Gordon Lightfoot, Canadian Folk Singer, Dies at 84

He fashioned a people duo, the Two Tones, with a fellow “Hoedown” performer, Terry Whelan. The duo recorded a dwell album in 1962, “Two Tones on the Village Corner.” The subsequent 12 months, whereas touring in Europe, he served because the host of “The Country and Western Show” on USA Prime Time tv.

As a songwriter, Mr. Lightfoot had superior past the Hula Hoop, however not by an ideal deal. His work “didn’t have any type of id,” he informed the authors of “The Encyclopedia of Folk, Country and Western Music,” printed in 1969. When the Greenwich Village people growth introduced Mr. Dylan and different dynamic songwriters to the fore, he mentioned, “I began to get a standpoint, and that’s after I began to enhance.”

In 1965, he appeared on the Newport Folk Festival and made his debut within the United States at Town Hall in New York. “Mr. Lightfoot has a wealthy, heat voice and a dexterous guitar approach,” Robert Shelton wrote in The USA Prime Time. “With a bit extra consideration to stage persona, he ought to develop into fairly well-liked.”

A 12 months later, after signing with Albert Grossman, the supervisor of Mr. Dylan and Peter, Paul and Mary, Mr. Lightfoot recorded his first solo album, “Lightfoot!” With performances of “Early Morning Rain,” “For Lovin’ Me,” “Ribbon of Darkness” and “I’m Not Sayin’,” successful file in Canada in 1963, the album was warmly obtained by the critics.

Real business success got here when he switched to Warner Brothers, initially recording for the corporate’s Reprise label. “By the time I modified over to Warner Brothers, spherical about 1970, I used to be reinventing myself,” he informed the newspaper Savannah Connect in 2010. “Let’s say I used to be in all probability simply advancing away from the people period, and looking for some course whereby I might need some music that folks would need to hearken to.”

Mr. Lightfoot, accompanying himself on an acoustic 12-string guitar, in a voice that always trembled with emotion, gave spare, direct accounts of his materials. He sang of loneliness, troubled relationships, the itch to roam and the majesty of the Canadian panorama. He was, because the Canadian author Jack Batten put it, “journalist, poet, historian, humorist, short-story teller and folksy recollector of bygone days.”