On November 10, 1975, the freighter SS Edmund Fitzgerald went down in a storm on Lake Superior with all 29 of her crew. No one survived, and to this day nobody knows for certain what sank her. Outside the Great Lakes, most of the world knows her name for one reason: Gordon Lightfoot wrote a song about her within the year.
An honest word about why this song is on an Irish band's blog: the connection is the tradition, not the wreck. Lightfoot was Canadian and the crew were Great Lakes men. What the song shares with the Irish music on this blog is its job — a long narrative ballad that names working men and refuses to let them be forgotten. That is the same work done by Fiddler's Green and Leave Her Johnny, and Irish-American audiences in Great Lakes and pub country have taken those 29 names personally for fifty years.
November 10, 1975: What Happened to the Edmund Fitzgerald
The Fitzgerald was the largest ship on the Lakes when she was launched, loaded with iron ore and working the run across Superior into the teeth of a November storm — the season the song calls the gales of November. The lyrics follow the final hours closely: the cargo, the relative safety of the Canadian shore route, the messages passing between ships as the weather closed in. Then, on the evening of November 10, she was gone — lost with all hands, in a sinking that has been investigated, argued over, and never fully explained.
Without the song, the wreck would likely have remained what it first was: a regional tragedy, enormous to the families and the Lakes ports, and unknown almost everywhere else. Lightfoot released the song in August 1976, less than a year after the sinking, and it carried the crew's story around the world.
How Lightfoot Wrote It (Newsweek, a Sea-Shanty Tune, and a Changed Line)
Lightfoot built the song from a magazine article. The Newsweek piece was headlined "The Cruelest Month," and it opened with the Chippewa legend of Gitche Gumee, the shining Big-Sea-Water — which is where the song's first verse comes from. The long, rolling tune underneath it is shaped like a sea shanty, built to carry a story verse after verse.
He also fact-checked himself, which fits how this blog tries to tell these stories. Early versions of the song suggested a main hatchway had caved in. Later reporting found no proof of that, and Lightfoot changed the line in live performance rather than lay blame where it did not belong. The songwriter corrected his own song when the evidence moved.
Remembering the Crew
In Detroit, when the news came in, the bell of the Mariners' Church was rung 29 times by the Reverend Richard Ingalls — once for each man. The song ends at that bell, and the bell is still the centre of how the crew is remembered. Since Lightfoot's death in 2023, the church has rung a 30th toll: for Lightfoot himself, and for all sailors lost on the Lakes.
The ship's own bell — 200 pounds of bronze — was recovered from the wreck on July 4, 1995, and is on display at the Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum at Whitefish Point, placed there as a memorial to the crew at the families' request. The museum holds a memorial ceremony every November 10.
That work of naming and remembering is why this post sits comfortably next to Green Fields of France: one ballad names a single soldier in a war grave, the other names a crew of 29, and both exist so the dead are not just a number.
The Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum's Edmund Fitzgerald page covers the bell, the annual ceremony, and the expeditions to the wreck, and Smithsonian Magazine's 50th-anniversary account tells the full story of the final voyage and the mystery after it.
— hear us play it live (video above).