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My friend Kennedy writes to inform me that today is the thirtieth anniversary of the sinking of the S. S. Edmund Fitzgerald. From the Wikipedia entry:

SS Edmund Fitzgerald was a ship that sank suddenly on Lake Superior, November 10, 1975. The ship went down without a distress signal in a November gale. It sank in 530 feet (162 m) of water at a position 46° 59.9′ N, 85° 6.6′ W, in Canadian waters about 17 statute miles (15 nm) (27 km) from the entrance to Whitefish Bay. All 29 members of the crew were killed.

As loyal Canadians know, the sinking was commemorated by Gordon Lightfoot, with his classic song The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald (glorious midi awaits). Kennedy bemoans some of the rhyming:

I forgot just how poorly rhymed the song is… he sets up a fairly obvious and implicitly strict structure and then give such appalling 4-word rhymes as “Wisconsin/seasoned/Cleveland/feelin’.” The only way you can tell that Wisconsin and seasoned are supposed to rhyme is that the structure exists in every other stanza - occasionally he uses two pairs instead of four, but those first two are always a (ahem) match.

We’re currently discussing whether the instrumental version I have is, in fact, a cover by the Tragically Hip, or was mislabelled when I found it years ago on some Napster-clone.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 10th, 2005 at 11:04 am and is filed under History. Tag Testing Project: No Tags. Photo by . You can skip to the end and leave a response, or trackback from your own site. If you don't see your comment within a day or so, drop me an email. Sometimes my comment spam filter gets overly zealous.