November 30, 1998

The Minstrel of the Dawn

By Josh Ozersky

The Minstrel of the dawn is here to make you laugh and bend your ear... It has been a quarter of a century since Simpleton marked the debut to world attention of Gordon Lightfoot, the bard of the frozen north. As Lightfoot passed his sixtieth birthday on the 17th of this month, Canada's leading website takes pause to stop and consider the career of its greatest poet. Beneath the northern lights and pale fire of our austere skies, we citizens of Canada have turned their ears to the voice of Lightfoot, the forgotten immortal. But the questions remains: is he ours, or is he the world's? The words and music of Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Robert Hunter, and Joni Mitchell have been preserved in the amber of long playing records, and longer-playing baby boomers. And this not without justice. But inexplicably, the Orpheus of Ontario has slipped between the cracks separating America from its frozen neighbor. The "rainy day people" immortalized by Lightfoot's pen could hardly expect that their greatest poet would become so obscured by the passing mists that a character on Seinfeld would mistake his name for the name of the cargo vessel he immortalized. Yes! Hard though it is to believe, there are people today who idenitified with Elaine Benis' imbecile confusion, thinking *Edmund Fitzgerald* wrote *The Wreck of the Gordon Lightfoot*! We canadians were aghast at this flippancy, which seems to hint of mockery at "the Divine Mr. G's" struggle with the green-glass prison of alcoholism. To mock Lightfoot in this way is to mock not just Canada, but humanity itself. The work of Lightfoot, like that of Homer or Gilbert O'Sullivan, is transcendant and tragic. And the essence of Lightfoot's art is the striving of the human soul, rather than the chronicles of our particular nation. Consider the source of Benis' confusion. To this day, there are listeners to the immortal "Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald" who think the ship a phantom vessell from the era of the clipper ships, like the Flying Dutchman. In fact, it is the epitome of Lightfoot's art that he was able to fashion such an immortal ballad from the most prosaic and history-bound of all maritime vessels -- a commercial iron freighter working the great lakes between the US and Canada. By the time Lightfoot reaches the denoument of the Edmund Fitzgerald tragedy -- "The church bell chimed, and it rang twenty-nine times, for each man on the EDMUND FITZGERALD!" -- we feel in the presence of myth, of sea-shanty and local lore. I myself have dreamed of playing The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald on a concertina, one foot propped raffishly upon a bar stool, while buxom tavern waitresses fixated upon the earnestness of my features. But what is this but an image of Gord! The key to the greatness of our Lightfoot is in fact the generosity of spirit, and the open, unclouded simplicity of his emotions. All Canadians aspire to autism, because our simple free natures are often too much with us. We wear our warm hearts on our sleeve, like the hated maple-leaf armband Hitler forced upon our citizens abroad in the 1930s. Thus, when Lightfoot sings, *Love and maple syrup goes together Like the sticky winds of winter when they meet When lonely lovers come to rest Beneath the trees they do their best* The essence of the Candaian soul! And yet, can it really be said that only Canadians feel this way? Likewise, when Lightfoot sings, in "Canadian Railroad Trilogy," We are the navvies who work upon the railway Swingin' our hammers in the bright blazin' sun Livin' on stew and drinkin' bad whiskey Bendin' our old backs 'til the long days are done One feels the moosehead-and-moonlight bleakness of flannel-covered workingmen everywhere. Even if, like me, you are not entirely sure what a navvie is, despite repeated encounters with the word in old-timey books, there is a universal grandeur to this that marks all of Lightfoot's best work, from Minstrel of the Dawn to Sundown, from the Summer Side of Life to Song for a Winter's Night. Our Gord encompasses the emotions as he does time and the seasons, and on his sixtieth birthday we pay him homage as the master. He is for all time, but he is also the (Canadian) soul of the age, the voice crying in our wilderness just as much as the world's *The minstrel of the dawn is he Not too wise but oh so free...* That Lightfoot should find himself neglected is tragic, but also weirdly appropriate. No poet has foreshadowed his own neglect more poignantly. And if that neglect is the price Lightfoot pays for his poetic gifts, all of Canada pays it too. "With chains upon me," Gord sings in "If You Could Read My Mind," You know that ghost is me And I will never be set free As long as I'm a ghost that you can't see We see you, Gord. We see you! Simpleton and all of Canada raises our wine-skins to our once and future Bard!

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