THINKING OUT LOUD: The artistry remains, after the artist has gone (copy)
Published 6:00 am Friday, May 5, 2023
- Galvin crop
We were sitting in a circus tent on the third of September in 1983. Before us was a small circular stage designed to rotate clockwise, so that everyone had a chance to come face to face with the performer.
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In walked a rail-thin man with golden hair and a golden baritone. He wore jeans and a blue denim shirt, over which was a leather jacket. And, over the jacket, a guitar — a 12-string Martin on which he wrote songs that no less than Bob Dylan himself said he wished “could last forever.”
Gordon Lightfoot.
Calling Gordon Lightfoot a singer-songwriter doesn’t do right by the Canadian artist, who died May 1 at the age of 84. A troubadour, perhaps. A lyric poet, certainly. But he did more than write and sing songs.
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Gordon Lightfoot transported you with such clarity of vision to times and places you’d never see that you were left swearing you were born there.
There was a time in this fair land when the railroad did not run
When the wild majestic mountains stood alone against the sun
Long before the white man and long before the wheel
When the green dark forest was too silent to be real
The opening lines of “Canadian Railroad Trilogy” starts you off on one such transportation — a seven-minute odyssey that traverses his native land while telling the story of those who built the trains and the tracks, and in some cases didn’t live to see their completion.
We react to various art forms in different, personal ways. We suspend our disbelief in the theater, get lost in a book, or stand entranced in front of a painting.
And while I would be loathe to belittle your preferences, for me it has always been folksingers — particularly those who meld music and story with such quiet confidence that the listener hasn’t realized their defenses had dropped.
John Prine. Nanci Griffith. Townes Van Zandt. Kate Wolf. All, like Lightfoot, now gone. All that remains are the songs.
And the memories.
Back on that September night, Lightfoot’s opening act — another late legend, Jesse Winchester — was unable to perform. No matter, for Lightfoot extended his own set — through “Song for a Winter’s Night,” “Cotton Jenny,” “Old Dan’s Records” and so many more.
Yes, he appealed to those with a passing familiarity and worked his way through “Sundown,” “Carefree Highway,” “If You Could Read My Mind” and, ultimately, “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” … but the rest of us were just as ready for the deep cuts, as he took us across Canada with “Alberta Bound” and “Christian Island.”
I understand now, with the advantage of time, that what drew me to Lightfoot was that his poetic spirit was never far removed from his sense of place.
My own Canadian roots have always been shrouded in mystery. A grandmother from Newfoundland, who found her way to Massachusetts never to return until her ashes were carried back and buried near her parents grave-markers on a Heart’s Content hillside overlooking Trinity Bay.
We know very little else, for she was a private person with a even more private reason for leaving her homeland behind. And Newfoundland was always someplace, still is, that I would visit someday … when life isn’t busy getting in the way.
Lightfoot — through his playing and his voice, his lyrics and his persona — provided memories of things I never knew were a part of me.
Music, when it affects us like this, goes beyond sight and sound. When I sat in that circus tent 40 years ago, I knew I could never see Lightfoot in concert again — I had been taken to a place both foreign and familiar, and I saw no need to risk sullying that experience.
Besides, I still have the songs.
Oh, there was a time in this fair land when the railroad did not run
When the wild majestic mountains stood alone against the sun
Long before the white man and long before the wheel
When the green dark forest was too silent to be real
When the green dark forest was too silent to be real
And many are the dead men
Too silent to be real