SILVER LININGS

Sonic Connections: The Folk Soul and Its Faithful Carriers

BLACK CLOUD:

I rise tonight, under a sky that knows too many half-truths,

to honor a man who bore no relation to Lori Lightfoot, mayor of Chicago, visage model for a Batman villain.

Our Lightfoot carried a name that sounded like prophecy nonetheless.

A Scottish name, sailing across generations and geographies,

from the polite middle-class streets of Orillia, Ontario,

to the deep, weathered grooves of the world’s turntables.

They talk about the dearth of Canadian culture.

Let them.

Because if that were true—

if Canada were truly some vast cultural blank—

then Gordon Lightfoot alone would be enough to put that to lie.

He sang the lakes and the lumber camps,

the barrooms and the ballads,

the lovers and the lonely highways—

until all the empty spaces had voices again.

He grew up middle-class, it’s true,

with all the bourgeois implications that word carries.

But from the moment he opened his mouth to sing,

you wouldn’t have known it.

He could write about love and betrayal,

about whales and shipwrecks,

about Don Quixote and the stubborn persistence of fools,

and none of it sounded contrived.

It sounded like the folk soul itself had chosen him,

tapping him on the shoulder and saying:

“Here, Gord. You carry this now.”

I always preferred his early songs—

when his voice was unweathered,

when the arrangements shimmered with evocative strings,

when there was still a certain slyness in the lyrics,

like in “I’m Not Sayin’”—

where he skirts the edges of confession,

where he plays coy with the truth,

where he’s already wrestling with the impossibility of promises.

And yet later, older, more exposed,

he sang “If You Could Read My Mind,”

and you could hear the shift—

from ambiguity to apology,

from youthful hedging to weary reckoning.

He’d lived enough by then to know that the castle in the air always falls,

that the paperback hero never quite makes it to the last page,

that even the womanizer, in the end, must say:

“I’m sorry. I did what I did. I wish I’d done better.”

I saw him once, in Phoenix, Arizona.

A theatre in the round.

He had to be led onstage by one of his bandmates,

unsteady, visibly drunk—

and yet when the guitar was in his hands,

when the spotlight circled him like a benediction,

he played flawlessly.

Not a missed note.

Not a cracked lyric.

He stood inside the song like a man standing inside a cathedral.

And maybe that’s the truest thing about Gordon Lightfoot:

he could stand inside the song,

and make you believe he’d lived every last word,

whether it was about a lover, a lake, or a ship gone down beneath the waves.

And let’s be clear:

Lightfoot wasn’t just conjuring lost ages and loves—

he was adding his own parody to the parody,

a faithful, skillful, loving parody,

the kind that doesn’t cheapen the thing but deepens it,

the kind that says:

“I know this is an old story, but let me add my verse anyway.”

Not parody like mockery,

but parody like Mercury—

a messenger carrying tradition forward,

as folks have always done,

because that’s how the folk song lives on.

Tonight, I light a candle not just for the man,

but for the folk soul he carried.

For the sly young man of “I’m Not Sayin’”

and for the older man of “If You Could Read My Mind,”

who finally read his own mind enough to know he owed an apology—

and sang it,

and meant it.

“Sleep well, Gordon. You made it all sound true.”

—Black Cloud, Chief Poetic Justice Warrior