David M. Shribman
NATIONAL PERSPECTIVE
DETROIT — Here in the Mariners’ Church, planted in the shadow of the Renaissance Center at the corner of Woodbridge Street and Woodward Avenue, the gales of November seem to swirl in the air.
The English country gothic stone church has stood here for 176 years, welcoming sailors and grieving for them, offering prayers for shipmates setting out on the perilous waters of the Great Lakes and solace to families mourning doomed seafarers who, the Canadian balladeer Gordon Lightfoot put it, were swallowed by the waves breaking over the railing.
This is the rustic hall in Detroit where the church bell chimed 29 times, once for each man on the Edmund Fitzgerald.
This weekend, families of those men who learned that Lake Superior never gives up her dead will gather here to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the wreck of the Great Lakes ore carrier, the maritime tragedy marked by Lightfoot’s haunting ballad.
His song has become the preeminent account of an episode now almost impossible to describe, in this column or elsewhere, in any terms besides the 478 carefully sculpted words of the 1976 folk ballad. Indeed, I count 10 books titled in some variation of “gales of November,” a phrase first appearing in the eighth stanza of the ballad, and then in nearly every account of the shipwreck and its aftermath.
Including, unavoidably, this one.
The Canadian singer-songwriter and the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald are inextricably linked in a way few episodes are.
That’s because no other words but his fully capture the drama, the struggle, the final sinking beneath the waves, the solemn sound of the bells that the Rev. Richard Ingalls tolled after learning the fate of men he never met in a ship he never saw that fell to the bottom of a different Great Lake, one far away.
Lightfoot, who died at 84 two years ago, went to his own grave as the balladeer, chronicler, poet laureate, librettist, minstrel of misfortune and, after all these years, dramaturg of the maritime catastrophe that occurred on Nov. 10, 1975. His weeping words — they sold 850,000 copies as a single and once ranked second on the Billboard charts — have stuck to the shipwreck the way “When in the course of human events” sticks to the American Revolution, “date of infamy” is attached to the attack on Pearl Harbor, and “Do you believe in miracles?” adheres to the 1980 American Olympic hockey victory.
Lightfoot produced nearly 40 albums. His “Sundown” (“She’s been looking like a queen in a sailor’s dream”) actually outranked the Edmund Fitzgerald song, landing No. 1 on Billboard. His “If You Could Read My Mind” (“… what a tale my thoughts would tell”) speaks of the power of enduring memories. His “Canadian Railroad Trilogy” (“There was a time in this fair land …”) is so descriptive and evocative of the building of the country’s transcontinental railroad that the popular historian Pierre Berton said Canadians learned more about the building of the great 19th-century feat in 6 minutes and 22 seconds of the Lightfoot song than in the two full books he labored over for years.
But none of Lightfoot’s songs has the power of his shipwreck sonata.
Which is why, when the families (who learned, as he put it, where the love of God goes when the waves turn the minutes to hours) gathered in this cathedral of catharsis in 2000 for a 25th-anniversary commemoration, Lightfoot, in black leather jacket and black jeans, joined them. He realized what the families already knew: that the song was his greatest achievement. “I have a responsibility to be here,” he said. “It’s not the kind of song you can write and walk away from.”
The tune that eventually carried the song had been floating around his mind, itself a lake freighter of a burden, for some while. It was, he said, “a melody and a chord progression that I had at hand that I did not know quite what I was going to do with.” After reading an Associated Press account of the shipwreck, and then one in Newsweek, he was, according to Nicholas Jennings in his 2017 Lightfoot biography, “instantly captivated.” Melody and moment were merged.
He already had written a shipwreck song, “Ballad of Yarmouth Castle” (“Like a toy ship on a mill pond/She burned all through the night”), about a vessel dying in a 1965 fire. For the Edmund Fitzgerald song, he worked even more doggedly, determined to get every detail: the ship’s load, its course across the Great Lakes, the winds, the waves. He felt the melody he had at hand fit its “somber and mysterious mood,” as John U. Bacon put it in his book published only last month and titled, of course, “The Gales of November.” Then, with uneasiness, he began crafting the lyrics. “He feared being inaccurate, corny or worse,” Bacon wrote, “appearing to exploit a tragedy for profit.” It took months to get it right.
But one thing he got wrong. That’s why he changed the description of the Mariners’ Church from a “musty old hall” to a “rustic old hall.”
Sunday, that rustic old hall, now filled with memorabilia from the shipwreck to which it is linked in lyric and legend, will be filled with mourners. It is, after all, a church where every service begins with the congregation singing this:
Eternal Father strong to save,
Whose arm has bound the restless wave,
Hear us when we cry to Thee,
For those in peril on the sea.
Over the weekend memorial, the brass bell will be rung 29 times. A hornist will play taps from the balcony. Perhaps those gathered here will notice the seafaring themes in the soaring stained-glass windows, one picturing a dove in Noah’s hand, another portraying a cross-topped mast signifying the Ship of the Church — and, in the tower, a stained-glass image of a 20th-century ore carrier, installed seven years before the Edmund Fitzgerald disaster.
Lightfoot often ended his concerts with the railway song. But the power of his shipwreck song never has ended.
The men are gone. The legend lives on. That is in part because when it comes to the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, as Lightfoot wrote in a different song, when you reach the part where the heartaches come, the hero would be him. Him, and the men he eulogized for all time.
A Swampscott High School Class of 1972 member, David M. Shribman is the Pulitzer Prize-winning former executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
