love that version of the lyrics!

[charlene]

Globe and Mail:


Murder by Tweet: The great Lightfoot blackout of 02/18

Blame bounced back and forth between new and old media on Thursday as each accused the other of starting false reports that musician Gordon Lightfoot had died.

The rumour began as a prank phone call to musician Ronnie Hawkins’ manager. As Ottawa media consultant Ian Capstick explains, Mr. Hawkins told his wife, Wanda, who spread the news by phone, Facebook and even fax. It hit Twitter mid-afternoon with the post “RIP Gordon Lightfoot” from the (now-deleted) Fleminski account, which belonged to Ottawa resident Rebecca Fleming.

According to Mr. Capstick, CanWest News Service called Ms. Fleming, who pointed them to Wanda Hawkins’ Facebook page. A CanWest reporter confirmed the mistaken belief with Ronnie Hawkins by telephone and CanWest issued an in-house news alert, which reporter David Akin relayed to his roughly 2,500 Twitter followers: “Gordon Lightfoot has died, sources close to the singer say.”

Tweeters at Roots Music Canada tried to quell rumours by posting: “Gordon Lightfoot was on the phone and fine half an hour ago.” But the shipwreck had already happened. Over the next two hours more than 3,000 new Tweets spread the false news. Meanwhile, CanWest newspaper websites had run with their story and before long Gordon Lightfoot was listening to radio reports of his death while driving to a dentist appointment in Toronto.

Roughly an hour after his initial post, Mr. Akin Tweeted that Mr. Lightfoot’s manager had denied the rumour. Media retractions followed, and the tide of false Twitter posts gave way to relief, media commentary, and, of course, snappy one-liners.

The Twitter reaction:

“What a day for Canada, 3rd GOLD medal won in Olympics & Gordon Lightfoot un-dies. Who says Canada is boring?”

“Blaming Twitter for spreading the false news of Gordon Lightfoot's death is like blaming trees 4 incorrect newspaper article.”

“This just in: Gordon Lightfoot among 6 billion humans NOT dead.”

“If You Could Read My Obit: Gordon Lightfoot comeback song.”

“I'll never forget where I was when I heard Gordon Lightfoot was alive.”

“It might have been more believable if Gordon Lightfoot had tweeted about the National Post’s demise. Just sayin'.”

“Headline: Canada media still learning Twitter. In related news: Gordon Lightfoot still not dead.”

“Does this mean Lent is over? The resurrection of Gordon Lightfoot – bring on the choco bunnies.”

“Gordon Lightfoot's condition upgraded to ‘alive.’ “

“I just learned that Gordon Lightfoot is still alive before I had even heard he had died.”

[johnfowles]

Originally Posted by MistyMoppens

BTW - has anyone noticed the resemblance between Char & Joan Baez in the pic Sir John has posted? Hair, eyes, smile. Wow.

I of course did and I purposely chose those two pix to make my point, never having seen a picture of Char before she went grey,Unless that is, like me she started going grey when very young
At school aged about 13/14 I well remember being set upon by class "mates" who were intent on pulling all my newly emerging grEy hairs out, no doubt helping their proliferation? Note that at no time did my hair turn grAy!!

[Yuri]

A letter to the editor I came across in the Toronto Sun newspaper sums it up for a lot of us here

Canada’s best singer

Re “Singing from the grave” (Joe Warmington, Feb. 19): As a huge Gordon Lightfoot fan, it hit me like an 18-wheeler when I heard he had died. I was devastated and totally depressed. Then, shortly after, came the best news I had heard in years — Lightfoot is alive. I have even forgiven Canwest because our beloved Gord is still with us. Charles Adler summed it up best — “I have never been happier to be wrong about a story.” Canwest should realize there are losers out there who use the Internet for scurrilous agendas. I hope this is never repeated. Long live the greatest Canadian singer ever.

Harry S. Anchan

Calgary

(What could the agenda possibly be for saying Lightfoot is dead when he’s not?)

