Cherishing the Soundtrack of My Life

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"Hi, I'm Gordon Lightfoot, and the reports of my death are greatly exaggerated." That's how legendary singer/songwriter Gordon Lightfoot introduced himself after performing two songs for an enthusiastic audience at Louisville's Brown Theater. That joke stems from a 2010 incident when he was in his dentist's office and heard the radio station playing in the office reporting that he had died. (He actually did have a very close brush with death in 2002, suffering an abdominal aortic aneurysm, a condition that is reportedly fatal 90% of the time.) The 77-year-old Canadian Music Hall of Fame inductee (who's oddly not in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame) looks much thinner than he did in his heyday when his ubiquitous radio hits helped create the soundtrack of many lives. Age may have thinned him but his voice, while not as powerful as it once was, still is able to deliver those wonderful, introspective songs that a generation identifies with. Playing for nearly two hours in two sets, Lightfoot could do little more than skim the surface of his recording career. It would take much more time than either he or his Monday night audience had, given the vast songbook he has given the world over the past 50 years. My first exposure to Gordon Lightfoot was as a child in 1965, when Marty Robbins covered "Ribbon of Darkness." Lightfoot performed the song in the first set, and did another song that's well-known by others, "Early Morning Rain" (a hit for George Hamilton IV in country and covered famously by Elvis Presley) in the second set. While talking of Elvis' version Lightfoot said, "People ask me, 'Do you have a favorite?' There's no cover of my song that I don't like, because it's an honor that people have covered them." He received a number of standing ovations through the night, including for "Sundown" (his only #1 song in the U.S., which closed the first set), the legendary story song "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald," and his classic "If You Could Read My Mind." I spent much of the evening with tears streaming down my cheeks, especially as he did "Edmund Fitzgerald" (it's the sailor in me), "If You Could Read My Mind" (one of my all-time favorite songs, period), and "Early Morning Rain" (which I remember from my childhood when George Hamilton IV had a hit with it). It was a magical night spent cherishing those songs that are an integral part of the soundtrack of my life.