Attempts to sell the song went nowhere so at 18, he headed to the U.S. After taking the class again, he graduated in 1957.īy then, Lightfoot had already penned his first serious composition - “The Hula Hoop Song,” inspired by the toy that was sweeping the culture. Perhaps distracted by his taste for music, he flunked algebra the first time. He strummed his first guitar in 1956 and began to dabble in songwriting in the months that followed. The appeal of those early days stuck and in high school, his barbershop quartet, The Collegiate Four, won a CBC talent competition. “I remember the thrill of being in front of the crowd,” Lightfoot said in a 2018 interview. At age 13, the soprano won a talent contest at the Kiwanis Music Festival, held at Toronto’s Massey Hall. He began singing in his church choir and dreamed of becoming a jazz musician. While Lightfoot’s parents recognized his musical talents early, he didn’t set out to become a renowned balladeer. “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” for instance, is a haunting tribute to the 29 men who died in the 1975 sinking of the ship in Lake Superior during a storm. “It’s not country, not folk, not rock,” he said in a 2000 interview. Lightfoot’s music had a style all its own. “I take situations and write poems about them.” “I simply write the songs about where I am and where I’m from,” he once said. May his music continue to inspire future generations, and may his legacy live on forever.” “Gordon Lightfoot captured our country’s spirit in his music – and in doing so, he helped shape Canada’s soundscape. “We have lost one of our greatest singer-songwriters,” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau tweeted. and Canadian shows, citing health issues. Just last month he canceled upcoming U.S. He performed in well over 1,500 concerts and recorded 500 songs. In the 1970s, Lightfoot garnered five Grammy nominations, three platinum records and nine gold records for albums and singles. One of the most renowned voices to emerge from Toronto’s Yorkville folk club scene in the 1960s, Lightfoot recorded 20 studio albums and penned hundreds of songs, including “Carefree Highway,” “Early Morning Rain” and “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.” His cause of death was not immediately available. Representative Victoria Lord said the musician died at a Toronto hospital. If the usage were a common dialect somewhere, I'd probably pick it up over a weekend trip to the place.TORONTO - Gordon Lightfoot, the folk singer-songwriter known for “If You Could Read My Mind” and “Sundown” and for songs that told tales of Canadian identity, died Monday. In the original order, I feel that I have to hold a present tense clause in my mind and then "back edit" its tense to the future upon receiving the future tense clause.)Īt the same time, I'm able to "train" myself to accept the second without a whole lot of difficulty. (The rearrangement "I will remember you every time I listen to the song" continues to look fine, though: the inheritance of tense goes left to right, following the direction of speech. The more I re-read the first one, the more I want to insert "From now on, " at the beginning to soften the change in tense, which seems more and more abrupt. If you stare at these two sentences long enough, you may find yourself changing your mind! The first one will start to look awkward, while the second starts to look normal:Įvery time I will listen to the song, I will remember you. This "propagation of tense" is not a general rule it seems to apply to clauses dependent on a main future tense clause. Whereby the first clause is expressed in the grammatical present tense, but inherits the future tense semantics from the "will* in the second. So it is a rather a "special case" that we can have:Įvery time I listen to the song, I will remember you. Here, if either verb is changed to present tense, without the other, it is ungrammatical. He will do that every time.Īlso, if the tense is past, note both clauses must be in the past tense:Įvery time I listened to the song, I remembered you. Oh don't pay attention to his weird response. Although the superfluous "will" sounds unnecessary, this doesn't seem like a case of bad grammar, but a matter of euphony.Ī clause can give a quantifier like "every time" or "whenever", and use future tense.
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