[Bill]

Glad I missed the rumor!

[charlene]

no agenda - just stooopidity....

New York magazine article places Gordon in the "I saw my own obituary" club:

http://nymag.com/daily/entertainment...the_i_saw.html

Probably, we'll never know the identity of the prankster who called Ronnie Hawkins' management office...that's bizarre for someone to call like that and of course, not funny in the least.

But Gordon's response for sure in good form with his humor. And some comments I read in blogs, etc:

http://www.canada.com/health/Singer+...156/story.html

[jj]

Originally Posted by podunklander

...that's bizarre for someone to call like that and of course, not funny in the least.

unimaginable (and unlikely) that any child of Ingrid or Fred (or Galen?) would do that...odd that Ronnie would think the family would delegate the 'notifying family and close friends call' duties to a grandchild

i wonder if they ever got that call traced...could have come from a booth i suppose....btw, ever noticed how hard it is to find a booth these days...not everyone has a cell phone, eh

[fezo]

Originally Posted by vlmagee

Lightfoot never recorded it with "pavement" but he definitely sang it that way for a short time in the 60s. There is at least one live recording that definitely has "pavement" and "never grows". It's one of 4 GL songs on a strange MP3 compilation of "country, blues and western classics":

www.gordonlightfoot.com/LiveLightfootCutsfromthe1960s.shtml

I love that version of the lyrics!

Good to know I am not losing my mind. Well, not on that issue anyway.

[Moosedog]

Many of the blog comments I've been seeing are comical. Some posters seem to have turned it into a "competition" to see who discovered it was a rumor first. I'm pretty sure there is no prize. LOL Oh wait...the prize is the fact that it was just a rumor.

Originally Posted by jj

unimaginable (and unlikely) that any child of Ingrid or Fred (or Galen?) would do that...odd that Ronnie would think the family would delegate the 'notifying family and close friends call' duties to a grandchild

i wonder if they ever got that call traced...could have come from a booth i suppose....btw, ever noticed how hard it is to find a booth these days...not everyone has a cell phone, eh

In the interviews, Ronnie does say it struck him as odd. Had he received the call directly, I'm sure he would have questioned the caller further. Once I saw the word 'prank' used...made me think that someone he knew either thought it would somehow be funny, or it was intended to be malicious. Doesn't seem to be the work of Ashton Kutcher.

Last time I saw (and used) a booth lol was at a gas station on the outskirts of Hamilton. Our cell phones don't work in CA. No phonebook at the booth or inside the station.

Originally Posted by Moosedog

Many of the blog comments I've been seeing are comical. Some posters seem to have turned it into a "competition" to see who discovered it was a rumor first. I'm pretty sure there is no prize. LOL Oh wait...the prize is the fact that it was just a rumor.

LMAO
Did you read the one where someone jokingly wrote that they thought Gordon had died on the Edmund Fitzgerald? But there were a few out there who seriously didn't know Gordon was still alive.

oh geez, a competition to see who was the 1st to squelch the rumor? How lame is that!

[fezo]

Hmmm... Pam comments on the previous posts but not the one about losing my mind. That tells me all i need to know.....

I did like the comment that said his condition had been upgraded to alive.

[charlene]

in the spirit of the Olympics: Lightfoot - 1 / Grim Reaper - 0

lol

[jj]

Originally Posted by charlene

in the spirit of the Olympics: Lightfoot - 1 / Grim Reaper - 0

lol

lol. i hope degree of difficuly was taken into account


ok, joking aside (but still an uncomfortable topic), do you think GL has a plot reserved at some place in Toronto like Mt Pleasant or perhaps a spot up by his mom and dad...or ratehr where would an appropriate place be to scatter ashes?

"I will do my final number, by Lake Couchiching"

[Borderstone]

Well , like the rest of you here ....I too was relieved at this news. (That it wasn't true.)

I only saw this story on my local news,thankfully,after it had already cleared up as a hoax.

