Chart Rewind: The Legend of the Edmund Fitzgerald Lives on in Gordon Lightfoot’s Hit Tribute

Fifty years ago on Nov. 10, 1975, massive freighter the SS Edmund Fitzgerald sank in Lake Superior, amid 50-foot waves and 100-mile-an-hour winds. All 29 men aboard the ship died.

The loss was commemorated in folk-rocker Gordon Lightfoot’s “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” which hit No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 a little more than a year later, on the chart dated Nov. 20, 1976.

The haunting ballad reenters Billboard’s Nov. 15-dated Rock Digital Song Sales chart at No. 5 and Country Digital Song Sales at No. 7, up 160% to 1,000 sold Oct. 31-Nov. 6, according to Luminate.

The song also gained by 77% to 1.4 million on-demand U.S. streams in the tracking week.

In 2015, Lightfoot discussed the origins of the single, which he solely wrote, in an interview with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. “The story of the sinking of the Fitzgerald stayed with me in a funny kind of a way, all by itself,” he shared at the time. “I wasn’t forgetting about it. I knew everyone had forgotten about it, but I knew I hadn’t forgotten it.”

Lightfoot, who died in May 2023 in his native Ontario, recalled that he “had some chords and a melody I had been thinking about and didn’t know where to direct it.

“It is a very good piece of work, I do believe,” he said of the track, which also went top 10 on Adult Contemporary. “It’s one of those songs that just stands the test of time and it’s about something that, of course, would be forgotten very shortly thereafter, which is one of the reasons I wrote the song in the first place. I didn’t want it to be forgotten.”

Lightfoot went on to befriend family members of victims of the ship’s sinking, remaining aware that the song was at its core a tribute to an actual tragedy.

Of it, he said, “There is a responsibility.”