50 years later, why the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald haunts us still – National
It was a shipwreck so notorious, it inspired what many critics and listeners agree is one of the greatest songs of all time — a song that helped solidify its legend.
Fifty years ago, on Nov. 10, 1975, the SS Edmund Fitzgerald sank during a brutal storm on Lake Superior while sailing from Superior, Wisc., to Detroit. The entire crew of 29 men died in the Canadian waters.A year later, the disaster was immortalized by Canadian singer-songwriter Gordon Lightfoot when he released “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” which became an unlikely hit single in 1976 and remains popular to this day as both a totem of culture in Canada and the source of online memes.“There were about 6,000 commercial shipwrecks on the Great Lakes between 1825 and 1975. Everybody knows one, and it’s because of the song,...