I fortunatley had not heard,seen or read anything about him being gone,If i had I would have bawled like I did for MJ.

Godon's stickin' with us until he's 100! Strange part is ,just the day before i had played one of my Songbook CDs!

[Auburn Annie]

"...do you think GL has a plot reserved at some place in Toronto like Mt Pleasant or perhaps a spot up by his mom and dad...or ratehr where would an appropriate place be to scatter ashes?"

in the lee of Christian Island? where the green dark forests are too silent to be real? Beyond the wild misty mountain,within the valley so free? And of course: when I get my final slumber, when I pawn my diamond ring,
I will do my final number, by Lake Couchiching...

Originally Posted by fezo

Hmmm... Pam comments on the previous posts but not the one about losing my mind. That tells me all i need to know.....

I did like the comment that said his condition had been upgraded to alive.

oh well, that's because it's nothing new

[Yuri]

I didn’t kill Gordon Lightfoot

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/...rticle1481522/

Many people blamed me last week when rumours of his death arose. I just happened to be the first to tweet about it

Rebecca Fleming

From Friday's Globe and Mail Published on Thursday, Feb. 25, 2010 4:33PM EST Last updated on Thursday, Feb. 25, 2010 8:45PM EST

The un-news was short-lived. On Feb. 18, the media had legendary Canadian singer Gordon Lightfoot dead, then un-dead, within the span of about an hour. That was pretty easy for Mr. Lightfoot to clear up, from his car on the way to the dentist.

But my own good no-name, not so much. I, Rebecca Fleming (heard of me? Didn't think so), have been identified by several news sources as ground zero for the rumour. I, a full-time biologist with two little kids recovering from gastroenteritis, apparently have nothing better to do on a Thursday afternoon in quarantine than to start celebrity death hoaxes.

The idea is kind of appealing in principle – having the time, free headspace and lack of conscience to dream up twisted schemes like this. Not to mention having that kind of clout and credibility. Can you imagine? Move over, Perez Hilton.

But alas, my sole claim to infamy is that I, @fleminski, was the first to tweet “RIP Gordon Lightfoot.” I had heard the news from a mutual friend of Ronnie Hawkins (who, incidentally, introduced my parents to each other). Someone claiming to be Gordon Lightfoot's grandson started the whole business with a prank call to Mr. Hawkins's management. But nobody seems to be interested in him. He used the telephone. And dude, that's just so 20th century.

If you want to spread things fast, Twitter is your friend. Or your enemy, as the case may be.

I was a Twitter nobody with a mere 100 followers, tweeting just for fun, a molecule in the Twitter sea. But 10 minutes after I posted that seemingly innocent tweet, I got a call from a CanWest reporter. I pretty much had the feeling of floating above my body when I realized the magnitude of what I had done. But my first thought wasn’t, “What if it isn't true?” It was, “What if his family doesn't know yet?”

The reporter assured me she had heard the rumour elsewhere and needed a source, so I spilled. Then I set about protecting my tweets in a vain attempt to stop the spread of the news. Not long afterward, I got a tweet from @rootsmusicanada, who had confirmed that Gordon Lightfoot was alive and well. After a brief moment with my head between my knees, trying to maintain consciousness, I posted an apologetic retraction, which went out to, well, nobody, because my tweets were protected.

Around the same time, I started seeing “RIP Gordon Lightfoot” everywhere. On Facebook, on Twitter and, oh my gosh, in the news. I panicked. I deleted my Twitter account outright (RIP @fleminski) and turned off my computer in the hope that it would all just go away.

It didn’t.

By the time I went back online, Gordon Lightfoot was officially undead (phew!) and the witch hunt was on (uh-oh!). Media guru and sleuth Ian Capstick was hot on my trail, and even had my picture and the dreaded tweet in question on his blog. Commenters were gleefully posting personal information about me: my full name, where I lived, whom I worked for. So I did what anybody in my situation would do. I opened a bottle of wine, and began to drink.

