50 years later, why the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald haunts us still

The disaster, which was immortalized by Gordon Lightfoot's 1976 song 'The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,' has united Canadians and Americans across the Great Lakes.

It was a shipwreck so notorious, it inspired what many critics and listeners agree is one of the greatest songs of all time — a song that helped solidify its legend.

Fifty years ago, on Nov. 10, 1975, the SS Edmund Fitzgerald sank during a brutal storm on Lake Superior while sailing from Superior, Wisc., to Detroit. The entire crew of 29 men died in the Canadian waters.

A year later, the disaster was immortalized by Canadian singer-songwriter Gordon Lightfoot when he released “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” which became an unlikely hit single in 1976 and remains popular to this day as both a totem of culture in Canada and the source of online memes.

“There were about 6,000 commercial shipwrecks on the Great Lakes between 1825 and 1975. Everybody knows one, and it’s because of the song,” said John U. Bacon, author of the new book The Gales of November: The Untold Story of the Edmund Fitzgerald.

The scale of the wreck itself also makes it stand out, historians say.

The Edmund Fitzgerald remains the largest ship ever to sink in the Great Lakes, which was a particularly booming industrial region in the mid-20th century following the Second World War, when hundreds of commercial vessels ferried raw materials in-between booming port cities on both sides of the border every year.

Before it sank, the over-200-metre-long freighter spent 17 years carrying taconite ore, a low-grade iron, from Minnesota mines to steel mills in Detroit, Toledo and other ports.

Sailors on the Great Lakes have regularly had to contend with fierce weather, something with which residents in those cities are all too familiar. As Lightfoot’s song underscores with its repeated references to “the gales of November,” the month brings particularly strong storms.