In 1975, the great Canadian singer-songwriter Gordon Lightfoot read a Newsweek magazine article about a little-known shipwreck in the Great Lakes. The ship was the Edmund Fitzgerald, which lost 29 souls, and Lightfoot would soon sing, “The ship was the pride of the American side,” creating an iconic song.

November 10, 2025, is the 50th anniversary of the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald (the tragedy, not the song), and that has renewed interest in Lightfoot’s lyrics and the real story.

How did Lightfoot write the song? For starters, it violated songwriting rules, clocking in at six minutes.

Lightfoot explained how he wrote the song in an AMA on Reddit in 2014.

“The Edmund Fitzgerald really seemed to go unnoticed at that time, anything I’d seen in the newspapers or magazines were very short, brief articles, and I felt I would like to expand upon the story of the sinking of the ship itself,” he wrote.

“And it was quite an undertaking to do that, I went and bought all of the old newspapers, got everything in chronological order, and went ahead and did it because I already had a melody in my mind and it was from an old Irish dirge that I heard when I was about 3 and a half years old,” added Lightfoot. “I think it was one of the first pieces of music that registered to me as being a piece of music. That’s where the melody comes from, from an old Irish folk song.”

In return, the Irish song Back Home in Derryborrowed from Lightfoot’s song.

The Great Lakes Shipwreck Historical Society is holding an “outdoor public remembrance service for the 50th Edmund Fitzgerald Memorial at Whitefish Point” on the anniversary, according to its website.

What is the real story of the Edmund Fitzgerald?

“The Edmund Fitzgerald was lost with her entire crew of 29 men on Lake Superior November 10, 1975, 17 miles north-northwest of Whitefish Point, Michigan,” the Great Lakes Shipwreck Historical Society explains on its website. “Whitefish Point is the site of the Whitefish Point Light Station and Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum. The Great Lakes Shipwreck Historical Society (GLSHS) has conducted three underwater expeditions to the wreck, 1989, 1994, and 1995.”

In 1995, an expedition recovered the ship’s 200-pound brass bell.

Lightfoot didn’t get all of the facts right in his song. The ship was coming from a mill in Minnesota, not Wisconsin; it was not fully loaded with ore; and it was headed to Detroit, not Cleveland. He also took some liberties, conjuring up the cook warning of looming disaster. There is no way to know whether anything like that happened.

“The S.S. Edmund Fitzgerald was conceived as a business enterprise of the Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance Company of Milwaukee, Wisconsin,” the society says. “Northwestern Mutual contracted with Great Lakes Engineering Works of Ecorse, Michigan to construct a ‘maximum sized’ Great Lakes bulk carrier. Her keel was laid on August 7, 1957 as Hull No. 301.”

Named after the President and Chairman of the Board of Northwestern Mutual, the ship* “*was launched June 8, 1958 at River Rouge, Michigan. Northwestern Mutual placed her under permanent charter to the Columbia Transportation Division of Oglebay Norton Company, Cleveland, Ohio. At 729 feet and 13,632 gross tons she was the largest ship on the Great Lakes, for thirteen years, until 1971,” the society explains.

On November 9, 1975, the ship “was to transport a load of taconite from Superior, Wisconsin, to Zug Island, Detroit, Michigan.”

The ship sank in a storm. “Weather conditions continued to deteriorate. Gale warnings had been issued at 7 pm on November 9, upgraded to storm warnings early in the morning of November 10. While conditions were bad, with winds gusting to 50 knots and seas 12 to 16 feet, both Captains had often piloted their vessels in similar conditions,” the society says.

The cause of the wreck is disputed. “While the Coast Guard said the cause of the sinking could not be conclusively determined, it maintained that ‘the most probable cause of the sinking of the S.S. Edmund Fitzgerald was the loss of buoyancy and stability resulting from massive flooding of the cargo hold,’” the society wrote. “‘The flooding of the cargo hold took place through ineffective hatch closures as boarding seas rolled along the spar deck.’”

That is challenged, though, and the society notes, “What caused the ship to take on water, enough to lose buoyancy and dive to the bottom so quickly, without a single cry for help, cannot be determined.”