Meanwhile, Ronnie Hawkins, Gordon Lightfoot's production company and the media were unable to make any kind of connection between the phone-call hoax and my tweet, and nobody was quite sure which came first. Of course, @fleminski was nowhere to be found. But never mind that.

In reality, my tweet was a pop rock compared to respected CanWest journalist David Akin’s atomic bomb. He innocently tweeted, to his many journalist followers, a CanWest alert: “Gordon Lightfoot has died, sources close to the singer say.” Kaboom.

You can figure out the rest.

In the wake of Lightfoot's good-humoured resurrection, a huge blamestorm blew through the media and blogosphere, and few seemed to be able to get the story straight. People largely blamed Twitter and lack of journalistic integrity. And they blamed little old me.

Hardly anybody seemed to care about the prankster who started this whole thing with a call to Mr. Hawkins's management. But I'm betting even he is surprised at the magnitude of the outcome.

I think this all boils down to the fact that we're human. It's not unusual for people to die. And we're inherently gullible, especially when we have no reason to doubt the story or the source. Ronnie Hawkins believed his management. CanWest and I believed Ronnie Hawkins. David Akin believed CanWest. The rest of the media believed David Akin. Thankfully, Gordon Lightfoot didn't believe the radio, or he wouldn't have made it to his dentist appointment.

Though I wasn't the origin of this hoax, I know that I acted as a significant and unwitting catalyst, and for that I am deeply sorry. I am glad that Gordon Lightfoot lives on to sing about the things that make us all human. Our passions, our fears and, most of all, our mistakes.

Rebecca Fleming lives in Ottawa.

***23 Comments to date - go to link at top to view

[charlene]

It was pretty clear almost immediately that she wasn't the source... I feel for her..

David (Roots Music Canada) tweeted he had contacted EMP after finding out it was a rumour with them and I phoned B. Fiedler at the same time and let Kenyon (who called me with the news he saw on the news wire) know all was well..
Ronnie Hawkins was on the radio and tv talking about the phone call from a grandson so it was clear that a tweet didn't start it. A Tweeter just innocently took erroneous info, and passed it on. Tweets are a lot faster way to pass info on than years ago and the audience is much larger.

The culprits are the originator who made the call and the media person who did not complete due process in confirming such a serious story with the proper sources.

They owe me 10 years..

[buzzard]

Interesting article. Makes me wonder where we're going with news reporting and verification of sources. I thought Lightfoot took the whole thing with very good humour. I also thought the illustration in today's Globe was particularly unflattering.

Brian

[charlene]

http://mitchellshannon.wordpress.com...grim-reaper-0/
February 28, 2010
GORDON LIGHTFOOT 3, GRIM REAPER 0
Gordon Lightfoot, a folksinger and a preeminent cultural figure up here in Canada, last week suffered the unkindest death of all, which is the widespread assumption by his audience and countrymen that he had died. The phony news of his expiration was spread via Internet-borne rumors. Ersatz-death, where is thy dignity?


Rompin` Ronnie: Tell me, wha'd I say
A couple of idiots who get paid by large news organizations to know better reported the baseless gossip as fact on their newspaper and TV websites, and somehow managed to get Rompin’ Ronnie Hawkins, the merry old rockabilly character, to confirm the faux-report. The Hawk is like a current-day Gabby Hayes, the kind of fellow whose opinion you might seek if you were looking for an incoherent response along lines of, “Dad-gum the dasted durn ding-dong!” His confirmation, if that’s what it was, of his friend’s death made the tragedy true, but only for as long as it took Lightfoot to receive word that he had croaked. (I use ‘croak’ here in a colloquial sense, to mean ‘died’. I did not intend to draw attention to the singer’s long-diminished vocal prowess, but we’ll need to raise this unfortunate aspect in due course.)

