It was a shipwreck so notorious, it inspired what many critics and listeners agree is one of the greatest songs of all time — a song that helped solidify its legend.
Fifty years ago, on Nov. 10, 1975, the SS Edmund Fitzgerald sank during a brutal storm on Lake Superior while sailing from Superior, Wisc., to Detroit. The entire crew of 29 men died in the Canadian waters.
A year later, the disaster was immortalized by Canadian singer-songwriter Gordon Lightfoot when he released “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” which became an unlikely hit single in 1976 and remains popular to this day as both a totem of culture in Canada and the source of online memes.
“There were about 6,000 commercial shipwrecks on the Great Lakes between 1825 and 1975. Everybody knows one, and it’s because of the song,” said John U. Bacon, author of the new book The Gales of November: The Untold Story of the Edmund Fitzgerald.
The scale of the wreck itself also makes it stand out, historians say.
The Edmund Fitzgerald remains the largest ship ever to sink in the Great Lakes, which was a particularly booming industrial region in the mid-20th century following the Second World War, when hundreds of commercial vessels ferried raw materials in-between booming port cities on both sides of the border every year.
Before it sank, the over-200-metre-long freighter spent 17 years carrying taconite ore, a low-grade iron, from Minnesota mines to steel mills in Detroit, Toledo and other ports.
Sailors on the Great Lakes have regularly had to contend with fierce weather, something with which residents in those cities are all too familiar. As Lightfoot’s song underscores with its repeated references to “the gales of November,” the month brings particularly strong storms.
“The Great Lakes are more dangerous than the Atlantic Ocean, and it’s not even close,” said Bacon, who talked to former Fitzgerald crew members as well as the families of over a dozen of the shipwreck’s victims for his book. “Those guys (former sailors) told me that again and again and again.”
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Part of the reason is the combustible mix of incoming Arctic air with still-warm lake water and humidity left over from the summer months, experts say, as the seasons shift.
“It’s that clash in temperature that creates these strong Great Lakes storms,” Global News chief meteorologist Anthony Farnell said.
“These storms cut from the Gulf of Mexico in the south right up into the Great Lakes, and that can lead to a very low barometric pressure and rather intense winds and waves in November.”
The 1975 storm that sank the Edmund was particularly intense, Farnell noted, with near-hurricane force winds of over 100 km/h and waves as high as 11 metres.
“It’s been a while since we’ve had one at at that level,” he said.
That shared experience of intense weather is part of what has bound people together on both the Canadian and American sides of the lakes, said Dan Rose, the collections coordinator at the Great Lakes Museum in Kingston, Ont.
He specifically pointed to the so-called White Hurricane of 1913, which struck around the exact same time of early November and hit the region with powerful blizzards, killing more than 250 people and blanketing cities from Toronto to Cleveland with snow.
“I think there’s just something that is so unifying about enduring conditions that are that treacherous and that trying, and being able to look across the water at our neighbours and say, ‘Geez, isn’t it great that we were able to bear down and endure these trials and tribulations?” he said.
“It really drives home how unifying it is to just face things head on and work together to solve a problem.”
That bond was only reinforced by the Edmund Fitzgerald disaster and the shared love of Lightfoot’s song, Rose and other historians said.
The Edmund Fitzgerald’s legacy also endures with the improvements to shipping safety and weather tracking on the Great Lakes spurred by the investigations into the sinking.
That’s also partially due to Lightfoot, whose song Bacon said “embarrassed” the shipping industry into action.
Farnell said forecasters can now see major storms approaching days or even weeks in advance, giving shippers plenty of warning. Ship captains are also less willing to venture into heavy storms just to make it to port on time, and have more advanced navigation and location beacons onboard in case disaster strikes.
To this day, not a single commercial freighter has sunk in the Great Lakes since the Edmund Fitzgerald.
Yet historians still make a point to honour those past shipwrecks.
“We use the sinking of the Fitzgerald to bring attention to all the other sailors who have lost their lives on the Great Lakes,” said Billy Wall-Winkel, field curator of the Detroit Historical Society, which hosted several events and exhibitions to mark the 50th anniversary of the wreck leading up to Monday’s annual Lost Mariners Remembrance.
“We want to celebrate the people who built the country, rather than just the people who designed it or paid for it.”
The harrowing story of the Fitzgerald is only part of why Lightfoot’s song continues to endure today for both Canadian and American listeners.
At nearly six minutes and with no chorus, “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” relies on a repeating, circular melody that allows Lightfoot to lay out the history of the Great Lakes and that one fateful night in great detail.
“It’s mesmerizing,” said Maria Virginia Acuña, a music history and musicology professor at the University of Victoria who primarily studies early modern musical theatre, and who listened to the song for the first time after being asked to discuss it for this story.
“It’s soothing, but it’s also sad and tragic, like a lament … but the repetition captivates us and turns this historical event into something much more accessible and universal.”
Acuña, who grew up in Argentina, said her Canadian-born husband told her “how important this (song) is and how it’s a big part of our culture.”
The song, which hit number two on the Billboard 100 and number one in Canada in 1976, was given another boost of popularity after Lightfoot’s death in 2023. The artist himself said it was the song he was most proud of.
“It has a timeless quality to it,” Acuña said. “And I think like with all music, we take songs at different moments in our lives and they acquire new meanings.”
In the past few years, “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” has inspired countless memes on TikTok, Reddit and Instagram. The “gales of November” lyric in particular has been used to refer to everything from the overwhelming power of nature to seasonal depression to the lengths one will go to get to a girlfriend’s house, connecting a new generation of listeners to the iconic story and song.
People online have also marveled that the wreck happened a relatively short time ago, instead of the 1800s or early 20th century — or even that it happened at all.
“It not just Gen Z — even boomers have said they had no idea,” said Bacon, who added he’s not surprised why the story of theEdmund Fitzgerald continues to attract new generations of listeners and readers.
“I think it’s also something just truly fundamental and elemental about human nature. Humans in a boat fighting the elements for their lives has captivated us since Noah’s Ark. So that’s not new, and we’re still fascinated.”
