A Tale of Death at Sea and Two Songs

From Wikipedia, image of The Edmund Fitzgerald underway in 1971.

I just finished a book that I’d recommend to any fellow history buffs: “The Gales of November: The Untold Story of the Edmund Fitzgerald” by John U. Bacon.

I’m a history fan—I majored in history (and communication-journalism) as an undergraduate. There are, for me, times and events that are particularly fascinating and that I have read a fair amount about. For example, my father was a WWII veteran, and the two big wars of the 20th Century, World Wars I and II, have long been of interest to me. The moon landing is in my living memory, and I’ve read some about the early space program. If you grew up in the U.S. and are into history, it’s hard to avoid the twin giants of our national narrative: the two American revolutions, the first one when we told the king to go to heck and the (un)civil one when we almost tore apart our union to protect inhumane human property rights that are clearly wrong.

Image from Amazon.

And big events of my own life, of course, draw my attention. I was a senior in high school in November of 1975. I don’t remember tuning into news of the Edmund Fitzgerald at the time, although I was in the habit of paying attention to news (my family subscribed to three daily newspapers and watched the evening news most nights), so it’s likely I heard about it.

But what I clearly remember most was a tune from the next year. I certainly heard on the radio Gordon Lightfoot’s song about the shipwreck that became a big hit in the autumn of my high school graduation year, 1976. And I bought the album that the song is on on as a result of my enjoying the song.

Anyway, I am not sure Bacon’s book title is entirely accurate, since the story was told at the time and then retold in popular music—but I thoroughly enjoyed his detailed exploration of the story of the end of one of the largest freighters ever to ply the waters of our enormous northern lakes.

I’ve seen Lake Michigan, but have not traveled to the other lakes much yet. I hope to visit Duluth sometime this year and view the largest of these inland seas, the mighty one that they call Gitche Gumee. The fresh, cold, deep waters there aren’t for swimming (too cold, year-round), but I would like to stand on the shore and contemplate life at the edge of something vast, dangerous and beautiful. You can feel small when you stand beside the ocean, but from all accounts, Lake Superior will do, too.

Anyway, the book has all kinds of fascinating tidbits. The nature of taconite, not something that I was aware of, for instance. The danger of Superior, and how many thousands of mariners it has claimed since large-scale commercial shipping began in the 19th century. Most of all, the personal stories of the men who chose (and choose) a life of wandering those waters, fueling America’s old iron-based industrial base with their labor.

It's a story of fundamental elements, of water and iron and weather and humanity.

Bacon tells the story well. We get to meet the 17-year-old pregnant girlfriend of a sailor and worry for her future. Spoiler: Her child is born a healthy girl who has a son who, to the delight of one family of the 29, looks like his departed grandfather.

We learn the story of Ernest McSorley, a 63-year-old ship captain from Toledo, Ohio, who struggled unsuccessfully to bring his ship and crew to safety. We learn of many other engineers and oilers and wipers and porters who crewed the mighty Fitz.

We learn of the competitive instincts and machismo culture and corporate greed that contributed to the tragedy.

Yeah, as a history major, I try to understand that history in school can seem dull, but I never have shared that attitude. History is ours and everyone else’s collective story, and I don’t quite get humans who aren’t fascinated by other human’s experience. Sharing a collective knowledge by telling our shared stories is one of the few things that makes us unique and uniquely human.

Anyway, another thing that makes us human—sure, many animals make musical notes, but we have the combination of abstract language and both resonate sound chambers in our bodies and instruments that we construct to create musical works, to translate our experiences in a resonate way that touches our emotions as well as our minds.

We sing. And we write songs.

Two of those songs feature prominently in the tale Bacon tells. Great Lakes sailors back in the 1970s were pretty much all men, and during breaks in their journeys, those men congregated in dive bars in rough harbor towns and put some of their coins into juke boxes.

They played “Brandy (You’re a Fine Girl),” a pop song written by Elliot Lurie and performed by the group he fronted, Looking Glass. The 1972 pop song was common ground between the country-western older sailor crowd and the young rockers who also worked on the ships.

