Veteran Canadian singer-songwriter Gordon Lightfoot has died. He died on Monday evening, May 1, at Sunnybrook Hospital in Toronto.
The 84-year-old folk music and soft rock icon rose to international fame as a folk music star in the 1960s and ’70s. Lightfoot’s death was confirmed by his longtime agent, Victoria Lord, but the immediate cause of death was not made public.
Lightfoot topped the Billboard Hot 100 in 1974 with ‘Sundown’ and also had top 5 songs with ‘If You Could Read My Mind’ and ‘The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.’ All three songs reached No. 1 on the adult contemporary chart, as did ‘Carefree Highway’ and ‘Rainy Day People,’ during his mid-’70s chart heyday.
Lightfoot rose to prominence in the mid-’60s, penning such folk standards as “Early Morning Rain” (a major hit for the Canadian folk duo Ian and Sylvia Tyson), “For Loving Me” and “Ribbon of Darkness,” as well as the ambitious “Canadian Railroad Trilogy,” a sort of Northern equivalent to Mickey Newbury’s…
Source: Linda Ikeji
