Gordon Lightfoot, who died yesterday at the age of 84, was a legend in his home country of Canada. He might not have the same global fame but he was revered there as much – if not more – than contemporaries like Neil Young and Joni Mitchell.

Best known here for an easy-listening style, this epic narrative song is rightly regarded as his finest work, documenting an epic account of a marine tragedy with a journalistic eye for detail.

He began writing a song about the night a freighter went down in a storm on Lake Superior, taking the lives of all 29 crew, the day after it happened in November 1975.

Within a month he had recorded it – and it topped the US charts almost exactly a year after the event itself, in November 1976.

Lightfoot spent most of his career in his homeland, resisting the next generation’s temptation to migrate across the border for the sake of his career.

True, he went to LA to study music after leaving school, but moved back to Canada in 1960 because he missed home. He also spent a year in the UK, hosting BBC television’s Country And Western Show just as London was starting to swing in 1963.

Lightfoot’s biggest international successes came in the mid-Seventies, first with the melancholy easy-listening classic If You Could Read My Mind (about the break-up of his marriage) and the equally mellow Sundown (below).

He received 16 Juno awards – Canada’s equivalent of the Grammys – between 1965 and 1976, and was nominated five times for a Grammy. LIghtfoot survived major surgery in 2002 and released his 21st album in 2020 – more than half a century after his debut.

He died in his home town of Toronto on 1 May 2023.