“The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” was written by the Canadian singer-songwriter Gordon Lightfoot. He composed it soon after the freighter Edmund Fitzgerald sank in a storm on Lake Superior in November 1975, drawing on news accounts of the disaster, and released it in 1976.
The song is a measured, mournful ballad that retells the ship’s last voyage — the gathering gale, the loss of the vessel and all twenty-nine men aboard, and the grief left behind. Lightfoot treats the wreck with the gravity of an old sea ballad.
Lightfoot considered it his finest work, and it has been recorded by folk and bluegrass artists since.
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