Gordon Lightfoot, the Canadian people singer whose wealthy, plaintive baritone and reward for melodic songwriting made him one of the vital widespread recording artists of the Nineteen Seventies, died on Monday night time in Toronto. He was once 84.
His dying, at Sunnybrook Hospital, was once showed by means of his publicist, Victoria Lord. No purpose was once given.
Mr. Lightfoot, a fast-rising megastar in Canada within the early Nineteen Sixties, broke via to world luck when his buddies and fellow Canadians Ian and Sylvia Tyson recorded two of his songs, “Early Morning Rain” and “For Lovin’ Me.”
When Peter, Paul and Mary got here out with their own versions, and Marty Robbins reached the highest of the rustic charts with Mr. Lightfoot’s “Ribbon of Darkness,” Mr. Lightfoot’s popularity soared. Overnight, he joined the ranks of songwriters like Bob Dylan, Phil Ochs and Tom Paxton, all of whom influenced his taste.
When people track ebbed in recognition, beaten by means of the British invasion, Mr. Lightfoot started writing ballads aimed at a broader target market. He scored one hit after every other, starting in 1970 with the heartfelt “If You Could Read My Mind,” impressed by means of the breakup of his first marriage.
In fast succession he recorded the hits “Sundown,” “Carefree Highway,” “Rainy Day People” and “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” which he wrote after studying a Newsweek article concerning the sinking of an iron-ore service in Lake Superior in 1975, with the lack of all 29 group contributors.
For Canadians, Mr. Lightfoot was once a countrywide hero, a homegrown megastar who stayed house even after attaining impressive luck within the United States and who catered to his Canadian fanatics with cross-country excursions. His ballads on Canadian subject matters, like “Canadian Railroad Trilogy,” pulsated with a love for the country’s rivers and forests, which he explored on formidable canoe journeys a ways into the hinterlands.
His non-public taste, reticent and self-effacing — he have shyed away from interviews and flinched when faced with reward — additionally went down neatly. “Sometimes I wonder why I’m being called an icon, because I really don’t think of myself that way,” Mr. Lightfoot advised The Globe and Mail in 2008. “I’m a professional musician, and I work with very professional people. It’s how we get through life.”
Gordon Meredith Lightfoot Jr. was once born on Nov. 17, 1938, in Orillia, Ontario, the place his father controlled a dry-cleaning plant. As a boy, he sang in a church choir, carried out on native radio presentations and shined in making a song competitions. “Man, I did the whole bit: oratorio work, Kiwanis contests, operettas, barbershop quartets,” he advised Time mag in 1968.
He performed piano, drums and guitar as a young person, and whilst nonetheless in highschool wrote his first tune, a topical quantity concerning the Hula Hoop craze with a catchy ultimate line: “I guess I’m just a slob and I’m gonna lose my job, ’cause I’m Hula-Hula-Hoopin’ all the time.”
After finding out composition and orchestration at the Westlake College of Music in Los Angeles, he returned to Canada. For a time he was once a member of the Singing Swinging Eight, a making a song and dancing troupe at the tv display “Country Hoedown,” however he quickly turned into a part of the Toronto people scene, acting at the similar espresso properties and golf equipment as Ian and Sylvia, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young and Leonard Cohen.
He shaped a people duo, the Two Tones, with a fellow “Hoedown” performer, Terry Whelan. The duo recorded a reside album in 1962, “Two Tones at the Village Corner.” The subsequent yr, whilst touring in Europe, he served because the host of “The Country and Western Show” on BBC tv.
As a songwriter, Mr. Lightfoot had complex past the Hula Hoop, however now not by means of a perfect deal. His paintings “didn’t have any kind of identity,” he advised the authors of “The Encyclopedia of Folk, Country and Western Music,” revealed in 1969. When the Greenwich Village people growth introduced Mr. Dylan and different dynamic songwriters to the fore, he mentioned, “I started to get a point of view, and that’s when I started to improve.”
In 1965, he seemed at the Newport Folk Festival and made his debut within the United States at Town Hall in New York. “Mr. Lightfoot has a rich, warm voice and a dexterous guitar technique,” Robert Shelton wrote in The New York Times. “With a little more attention to stage personality, he should become quite popular.”
A yr later, after signing with Albert Grossman, the chief of Mr. Dylan and Peter, Paul and Mary, Mr. Lightfoot recorded his first solo album, “Lightfoot!” With performances of “Early Morning Rain,” “For Lovin’ Me,” “Ribbon of Darkness” and “I’m Not Sayin’,” a success document in Canada in 1963, the album was once warmly gained by means of the critics.
Real business luck got here when he switched to Warner Brothers, to begin with recording for the corporate’s Reprise label. “By the time I changed over to Warner Brothers, round about 1970, I was reinventing myself,” he advised the Georgia newspaper Savannah Connect in 2010. “Let’s say I was probably just advancing away from the folk era, and trying to find some direction whereby I might have some music that people would want to listen to.”
Mr. Lightfoot, accompanying himself on an acoustic 12-string guitar, in a voice that regularly trembled with emotion, gave spare, direct accounts of his subject material. He sang of loneliness, stricken relationships, the itch to roam and the majesty of the Canadian panorama. He was once, because the Canadian author Jack Batten put it, “journalist, poet, historian, humorist, short-story teller and folksy recollector of bygone days.”
His recognition as a recording artist started to wane within the Eighties, however he maintained a hectic traveling agenda. In 1999 Rhino Records launched “Songbook,” a four-disc survey of his occupation.
Mr. Lightfoot, who lived in Toronto, is survived by means of his older sister, Beverley Eyers; his youngsters, Fred, Ingrid, Miles, Meredith, Eric and Galen, and his spouse, Kim Hasse. His first two marriages led to divorce.
In 2002, simply sooner than going onstage in Orillia, Mr. Lightfoot collapsed when an aneurysm in his stomach aorta ruptured and left him close to dying. After two years spent convalescing, he recorded an album, (*84*) and in 2005 he resumed his reside performances with the Better Late Than Never Tour.
“I want to be like Ralph Carter, Stompin’ Tom and Willie Nelson,” Mr. Lightfoot advised the CBC in 2004. “Just do it for as long as humanly possible.”
Vjosa Isai contributed reporting.
