Do You Know the Tragic True Story Behind Gordon Lightfoot’s ‘The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald’?
What To Know
- The SS Edmund Fitzgerald sank in Lake Superior on November 10, 1975, during a severe storm, resulting in the loss of all 29 crew members.
- Gordon Lightfoot was inspired to write “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” after reading about the tragedy, aiming to memorialize the event and its victims.
- The song became a major hit, reaching number one in Canada and number two in the US, bringing widespread attention to the disaster.
50 years ago, the SS Edmund Fitzgerald sunk in Lake Superior, taking 29 men down with it — a tragedy you likely know about due to the 1976 Gordon Lightfoot hit “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” released less than a year after the ship sank. The song hit number one in Lightfoot’s native Canada, and number two in the US — an impressive feat for a song that ran over six minutes long.
Lightfoot was inspired to immortalize the wreck after reading a news article about it — and feeling that unless he did something, this devastating shipwreck, like so many each year, would be largely forgotten by the world.
What is the true story of the SS Edmund Fitzgerald?
On November 9, 1975, the 728-foot SS Edmund Fitzgerald set off from Superior, Wisconsin, transporting, as the song’s lyrics note, 26,000 tons of iron ore to Detroit’s Zug Island. Michigan Live reports that the ship encountered a hurricane-like storm, and in its final hours, was battered by “sustained winds of 60 mph, and waves higher than 25 feet.” Attempts to find a safe harbor to wait out the storm failed, and experts believe the ship may have actually scraped its side open while attempting to approach a nearby island.
Though the Fitzgerald was in radio contact with the Coast Guard for most of its struggle with the storm, by 7pm on November 10, 1975, the ship was no longer visible on radar. The Coast Guard began an active search, but the ship had already sunk, becoming what many call “the Titanic of the Great Lakes,” with all 29 men aboard dead.
Why did Gordon Lightfoot write about the wreck?
The singer-songwriter — who himself was an avid sailor — saw an article in Newsweek, and was saddened by the idea of such a tragedy being entirely forgotten. In a 2009 CBC interview, he recalled that he thought “nobody is ever going to know a thing about this [wreck] in years to come … it’s going to be completely forgotten. And that, basically, is why I wrote that song.”