Washington: 50 years after Edmund Fitzgerald wreck, story endures despite ballad’s myths

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If you’re singing along to Gordon Lightfoot’s “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” on Monday’s 50th anniversary of the Lake Superior tragedy, consider changing a few verses. Instead of:

“The ship was the pride of the American side,

coming back from some mill in Wisconsin”

Try singing:

“… coming back from Superior, Wisconsin.”

Lightfoot’s haunting ballad may be one of the most successful musical accounts ever of a historical event. That’s true even if the singer-songwriter got a few things wrong, says Ric Mixter, a Michigan-based journalist and documentarian who’s spent decades chronicling the Fitz — and even saw the wreck firsthand in a 1994 dive.

“I’m highly criticized at my lectures because I pick on Gordon,” said Mixter, whose latest Fitz book is “Tattletale Sounds: The Edmund Fitzgerald Investigations.”

“Eighty percent of that song is wrong — from the Chippewa legend that doesn’t exist” (it was appropriated from another tribe, he says), to the line “ ‘some mill in Wisconsin.’ There are no pelletizing mills in Wisconsin. It was not fully loaded and it was not going to Cleveland. It was partially loaded and going to Detroit.”

Ironically, Lightfoot said in a 2015 interview with NPR that he was inspired to write the song after being annoyed by an inaccuracy in a Newsweek article shortly after the Nov. 10, 1975, disaster — in which Edmund was spelled with an “O.” He also said the story gave short shrift to the 29 crew members who perished.

He wrote and recorded the song in little more than a month, long before investigations were complete or before technology even existed to reach the wreck at Superior’s depth. In that light, speculation — “They might have split up, or they might have capsized” — was poetically permissible. And certain moments, like imagined words between crewmen, were simply unknowable.

Disagreeing is Rafferty’s daughter, Pam Johnson.

“When I talked to Gordon Lightfoot, he and I discussed if my father would say those words, and I said, ‘Yes!’” she said in an interview posted at S.S. Edmund Fitzgerald Online.

Despite those differing interpretations, Mixter and Johnson have since become close friends. She’s joining him at one of his anniversary lectures this week.

Mixter, who acknowledges that if not for Lightfoot he wouldn’t be talking about shipwrecks at all, is also quick to praise what the songwriter got right.

“The lyric ‘Does anyone know where the love of God goes when the waves turn the minutes to hours?’ ” he quoted. “I can’t criticize that.”

Once deepwater dives like Mixter’s became possible and other probes were completed, that theory was dispelled. The cause of the wreck was attributed instead to a massive wave — one witnessed by the nearby Arthur M. Anderson — that split the Fitz in two.

Respectful of the families, Lightfoot in 2010 changed the line to “at 7 p.m. it grew dark, it was then … .” He sang it that way in performances until his death in 2023, though he kept the copyrighted, official version unchanged. He also altered the epilogue from “In a musty old hall in Detroit they prayed” to the more dignified “rustic old hall.”

Rustic could also have described Lightfoot’s voice in 2007, when I saw him at the Duluth Entertainment Convention Center, not long after his recovery from a tracheotomy.

With the auditorium just down the corridor from the facility’s Edmund Fitzgerald Hall, concertgoers were ecstatic at the opening chords of the song. (The only thing I recall coming close was the roar for James Taylor singing “and so was the turnpike from Stockbridge to Boston” at Tanglewood in western Massachusetts.)

The music was spot-on, and I don’t remember a single person complaining about his voice. If anything, it was the ultimate gift to be serenaded next to the Twin Ports bay where the Fitz last set sail.