50 years ago, the SS Edmund Fitzgerald sunk in Lake Superior, taking 29 men down with it — a tragedy you likely know about due to the 1976 Gordon Lightfoot hit “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” released less than a year after the ship sank. The song hit number one in Lightfoot’s native Canada, and number two in the US — an impressive feat for a song that ran over six minutes long.
Lightfoot was inspired to immortalize the wreck after reading a news article about it — and feeling that unless he did something, this devastating shipwreck, like so many each year, would be largely forgotten by the world.
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