50-Year-Old Songs: Sundown

Tweet

The rain isn’t too terrible right now, steady but they’re playing in it out at the PGA. I’m enjoying my usual BBQ chicken lunch for Friday and ready to spring another song on you that’s now 50 years old. And, just to reiterate HOW great a musical year it was, will you look at who else didn’t even make it to the top ten???? Sundown - Gordon Lightfoot Something that I didn’t discover until a few years ago: this song was written about Cathy Smith. Of course, Cathy Smith wasn’t that infamous at the time this song was a hit. She was a well-known groupie (well, known to the rockers, I guess…), so promiscuous that she was pregnant and referred to her baby’s father as “The Band,” because she’d been sleeping with everybody in The Band, and as such she couldn’t say who the father was. If you listen to the lyrics to this song, it’s a man rife with jealousy. Lightfoot later admitted that, saying that jealousy and alcohol (never a good combination) fueled his relationship with her. The punch line in this is, while he’s warning her to “take care if I find you’ve been creeping ‘round my back stairs,” he was married at the time of his affair with her! If you don’t remember Cathy Smith’s infamy, she was the one who admittedly gave John Belushi his fatal “speedball” in 1982. She died in 2020. This was Gord’s only #1 song in the US. It’s sad in retrospect, because it marked a terrible time in his life (by his own admission). Sundown Written by Gordon Lightfoot Recorded by Gordon Lightfoot From Sundown, 1974 I can picture every move that a man could make: