Blue Rodeo

• What does Gordon Lightfoot’s musical legacy mean for Canadians and for the history of Canadian music?
• In the wake of the singer-songwriter’s death on May 1, it has been hard to answer this question.

A powerful nostalgia

• Lightfoot’s voice is undeniably recognizable to many Canadians, and the cluster of songs that have enjoyed a long life on Canadian radio — and therefore in the Canadian consciousness — obviously engender a powerful nostalgia for an earlier time.
• With his death, he seems to have been canonized in the same vein as Gord Downie, lead singer of the band The Tragically Hip.

Nationalistic hot takes

• How, then, did Lightfoot suddenly become Canada’s greatest musical treasure?
• It’s not really so sudden, if we recognize that Lightfoot was a very popular singer-songwriter in his heyday in both Canada and the United States.
• He enjoyed middling success with his earliest albums in the 1960s, but then broke out with several key albums on Reprise Records in the following decade.

Chart singles

• A series of well-known singles were chart-topping hits in Canada and the U.S.: “If You Could Read my Mind” (1970), “Carefree Highway,” “Sundown” (1974), “Rainy Day People” (1975) and “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” (1976).
• These helped to established Lightfoot as an international name in the world of folk and country music.

Types of nostalgia

• I would argue that contrasting types of nostalgia are at the root of this evaluation of Lightfoot and his oeuvre.
• The Russian philosopher and cultural theorist Svetlana Boym famously identified two distinct — but not necessarily mutually exclusive — types of nostalgia: restorative and reflective.
• Reflective nostalgia, by contrast, does not revel in the past nor attempt to recover it.

A reflective nostalgia

• At their best, Lightfoot’s songs — ranging from folksy, rambling tunes about riding the rails to tender ballads recounting love and loss to epic narratives about ships and sailors lost in storms — invoke a reflective nostalgia.
• His fluid, gentle vocal delivery and simple, direct sentiments lean strongly towards “human longing and belonging,” much more so than they paint a compelling or accurate portrait of Canada.