50 Years Ago: The SS Edmund Fitzgerald Sinks and Inspires a Gordon Lightfoot Hit

For those that live or have lived around the American Great Lakes region, the story of the SS Edmund Fitzgerald is likely familiar. It was, to date, the largest ship to ever sink in those waters, claiming the lives of 29 crew members whose bodies were never recovered.

On the afternoon of Nov. 9, 1975, the boat set sail from Superior, Wisconsin, carrying a full load of iron ore pellets, bound for a steel plant on Zug Island near Detroit, Michigan. But by the next day, a severe storm had hit the lake and the ship sunk in Canadian waters at approximately 7 p.m. on Nov. 10.

Despite multiple investigations, it is still not known exactly what caused the sinking, apart from the storm. There are theories that improperly latched hatches may have contributed to the accident, as well as preexisting structural damage to the boat. One thing is certain: boats the size of the SS Edmund Fitzgerald do not often sink as swiftly as this one did.

As serious as the event was, it likely would not have been remembered by as many were it not for Gordon Lightfoot, who learned of the incident via a newspaper article and decided to write a song about what happened. Recorded in December of 1975, "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald" was released in August of 1976.

"The story of the sinking of the Fitzgerald stayed with me in a funny kind of a way, all by itself," Ligtfoot later recalled to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel in 2015. "I wasn't forgetting about it. I knew everyone had forgotten about it, but I knew I hadn't forgotten it."

Lightfoot set out to recount the story of the sinking ship in song form, trying to be "as accurate as possible." There are a few details Lightfoot changed — the ship, as noted, was not bound for Cleveland, for example — but for the most part, "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald" correctly portrays what happened on that blustery November day.

One might not think that a nearly six-minute folk ballad with no chorus, only verses, about a sunken boat would be a chart success. But it was. "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald" went to No. 1 in Lightfoot's native Canada and No. 2 in the U.S.

But making a hit wasn't Lightfoot's intention – even as the song's success grew, his priority was honoring the lives lost. In 1976, Lightfoot established a scholarship for cadets at the Great Lakes Maritime Academy. At one point, Lightfoot was offered a starring role in a movie based on the sinking, which he firmly declined.

In the original song, Lightfoot sang that "a main hatchway caved in," but the implication that crew members were directly at fault for the accident was not something Lightfoot, who got to know many of the affected families over the years, could continue to sing at his concerts.

"'The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,' that's one I always treat with respect," Lightfoot recalled to Broadview in 2013. "There is a ladies' committee in Madison, Wisconsin, that I've stayed in touch with for years and years. [It includes] the captain's wife and daughter, the daughter of a deckhand, the mother of a 21-year-old boy who was the youngest person in the crew to go down with the boat.

"The part in the song about the hatch covers giving way as one of the possibilities [for the shipwreck], well, that was the job of Cheryl's father and Ruth's son who were deckhands. They were supposed to be the guys who were looking after the hatch covers. I felt a cringe, I felt something in my soul, because they knew that wasn’t what happened and I had no business assuming what happened. In concert, I change the line of the song to say, 'At 7 p.m. it grew dark, it was then he said, 'Fellas, it’s been good to know you.'' No more hatch covers."

"At 17, I couldn't listen to it, to be honest," Debbie Champeau, the daughter of Oliver "Buck" Champeau said to Fox 11 News in November of 2025, 50 years since the boat's sinking. Her father was a third assistant engineer on the ship. "And it took me a while. In fact, I was in a grocery store when they played it and I'm like, 'I think I'm out of here."

But she later met Lightfoot in person: "And I asked him, 'Why did you write the song? What was the reason? The words? Because it's kind of eerie? And he said, 'I did it to bring noticeability to the fact that ships are going out un-seaworthy.' And the ship was unseaworthy. It wasn't up to code. There were violations."

Lightfoot's song brought a tremendous amount of attention to the accident, and in the years that followed, changes were made in Great Lakes shipping practices, including mandatory survival suits on board, new positioning systems and navigational charts.

"It is a very good piece of work, I do believe," Lightfoot said in 2015. "It's just one of those songs that just stands the test of time and it's about something that, of course, would be forgotten very shortly thereafter, which is one of the reasons I wrote the song in the first place. I didn't want it to be forgotten. There is a responsibility."

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I grew up a mile or two from one of the great lakes and saw the big freighters frequently. I was 11 when the Fitz went down and have vague memories of the news that day. That said, we have a painting in my living room of the Fitz a minute or so before she sank and I don’t even live in Michigan anymore. We’re now a mile from the Chesapeake Bay.

That said, I have great respect for the Troubadour, Gordon Lightfoot and his homage to the brave men who sail the Great Lakes.

I have always liked the song, but I started to take particular interest in the story and other Great Lakes lore after I moved to where I live now — two blocks off Lake Michigan. Some of my neighbors are retired merchant sailors. One had spent some time on the Fitzgerald. It was great for Lightfoot to have recognized these men, and for him to be recognized in return.

The almost always reliable NTSB reported that improperly fastened and maladjusted hatch cover clamps were the immediate cause of the sinking. More recent dives on the wreck and high definition scans and photos have further supported the hatch cover explanation above all other factors and possibilities.

Perhaps, but even so, the engineering needs to account for such things. It was a long ship with three separated cargo holds. If it had four, it might have retained enough buoyancy to at least stay afloat long enough to have given the crew a chance at survival, or never have sunk. One of the explanations for the Titanic sinking is that the crew member at the wheel turned the wheel the wrong way due to a lack of training and panic after the crew spotted the iceberg, and the ship actually steered in to the iceberg, not away from it. Human error is always present but the engineering must account for it in the design. With the Edmund Fitzgerald, it didn't. They were actually planning to lengthen the ship before it sank.

True enough. The dirty secret of engineering is that it is about economizing materials and cost -- sometimes in ways that go wrong. And when they do go wrong, there is usually a cascade of failures and poor choices with several what if scenarios that might have made for a different outcome.

The concept of proximate cause though is useful for sorting through such possibilities. When all the facts are taken into account, who was the last responsible person in time whose decisions were in error when the harm was foreseeable and avoidable based on the knowledge available at the time?

In my reckoning, the person proximately at fault was the captain in failing to properly secure the hatch covers before he headed into notoriously fickle waters in storm season. As my father taught me when I was boy sailing on the small lake I grew up on: avoid unnecessary risks because the water wants to kill you.

If the number of dead is your criteria then the Oklahoma City bombing at 167 doesn’t qualify. If its ships sunk in Chicago, I’m a bit confused. The Eastland was a preventable screwup. Center of gravity problem; bit high and buoyancy too low.
It turned turtle.

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