Lightfoot claimed to be just leaving his mid-town Toronto office when he learned of his death. Artists in other places work out of garrets, but I love that folksingers in Canada have mid-town offices. “Miss Stitt! Take some dictation: ‘Sundown, you better take care, comma, if I find you been creepin’ round my back stairs.’ Make two copies, and then get me Cisco Houston on line four.”

As it happily turned out, Lightfoot wasn’t deceased in the slightest, to paraphrase Michael Palin’s landmark dead-parrot sketch. The singer was as vital — and outwardly amused by the incident — as you would expect from any plucky septuagenarian stroke-victim with a precarious medical chart.
Like many, I found Lightfoot’s close brush with death to be unsettling. I have longstanding ties to the Canadian music scene, having once been beaten up as a child attending Danesbury Public School by Murray McLaughlin, the famously sensitive songwriter who lived on the other side of Lyon Avenue. I forgave McLaughlin years after the incident when he recorded “On the Boulevard,” a fine song about workingmen killing time on Lakeshore Blvd. in Etobicoke, the street where Lightfoot once earned a DUI citation after catching Adam Timoon‘s pub gig at the Seaway Hotel. (Adam Timoon these days occasionally entertains the residents of the veterans’ nursing home where they’re looking after my dad. Small world, ain’t it?)
Critics of the newspaper industry are making much out of how the incompetents at Global News obliviously circulated the misinformation, because, you know, the only thing lower than an employee of those olde-timey media corporations is a self-described Internet-based critic of same. These blogospheric nudniks would use the undead Lightfoot to make a point about how the New Media are cleaning the clocks of the old, but this is like the naturopath celebrating when the oncology surgeon fails to fully remove someone’s tumor. Call it unseemly. The lesson to be gleaned is that all you consumers of news and information should paste a warning sticker that reads ‘caveat-freaking-emptor’ to your I-pads.

The main thing is that Lightoot is okay. I took in a Jimmy Buffett concert back in November -– uneasily stuck in the middle of 16,000 or so rabid, exceedingly moist and garrulous parrotheads –- and, from the stage, Mr. Buffett announced between songs that he’d rather be attending the Gordon Lightfoot gig that was taking place across town, but, sadly, he “had to work.” It seemed like an unguarded comment to offer to your paying audience, but give Jimmy full marks for honesty.

Taking his point, when we got home, my wife found a pair of decent seats for the final night in Lightfoot’s annual series of shows here in his hometown of Toronto. He draws a far smaller and less raucous audience than Buffett, and the crowd was rapt to a fault, which is understandable with the man’s grandchildren in attendance. There was a striking contrast in the styles of ‘70s singer-songwriters, I must observe: Buffett onstage barefoot in what looked like bathing trunks; Lightfoot, post-aneurysm surgery, post-mild stroke, wearing the atavistic costume of a geriatric elevator-operator in a budget-friendly mid-Manhattan tourist hotel. He looked too much like Seymour Cassel in “The Royal Tenenbaums.”

Lightfoot, who underwent a tracheotomy a few years back, seems to have appropriated the recent phrasing and vocal approach of his chum Bob Dylan, making the most of his new rasp, and using muted whispers to a powerful effect. When the 71-year-old crooner, absent his baritone, sang my favourite of his songs, “The Watchman’s Gone,” well, you have to know it was an emotional moment:

“If you find me feedin’ daisies/Please turn my face up to the sky
And leave me be/Watchin’ the moon roll by
Whatever I was/You know it was all because
I’ve been on the town/Washin’ the bullshit down.”

That is telling them. Those incandescent lyrics, written when Lightfoot was 36, half his current age, foresaw the defiance of a man late in his life still able to sum up the grit and the vocabulary to tell the big cruel world to go screw itself. Hank Snow may be dead; Wilf Carter is gone, but Lightfoot and Lenny Cohen and Stompin’ Tom Connors are all still around to tell you what it is you need to know: Keep moving on, folks. Love calls you by your name, on a Sudbury Saturday night.

Lightfoot earns last word, this time, a perquisite of genius. “You’d better take care,/Knowing the watchman’s always there.”

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