| the way I feel |
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| By Nick Baxter-Moore | |||
| As an immigrant to this country, I have to confess that pretty much everything I knew about Canada when I first arrived some twenty-five years ago -- even though I may not have realized it then -- I had learned from the songs of Gordon Lightfoot.
As a university student in England in the late sixties, I was introduced to his music by a then-girlfriend who returned from a Canadian vacation with albums by Gordon Lightfoot and Leonard Cohen. Cohen probably made a greater initial impact but, accompanying that same girlfriend to a concert on one of his regular British tours, I came to appreciate Lightfoot's songs of bittersweet romance and natural geographic splendour. Later, with a Canadian-born graduate student who subsequently became my wife, I saw Lightfoot perform at London's famous Royal Albert Hall. Although probably every Canadian expatriate in London under the age of thirty-five was there, a large number of fellow Brits helped fill that large venue, clearly finding some resonance in the music of this very "Canadian" artist. As an undergraduate, my wife Heather had studied at Queen's University in Kingston, sharing a house with several friends. She can't remember now quite how it came about, but one night, after performing at Queen's, Lightfoot ended up on their living room couch, drinking beer. When we first set up house in Ottawa, that couch was one of our few pieces of furniture. An ugly old thing it was, but it was with much reluctance that we eventually replaced it, because, after all, how many couches could bear the legend "Gordon Lightfoot sat here"? >> To read the rest of this article click here.
About the author
Illustration by Andy Cienik
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One of Canada's best known singer-songwriters, Lightfoot was born in Orillia, Ontario, in 1938. At twenty, he moved to Los Angeles to study piano and orchestration at Westlake College. In 1960, he returned to Toronto where he arranged and produced advertising jingles. Influenced by the Yorkville folk scene, he took up guitar and began performing in local coffeehouses. Ian & Sylvia (Tyson) introduced him to their manager, Albert Grossman, who also managed folk trio Peter, Paul & Mary. Their recordings of Lightfoot's songs "For Lovin' Me" and "Early Morning Rain" launched his international career and his first, eponymous, album was released in 1966.