![](\"http:\/\/upload.wikimedia.org\/wikipedia\/commons\/f\/f5\/Gordon_Lightfoot.jpg\")
<\/p>\nTo the musical hipster, Gordon Lightfoot has for almost thirty years been synonymous with getting a kiss from your great-aunt.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Let’s do try to set the record straight, here.<\/p>\n
Lightfoot is one of the last, longest-living (commercially, anyway) survivors of the folk music boom of the early sixties. But I always took to Lightfoot because, while most of the “folk” music I heard was either screechingly, mawkishly self-righteous (Peter, Paul and Mary, Joan Baez) or self-consciously archaic (all of Pete Seger and Woody Guthrie’s many, many imitators) or groaningly over-literate (Bob Dylan’s many, many, many imitators), Lightfoot was just a guy who wanted to entertain a crowd.\u00a0 He was just a hard-drinking Canadian guy who looked and drank like the guy who refinished your driveway and sang songs about being hungover and unreliable.<\/p>\n
Which isn’t to say that he didn’t follow some of the trends of the times – but even those shots were more interesting than their contemporaries.\u00a0 Amid the suffocating masses of “protest” folk songs, songs like “Don Quixote<\/a>” and “Circle of Steel” were deft, oblique yet engaging.<\/p>\n Unlike most of his folk contemporaries, his shots at pop stardom, “Sundown” and “Carefree Highway” and “Summer Side of Life” and many others, were refreshingly un-suffocated by the conventions of folk that weighed down so much of the rest of the genre.<\/p>\n Lightfoot comes in for particular abuse for his biggest, best-known hit, “Wreck Of The Edmund Fitzgerald”.\u00a0 Some call it “boring”.\u00a0 Well, people are entitled to their own opinion; “Fitz” is <\/em>an example of one of the most-abused folk forms, the “Really really long historical ballad” (which Lightfoot has done before, albeit without quite the same sales)<\/a>. But I always loved the song, partly because being from North Dakota, maritime lore is in my bones, and partly because the notion that, in 1976, when disco and dreary singer-songwriter treacle and Bachman Turner Overdrive ruled the airwaves, the notion that a five minute song about a shipwreck would sell a zillion songs should have been a plot for one of those “a couple of underdog guys hatch an improbable plot to make a zillion bucks in a scheme that everyone <\/em>says has got <\/em>to be a flop” movies.<\/p>\n So yeah.\u00a0 I’m supposed to hate Gordon Lightfoot.\u00a0 But I don’t.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" To the musical hipster, Gordon Lightfoot has for almost thirty years been synonymous with getting a kiss from your great-aunt. Let’s do try to set the record straight, here. Lightfoot is one of the last, longest-living (commercially, anyway) survivors of the folk music boom of the early sixties. But I always took to Lightfoot because, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,14],"tags":[211],"class_list":["post-4679","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mitch","category-music","tag-love-and-hate"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4679","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4679"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4679\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26901,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4679\/revisions\/26901"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4679"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4679"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4679"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}