TORONTO (CelebrityAccess) – Legendary Canadian folk singer/songwriter Gordon Lightfoot passed away at a Toronto hospital today (May 1). Family representative and publicist Victoria Lord announced the news of his death. Stephan Boyd, his agent of 25 years, confirmed he passed from complications of emphysema. He was 84.
Gordon Meredith Lightfoot, Jr., born in Orillia, Ont. on November 17, 1938, was a natural musical talent from early on. The Global News reports Lightfoot’s mother recognized it when Lightfoot, at age 4, sang an Irish lullaby to his elementary school over the PA system.
Lightfoot taught himself to play folk guitar throughout high school and opted to move to California in 1958 to study jazz composition and orchestration at the Westlake College of Music in Hollywood, CA. However, the wanderlust didn’t last long, and Lightfoot returned to his native Canada and moved to Toronto, where the music scene lay at his feet.
He was one of the few Canadian artists who stayed in Canada and became famous without moving elsewhere. He signed with United Artists in 1965 and followed that up with an appearance on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson and at the Newport Folk Festival – further establishing his reputation on the music scene. Soon after, he released his first album, Lightfoot!, in 1966.
What followed was an annual concert at Toronto’s Massey Hall. Beginning in 1967, he played every year until the mid-80s, when it dropped to about once every 18 months. In 2005 Lightfoot resumed the Massey Hall event as an annual residency and tradition.
He was often called Canada’s greatest songwriter and known globally for his hand in the rise of the folk/rock genre. In the 2019 documentary Gordon Lightfoot: If You Could Read My Mind, Rush singer Geddy Lee said, “He is our poet laureate; he is our iconic singer-songwriter.”
Lightfoot was behind many songs that crossed genres, such as “The Wreck of Edmund Fitzgerald,” Ribbon of Darkness,” “If You Could Read My Mind,” “Carefree Highway,” “Rainy Day People,” and many others.
Musicians such as Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Hank Williams, Jr., and more have recorded his songs to great chart success, and Lightfoot was widely respected in the music industry.
Throughout his over 50-year career, Lightfoot was a multiple Grammy Award nominee and has won over 15 JUNO Awards. In addition, he was inducted into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame, where Bob Dylan presided over the ceremony. The very man Lightfoot stated inspired him early in his career.
“I know he’s been offered this award before, and he’s never accepted it because he wanted me to come up here to give it to him,” Dylan quipped onstage during the 1986 JUNO Awards gala. “He’s somebody of rare talent.”
“Gordon Lightfoot was a constant in my life for 60 years,” said Larry LeBlanc, Senior Writer of CelebrityAccess. “He was a friend as well. His music is ingrained in the memories of an entire generation, and he is greatly mourned.”
In 2015, his hometown of Orillia honored him with a tall bronze sculpture of a cross-legged Lightfoot playing a guitar and many Canadians make the trip to the site each year to thank the man heralded as one of Canada’s best.
Lightfoot is survived by his wife, Kim, six children — Fred, Ingrid, Galen, Eric, Miles and Meredith — and several grandchildren.