 

I’ve never been in love with that song, but I didn’t hate it either. It was just interesting to read how that particular song, which I was aware of but didn’t seek out, took on a special life for a special group of lonely seafarers.

So it goes, I suppose. Music doesn’t just mean what the writer or performer intends—like all art (music and books), it takes new form as it is invested with significance by an audience.

Of course, where the Edmund Fitzgerald is concerned, the main song in any book about the shipwreck isn’t the one written in the early 1970s, but another one written in the immediate aftermath of the tragedy.

It’s only an aside in the book, yet I really enjoyed learning more about “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” by Gordon Lightfoot—how the Canadian troubadour had been noodling for a while with a melody related to old sea shanties. How a half-page report in Newsweek captured his attention and caused him to seek out every news article about the ship that he could find. How he carefully crafted lyrics to both fit his melody and be as accurate to history as he could.

And the recording of the song was fascinating, too. He and the musicians he was working with had a week to lay down the final tracks to Lightfoot’s “Summertime Dream” album. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday—according to Bacon, Lightfoot had a strong work ethic and put in full shifts those workdays with his bandmates, but he ended each session by playing a bit of his sea shanty melody.

The singer and band worked so hard that they completed the album tracks in four days although they had the studio reserved for the full workweek. At the end of the session Thursday, one of the other musicians strongly encouraged Lightfoot to dig into the song that they had all heard all week but had never performed—the sea ditty Lightfoot composted based on a recent real shipwreck.

The song begins with low key instrumentation, and the drummer was waiting for a signal from Lightfoot before joining in. After almost two minutes, the signal hadn’t yet come, and the drummer was worried that he’d been overlooked. Then, after the slow initial two verses, Lightfoot gave him the nod. And that iconic stormy drumming right before “the wind in the wires made a tattletale sound” became part of music history.

Of the two songs, I have always enjoyed “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” more. It’s a deeper, sadder, truer song. It’s long for a pop song at 6 minutes, and musically very repetitive—but it works for me.

In that recording session, Bacon reports, the band came back and played it multiple times on Friday, their final day of working on the album. However, in the end, their first recording, the one that they made without much rehearsal on Thursday, was the track used on the album and for the single that played so much on the radio during my high school graduation year 50 years ago.

Lightfoot had mixed feelings about the song, which is understandable. He didn’t want to seem like he was taking advantage of a raw tragedy. In the end, his tune kept the memory of the event alive, and helped the families of the 29 come to terms with their deep, tragic loss.

I’ll let Elizabeth, The Charismatic Voice, who knows a lot more about music than I do, unpack a bit more about the song:

Again—tell me once more how history is boring? Sorry, you’re wrong.

Back to Bacon’s book. The later chapters when the ship is taking the northern route across the big lake and facing an increasingly powerful storm are bit like the movie “Titanic.” Not a spoiler alert: In “Titanic,” something bad happens to the ship. So, too, the story of The Edmund Fitzgerald doesn’t have a happy resolution.

Still, there’s a lot to take away from this book. One positive note—since that tragic night on Nov. 10, 1975, exactly zero additional large ships have gone down on the lakes. Reforms made in the wake of this event have saved many lives.

Another story in the book: How families of the sailors worked to protect the site of the wreck. However, they allowed the ship's bell to be recovered. Image from Wikipedia.

Disturbingly, we’re in the wake of a global pandemic that struck us six years ago and cost the U.S.A. more than 1 million souls. We’re not coping that well with the story of that time, partly because powerful politicians seem intent on re-writing pandemic history in an inaccurate way.

Maybe we’ll learn our own history better in the long run. After the Edmund Fitzgerald sank, the way captains think about the Greak Lakes, the way communication about weather is handled, the nature of radars and forecasts—things have changed for the better.

That’s what knowledge of history can do for you, if you let it--it can make things better. Also when you feel it appropriately, in your bones and in your music.