Copyright Star Tribune
Lightfoot’s haunting ballad may be one of the most successful musical accounts ever of a historical event. That’s true even if the singer-songwriter got a few things wrong, says Ric Mixter, a Michigan-based journalist and documentarian who’s spent decades chronicling the Fitz — and even saw the wreck firsthand in a 1994 dive. Ric Mixter, a Michigan-based journalist and documentarian who’s spent decades chronicling the Edmund Fitzgerald — and even saw the wreck firsthand in a 1994 dive. (Photo courtesy Ric Mixter) (Courtesy of Ric Mixter) “I’m highly criticized at my lectures because I pick on Gordon,” said Mixter, whose latest Fitz book is “Tattletale Sounds: The Edmund Fitzgerald Investigations.” “Eighty percent of that song is wrong — from the Chippewa legend that doesn’t exist” (it was appropriated from another tribe, he says), to the line “ ‘some mill in Wisconsin.’ There are no pelletizing mills in Wisconsin. It was not fully loaded and it was not going to Cleveland. It was partially loaded and going to Detroit.” Ironically, Lightfoot said in a 2015 interview with NPR that he was inspired to write the song after being annoyed by an inaccuracy in a Newsweek article shortly after the Nov. 10, 1975, disaster — in which Edmund was spelled with an “O.” He also said the story gave short shrift to the 29 crew members who perished. He wrote and recorded the song in little more than a month, long before investigations were complete or before technology even existed to reach the wreck at Superior’s depth. In that light, speculation — “They might have split up, or they might have capsized” — was poetically permissible. And certain moments, like imagined words between crewmen, were simply unknowable. That makes one of Mixter’s criticisms feel a bit like nitpicking: his assertion that Bob Rafferty, a last-minute replacement as the ship’s cook, “never would have said, ‘Fellas, it’s been good to know you.’ ”
