Gordon Lightfoot, the Canadian folk and country legend, has died at the age of 84. His longtime publicist, Victoria Lord, confirmed the news via CBC. No cause of death was provided.
Born in Orillia, Ontario, in 1938, Lightfoot started performing as a child, singing in church and appearing on local radio shows. As a teenager, he learned piano and taught himself to play guitar and drums. In 1958, he moved to California to study jazz composition at Hollywood’s Westlake College of Music and supported himself by writing commercial jingles and singing on demo recordings. Having grown homesick, he returned to Toronto in 1960 and joined the Singin’ Swingin’ Eight, a vocal group featured on CBC TV’s Country Hoedown. He also formed a duo with Terry Whalen called the Two Tones, which recorded the live album Two Tones at the Village Corner 1962. The following year, he served as the host on the BBC-TV series The Country & Western Show.
After discovering Bob Dylan in 1963, Lightfoot’s approach to songwriting shifted. “I started to get a point of view, and that’s when I started to improve,” he said. He went on to sign with Albert Grossman, who was also the manager of Dylan and Peter, Paul, and Mary. Around this time, Peter, Paul, and Mary and country artists like Marty Robbins also began recording some of Lightfoot’s earlier material. After signing a recording contract with United Artists Records in 1966, he released his debut LP, Lightfoot! Following three more studio albums for the label, Lightfoot found commercial success after switching to Warner Bros./Reprise in 1970. He scored his first US hit with ‘If You Could Read My Mind’, which originally appeared on the album Sit Down Young Stranger, while 1976’s Summertime Dream boasted the hit ‘The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald’.
Although his output slowed down in the ’80s, Lightfoot experienced a career revival in the ’90s, when he issued 1993’s Waiting For You and 1998’s A Painter Passing Through. In 2002, he suffered an abdominal aortic aneurysm and spent six weeks in a coma. Following his recovery, he released the album Harmony in 2004. His final LP was 2020’s Solo, an acoustic collection of demos and unreleased tracks written between 2001 and 2002.
Lightfoot was inducted into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame in 1986. He was elected to the Canadian Country Music Hall of Fame in 2001 and received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement in 2022.
“We have lost one of our greatest singer-songwriters,” Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau tweeted. “Gordon Lightfoot captured our country’s spirit in his music – and in doing so, he helped shape Canada’s soundscape. May his music continue to inspire future generations, and may his legacy live on forever. To his family, friends, and many fans across the country and around the world: I’m keeping you in my thoughts at this difficult time.”
