The legend lives on: The Lightfoot Band brings the music of their late bandleader to the Iron Horse

Legendary Canadian singer-songwriter Gordon Lightfoot died in 2023, but his longtime band members, who now tour as The Lightfoot Band, will share his music and legacy in Northampton at the Iron Horse on Thursday, April 24, at 7 p.m.

The Lightfoot Band includes Rick Haynes on bass, Barry Keane on drums and Mike Heffernan on keyboards — each original members of Lightfoot’s band for over four decades — as well as Carter Lancaster on guitar, who joined in 2011, and Andy Mauck on vocals and guitar, who joined in 2023. This won’t be the musicians’ first time playing in western Massachusetts; their touring history with Lightfoot includes stops at the Calvin, Tanglewood, and even Look Park.

“There was something about the people in the area and the area itself,” said Keane. “It was always one of our favorite stops on the tour, and all of us are just pumped to be going back to Northampton and finding out what the Iron Horse is all about.”

As it happens, the band’s upcoming shows this year will also have historical significance: 2025 marks the 50th anniversary of the incident that inspired one of Lightfoot’s most famous songs, “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.” In November 1975, the SS Edmund Fitzgerald, an ore carrier ship, sank in Lake Superior during a storm, drowning 29 crew members. Lightfoot read an article about the tragedy in Newsweek magazine and was inspired to write a song commemorating it:

“The legend lives on from the Chippewa on down / Of the big lake they call Gitche Gumee / Superior, they said, never gives up her dead / When the gales of November come early”

“There was just something about that [ship] that struck a chord with him,” Keane recalled. The SS Edmund Fitzgerald, he said, was “not anywhere near the only ship that has gone down in the Great Lakes, but there was something about that one.”

What’s more, Lightfoot didn’t initially plan to put the song on his 1976 “Summertime Dream” album, but he played a few snippets of it during the recording session in between other songs. When the band was done recording everything else, they still had a day and a half’s worth of studio time left over. The audio engineer suggested to Lightfoot that he could make use of the time by recording that song.

“It was the first time we had ever heard that song,” Keane said, “so we all played what we felt.”

In the wake of the song’s release, Keane said he, Lightfoot and the other bandmates got to meet the crew members’ families — “the wives and the sons and the daughters of the men of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” as Lightfoot sang — when those families came to concerts in states like Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota.

In the song, Lightfoot also sang, “The church bell chimed ‘til it rang 29 times / For each man on the Edmund Fitzgerald.” That church, the Mariners’ Church of Detroit, has an annual tradition of ringing its bell 29 times on the anniversary of the tragedy. The day after Lightfoot passed in May 2023, they rang it 30 times — the extra ring was for him.

“Had Gord not documented the event in that wonderful song, I think a few months would’ve gone by and everybody would’ve forgotten about it,” Haynes said. “He really put it in history, and people to this day are enthralled with the history surrounding the sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald.”

The Lightfoot Band loves meeting fans after shows, Keane and Haynes said; rather than sell backstage passes, the band hangs out in the venue’s lobby after every show so the audience can meet them.

“What we find is a lot of people are just dying to tell us their personal stories about how Gordon impacted their lives and what he meant to them,” Haynes said.

Haynes would know about Lightfoot’s impact on a life: he worked with Lightfoot for 55 years. To him, “Gord” was “like a John Wayne or a Willie Nelson kind of a guy that was tough — not big in stature, but a tough guy, and I expected him to be around for a long time.”

“He was a multifaceted songwriter and a performer, but first he was a writer, and he wrote songs about nature, about love, about war, about shipwrecks, about the sea, about the mountains,” he said. “Some singer-songwriters, they write about mainly one subject. He wrote about everything. His uncanny ability to pick a subject and put it into words and music and have people able to picture what he was writing about made him a very special singer-songwriter.”

As a session drummer, Keane has worked with innumerable artists and bands, including Bachman-Turner Overdrive, Shania Twain, and Carole King, among many others. What set Lightfoot apart?

“Gordon never blew his own horn. He shied away from media. The most important thing to Gord was writing great songs and playing them for people. He loved playing his songs for audiences, and that was the most important thing for him,” Keane said. “People should know what a humble man Gordon was, what a great person. He gave his money and his time to others. It was such a great privilege to be associated with a great man.”

Tickets start at $54 at ironhorse.org. SatinWood will open.

Carolyn Brown can be reached at [email protected].