Gordon Lightfoot ‘was massive’ during his prime in the ’70s: Biographer

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Was Gordon Lightfoot the Justin Bieber, Drake, The Weeknd, or Shawn Mendes — minus the screaming female fans — of his time?

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Pretty much in terms of hits, says Lightfoot biographer Nicholas Jennings.

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“Gordon Lightfoot in the ‘70s, during his prime, was massive,” said Jennings down the line from Lisbon, Portugal, on Tuesday.

“There wasn’t a bigger Canadian artist. His songs were heard worldwide. Here in Europe where I’m in at the moment, his songs were on the radio. In Latin America, his songs were on the radio. I’ve got in my record collection, foreign versions of all of Gordon Lightfoot’s hits released on different Warner Brothers subsidiaries around the world. I mean, it’s astonishing. He was ubiquitous. He was Canada.”

The 84-year-old singer-songwriter, who died Monday, was a staple of the folk-pop sound in the ‘60s and ‘70s with such classics as Early Mornin’ Rain, Steel Rail Blues, Ribbon of Darkness and Black Day in July.

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Then he topped the U.S. charts with such hits as If You Could Read My Mind (1970), Sundown (1974), Carefree Highway (1974), Rainy Day People (1975), and The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald (1976).

“It doesn’t get any bigger than Sundown, of course, because that was a number one album with a number one title song, that’s the pentultimate,” said Jennings, who spent a decade off and on with Lightfoot, writing a biography released in 2017.

“That’s what blew him wide open and made him the international superstar that he was.”

Ian and Sylvia Tyson were the first artist to cover a Lightfoot song with Early Mornin’ Rain in 1965, but others quickly followed, as Marty Robbins’ version of Black Day in July was a number one hit on the U.S. country chart the same year.

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Lightfoot’s catalogue of 500 songs have been recorded by hundreds of artists such as Bob Dylan — who considered him a mentor — Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Hank Williams Jr., Jerry Lee Lewis, Neil Young, Judy Collins, Harry Belafonte, the Grateful Dead, Olivia Newton-John, and Jim Croce.

“Literally hundreds,” said Jennings. “All the big names you can think of – Dylan, Johnny Cash, Elvis Presley, Barbra Streisand. Those are all the biggest names. Then there are people that are at the top of their genre like the bluegrass picker Tony Rice, who did an entire album of Gordon Lightfoot songs. There were disco versions of his songs. There were Spanish versions. Gordon Lightfoot’s known in Spain because there were songs covered in Spanish.”

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Naturally, the relationship with Dylan, who inducted Lightfoot into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame at the 1986 Junos, was a particularly special one.

“Yes, it was,” said Jennings. “He told me it was Dylan who inspired him to up his game and to write, original poetic songs. He heard Dylan, studied Dylan, and the result was Early Mornin’ Rain. And that was the song that really launched Lightfoot as a songwriter of that standard. He became a contemporary of Dylan’s. They watched each other. They studied each other. (Dylan) famously referred to him as a mentor.”

And if Lightfoot had a favourite cover of one of his tunes, he never said.

“Gordon was forever the diplomat,” said Jennings. “And he wouldn’t have wanted to offend any of the other people who covered his songs so he’d always give that pat answer: ‘It’s an honour to have any of my songs covered and I love them all.’”