Gordon Lightfoot died yesterday on May Day at age 84. He was hospitalized in Toronto, Canada and reportedly suffering from Alzheimer's Disease. The Canadian singer/songwriter left behind quite a musical legacy, which included such songs as If You Could Read My Mind, Rainy Day People, Sundown, Carefree Highway and The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald. Beginning in 1970 with If You Could Read My Mind, all these tunes had big-time commercial success in the US, especially Sundown and The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.

"When the Green Dark Forest Was Too Silent To Be Real"

As a young man, Gordon actually studied music for awhile in the US. After a brief attendance at the Westlake College of Music in Los Angeles, Gordon returned to Canada and started performing in clubs around Toronto, Canada's biggest metropolitan area. This phase of his career lasted through the sixties. Featured below are two classic songs from that era. First up is his epic Canadian Railroad Trilogy, a riveting account of the development of early Canada.

Next up is Early Morning Rain, one of Lightfoot's most covered tunes. Bob Dylan put the song on his 1970 Self Portrait album, as did Elvis Presley two years later on his Elvis Now LP. Other notables to cover this ballad are Peter, Paul and Mary, Ian and Sylvia, Neil Young and Jerry Lee Lewis. Below you can listen to an extremely well done version performed recently by Foxes and Fossils, a popular cover band.

A Tale of Two Painters

Above are two paintings of 19th century America done by two successful American artists. Taken together they depict two very distinct versions of America in the 1800s. The painting on the left (upper) was created by Alfred Bierstadt in 1863, when he visited Yosemite Valley. Compare this with a George Catlin's painting that he made on the shores of Lake Erie in 1847. There's quite a difference, isn't there? For while Bierstadt shows a beautiful wilderness devoid of human habitation, Catlin takes a very different approach. On his canvas, the Native American presence comes to life, portraying a vivant culture, very much in touch with their surroundings.

Overall, these two paintings do much more than just show the differences in the two personal visions of the artists. In fact, they represent two schools of thinking. On his canvas, Bierstadt saw the American wilderness as this spiritual creation, made by the hand of God. Bierstadt was not the only landscape painter to see the world in this manner, for there was also Frederick Edwin Church and the Hudson River School of painters, where many artists painted the Great Outdoors in this manner.

By contrast, Catlin shows a much different world. Lightfoot addressed this issue extremely well, when he wrote The Canadian Railroad Trilogy back in 1964. In essence, Bierstadt's Western panorama becomes the "dark green forest too silent to be real" and in contrast, Catlin shows us a different world, one where the American Indian is alive and thriving. This a theme that reoccurs from time to time in Lightfoot's lyrics.