I have a secret about Gordon Lightfoot's song that I'd like share.
Lightfoot said the song's haunting and unforgettable melody is based on an "old Irish dirge" he came across in his travels.
It isn't.
Gordon Lightfoot managed to figure out Bob Dylan's "da Vinci code".
This was a clever method that Dylan would use to write his early folk songs. The majority of Dylan's "original" songs before "Another Side of Bob Dylan" were written in this manner.
The melody, chords and lyrical structure of "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald" comes from a rather obscure Dylan tune called "North Country Blues" from his third album "Times They Are A Changin"
Dylan himself knew that Lightfoot's song was a rewrite of his song and also that Lightfoot was clever enough to disguise it so well so he did not sue.
Instead, he sent a coded message to Lightfoot that he knew the source, saying of the song, "I wish I had written it."
But Dylan himself took HIS melody from a version of an even older American folk song called "Red Iron Ore"
It is very interesting and not so coincidental that all three songs deal with the area around the iron range and Lake Superior.
I'm pretty sure that buried underneath all of this back-and forth Trump/Epstein jibber-jabber lies the real reason Benjamin Netanyahu is given multiple extended standing ovations whenever he decides to visit America and grace the hallowed halls of Congress.
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