The PC version of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City had a feature where you could create a custom radio station from MP3s on your filesystem. My song of choice, while aimlessly flying a helicopter through the skyscrapers of a low-poly downtown district, was The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald by Gordon Lightfoot, freshly downloaded from Morpheus or Kazaa or Limewire or whatever illegal filesharing software I was using at the time. It was the only song I uploaded so it played on a loop.
I picked it because I thought it would be funny. This is an earnest and plaintive sea shanty, a song about a bunch of sailors on a boat named after some guy dying in a storm, and that vibe slices neatly through the carefully cultivated neon slickness of Miami in the 80s. Lightfoot was a relic by the standards of the retro-set game I was playing, let alone the modern day of twenty-some years ago when I was sitting in the Computer Room. This was an early expression of what we might call “Millenial detached irony” or some such, but despite the comic juxtaposition I enjoyed, this song choice was an expression of genuine love on my part. Now it is fifty years to the day since the eponymous Ed met his watery end, and I’m playing the song on repeat and misting over. There’s been a bit of “Fitzgerald Fever” online as we approached the semicentennial, and it’s been heartening to see a new generation pass the story onward.
I recently played the song for my four-year-old daughter, whose taste in music is specific and strongly expressed, and thirty seconds in she declared that “this is my favorite song in my whole life.” I get it, kid. My brain rarely processes lyrics on the first pass, so for all I knew the song was about different grades of corrugated cardboard, but it still dug its way deep on first listen. The melody, which repeats without interruption for 6 1/2 minutes across vocals and guitar, is hypnotic, and the chord changes underneath propels you forward. The meter of the verse also lulls you into a trance, and I discovered recently that it shares its DNA with many nursery favorites. I truly think you could listen to this song forever. Unlike some people I know, Lightfoot strips his song bare, keeping the tune and structure steady so that it belongs to anyone who wants to sing it themselves.
With the lyrics, Lightfoot elevates a midwestern tragedy to myth. It occurs to me on one of my listens today that none of the humans in the story are named. Lake Superior is the main character, striking down the men who dared to cross her waters. This is a story of man making the mistake of thinking nature conquered, and Lightfoot cleverly contrasts the mundane world of steel mill logistics with the wisdom of the people who lived by the lake before we did: don’t fuck with Gitchee Gumee in November. There’s tragedy here too: with just 15 more miles behind ‘er, Big Eddie might have been spared the full extent of the lake’s wrath. The storm also struck unseasonably early, a freak occurrence that devastated those who weren’t expecting it, guaranteeing that it will be a story that resonates more and more.
When I recounted, voice breaking, the story of the shipwreck at the dining room table, my wife was surprised that it happened so recently. Having only heard the song in passing, she assumed it was about, like, a pirate ship or something. I suspect that this is an intentional effect. Part of the horrible milieu we find ourselves in is alienation not only from our institutions, and from each other, but from the past; people did things very differently before phones and computers and even factories and printing presses. Folk music is special to me because it weaves an unbroken tapestry, back to the mists of prehistory.
They say that, in their time, epic stories like the Iliad were sung, the story encoded as both tune and verse and passed from singer to singer. The songs sung around the fire are chosen to reinforce a group identity, and to remember the triumphs and losses that reverberate through the generations. The music is sung by a particular people, tied to a particular place and a particular time. This is maybe what feels the most alien when we all have access to the same music catalog and have been conditioned by mass media for over 100 years. Music today doesn’t occupy the same place in our society as it once did, but it can still wield that power. Every day, a youngster hears Edmund for the first time, and their heart is stirred by mysterious forces that they can’t explain. ChatGPT cannot summarize this experience; it belongs only to the mysterious recesses of the human soul. These youths express themselves the way that people their age do: with memes and short-form videos. Like me, they are amused at how “out of left field” this song is, but captivated by it all the same.
A very long time ago, word got out that an incoming freshman was seen unloading an upright bass at a dorm building at Allegheny College, and an invite was extended to join the Allegheny Folk Federation at the campus coffeeshop for regular sessions of pickin’ and grinnin’. That freshman was me, and my initiation into the traditions of Bluegrass and Old Time changed my life. The on-campus sessions were fun, but there were truly special nights when a few of us would pile into a junior’s beater and head the next town over, where a bar hosted jam nights and plied the musicians with pitchers of Yuengling. Critically, they didn’t card. I got to hold it down on the low end with a bunch of middle-aged strangers, deep in the hills of Northwestern Pennsylvania, and sit at a hearth that had been burning for hundreds of years. I learned a lot of the standard tunes the old fashioned way: by ear and with heavy repetition. I wish that I still had access to a place like that, and that others got to experience it. Having such regular access to people and community and music would fix a lot of things.
Shit sucks. Online spaces have become overtly hostile. The explicit and stated goal of the services we trusted to connect us is to serve a billion feeds of personalized slop to keep us scrolling forever. We are lost in a system that is giant and malevolent and uncaring. We are conditioned by forces beyond our control to trust each other less, to learn from each other less, to create things together less. So I’m moved to tears when I listen to a song about wind and water and dying, and when I see others discover the love and care that Gordon Lightfoot wove into his masterpiece. May we follow his example, and turn our stories into songs that will be remembered forever.