A turning point came when he heard Ian & Sylvia sing Merle Travis’ coal-mining tragedy “Dark as a Dungeon,” of which he later said, “When I saw that combination of folk and country music, I knew it was what I had been looking for. By the early 1960s, he’d written dozens of songs, but later said those early songs meant little to him. He cited Dylan, Pete Seeger and fellow Canadian folkies Ian & Sylvia as major influences, but also said he was a devotee of country singer Ernest Tubb. In the 1950s he moved to Los Angeles to study orchestration at the Westlake College of Modern Music in Hollywood, earning a living on the side writing advertising jingles and vocal arrangements for other singers. He gravitated to the region’s folk and country music scene as he got older, appeared on Canadian television in talent contests and then as a performer and, briefly, as the reluctant host of a country-western variety show. He made his first record when he was in fourth grade, a recording of “Irish Lullaby,” which was played over the school’s public address system. His mother noticed Gordon humming himself to sleep as a child, and both parents encouraged his innate musical talent, expressed early on when he joined the choir of the United Church in Orillia. Despite the Indigenous-sounding surname, Lightfoot said he was of Scottish extraction. His parents, Gordon and Jessie Vick Lightfoot, ran a dry cleaning business. 17, 1938, in Orillia, Ontario, about 80 miles north of Toronto. He also was elected to the Canadian Country Music Hall of Fame in 2001. The Canadian music industry treated him as royalty, bestowing him 16 Juno Awards, its equivalent of the Grammys, and inducting him into the Juno Hall of Fame, where Dylan, both a rival and a longtime admirer, made the award presentation. Elvis Presley, Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, Barbra Streisand, Jerry Lee Lewis, Marty Robbins, and Peter, Paul and Mary are among the artists who recorded Lightfoot compositions. Lightfoot was a gifted and prolific writer of hundreds of songs. It was one of many historically based Lightfoot compositions, and over the course of 21 albums recorded over five decades, he touched often on the character and people of his native country, most notably in “Canadian Railroad Trilogy,” revered by many Canadians as an unofficial national anthem.

2 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1976, told the true story of an ore freighter that sank in a storm in Lake Superior a year earlier, claiming the lives of all 29 crew members. Along with Joni Mitchell and Neil Young, Lightfoot is regarded as one of the most important Canadian pop musicians of the ’60s and ’70s, best known in the States for his mournful hits “If You Could Read My Mind,” “Sundown” and “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.”

Hex hall trilogy