![\"\"](\"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/03\/gordon_lightfoot.jpg\")
<\/p>\nIn some ways a reaction to the hard rock and psychedelic excesses of late 1960s pop music, the early 1970s ushered in the era of the singer-songwriter. Led by a raft of supremely talented artists who composed their own material, the scene featured acts like Carole King, James Taylor, Joni Mitchell, Laura Nyro, Leonard Cohen, Paul Simon and many others. Into that scene seemed to come Gordon Lightfoot.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
But Windsor, Ontario-born Lightfoot had in fact been a recording artist for several years; in his native Canada he scored a hit single as early as 1962\u2014nearly two years before the Beatles came to America\u2014with \u201c(Remember Me) I\u2019m the One.\u201d By the time the sixties drew to a close, Lightfoot had landed seven singles on the Canadian Top 40 charts. Bob Dylan went on record as an admirer of Lightfoot and his music as early as 1965; Dylan went so far as to cut his own version of the Canadian singer\u2019s \u201cEarly Mornin\u2019 Rain\u201d on his 1970 double LP Self Portrait<\/i>.<\/p>\n
But it wasn\u2019t until the singer-songwriter era came into full bloom that the guitar-playing Lightfoot broken into the United states musical market. When he did, he roared right to the top. His 1970 album debut for Reprise Records, Sit Down Young Stranger<\/i>, earned him a Gold record. The breakout single from that folky and largely acoustic LP, \u201cIf You could Read My Mind\u201d reached the top spot on the U.S. Adult Contemporary chart, establishing Lightfoot as a major presence in the scene. As the decade wore on, he earned more than a dozen hit singles; chief among those were \u201cSundown\u201d and \u201cCarefree Highway\u201d (both from the album Sundown<\/i>) and 1976\u2019s \u201cThe Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.\u201d His deep and sonorous voice coupled with his easy storytelling troubadour demeanor made for satisfying records that help define a genre.<\/p>\n
As the 1980s and \u201890s unfolded, Lightfoot\u2019s commercial fortunes waned on the U.S. charts, though he would remain a fixture of the Canadian record charts. The pace of Lightfoot\u2019s album releases has slowed as well, with only three studio albums released since 1990. But as the 2012 album All Live<\/i> demonstrates, as a live act, Gordon Lightfoot remains an engaging artist. He\u2019s a major concert draw as well. Currently on an extended celebration of his 80th<\/sup> birthday (last November), the 2019 leg of his \u201c80 Years Strong\u201d tour takes Lightfoot to 17 cities in the Western U.S. and across his native Canada.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In some ways a reaction to the hard rock and psychedelic excesses of late 1960s pop music, the early 1970s ushered in the era of the singer-songwriter. Led by a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":16551,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[27,30],"tags":[3802],"class_list":["post-16550","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-essay","category-folk","tag-gordon-lightfoot","cat-27-id","cat-30-id","has_thumb"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16550","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16550"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16550\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16552,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16550\/revisions\/16552"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/16551"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16550"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16550"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16550"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}