Gordon Lightfoot: A Regionalist Retrospective

Gordon LightfootA Regionalist Retrospective Zachary Michael Jack (bio) In an essay from his 1920 collection In the Garret, Midwestern-born New York Times music critic Carl Van Vechten traveled across his home region in search of the would-be "folk-songs of Iowa."1 Van Vechten took his cue from musicologist Cecil Sharp, who turned up a trove of such tunes in Appalachia from 1916 to 1918, and from the scores of song collectors who scoured the Deep South for homegrown, commercially viable blues during the 1910s. He reasoned that a trip across the Hawkeye State should yield a similar wellspring of Midwestern blues and folk—the heretofore unknown longings, frustrations, and indignities of a deeply felt yet reticent people bubbling forth in song. Little more than fifty years after Van Vechten's good-natured quest failed to turn up a Middle American Ma Rainey, I came of musical age on an Iowa Century Farm possessed of similar questions. Given the renown of my home state's celebrated stable of Regionalist scribes (Hamlin Garland, Ruth Suckow, Phil Stong, to name a few) and artists (Grant Wood, Marvin Cone, John Bloom), I too wondered what had become of our homegrown folk and blues in the fifty years since Grant Wood urged place-based musicians, artists, and writers toward an "honest reliance" on "native materials" in his 1935 manifesto Revolt Against the City.2 In the early 1980s Iowa folksinger and bluesman-in-the-making Greg Brown was still more than a decade removed from the first of his two Grammy nominations. In the throes of a musical adolescence, I was then learning to appreciate the ironies of regional identity as it played out in popular music. Most of the Beach Boys, it turned out, didn't surf.3 Meanwhile, much of the honky-tonk sound of the 60s and 70s, presumed to have originated in Nashville, had in fact come from California via the Bakersfield Sound of Merle Haggard and [End Page 226] Buck Owens. Likewise, Linda Ronstadt scored a hit in 1977 with the sultry, deeply Southern-sounding "Blue Bayou," despite growing up in dry and thirsty Tucson. To me, the baleful baritone singing of wrecked lives and ruined ships that played on the jukebox each weekend at the riverside tavern my uncle Charlie owned, Sutliff Bar and Grill in Sutliff, Iowa, sounded like it just might be Van Vechten's long-missing Iowa folk arrived a half-century later. Songs like "Sundown," "If You Could Read My Mind," "Rainy Day People," and "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald" perfectly pitch-matched the soundtrack of regret, pain, love, and longing I heard growing up in the rural roadhouses of a region careening toward Ag Crisis. The distinctive voice I heard from the juke was as deep and masculine as Johnny Cash, but it didn't seem to suffer from the same cult of personality. One couldn't hear Cash's "Folsom Prison Blues" or "Jackson" without picturing The Man in Black himself, pompadour and suit-jacket, making yet another buck. This other voice—the one I struggled back then to name—sounded disembodied by comparison, seeming more like an anonymous balladeer of the trials and travails of a people than the powdered face and Brylcreemed quaff of cultivated superstardom. In one of music's richer ironies, it was Canada's Gordon Lightfoot that struck such a resonant chord with us in the middle of Middle America—much more at the time than electrified, New Yorkified Midwesterner Bob Dylan. Born in small-town Ontario, Lightfoot somehow hit all the right Heartland notes. Geographically at least, the signal-strength of his cross-border cultural influence made a strange kind of sense. Fewer than eight hundred miles separated Orillia, Ontario, from Sutliff, Iowa, compared to the one thousand miles intervening between it and New York City, or the nearly two thousand miles between our unincorporated backwater and faraway folk-rock haven Laurel Canyon in Los Angeles. Though I couldn't articulate it then, I could hear the strains of Midwestern Gothic playing between the lines of Lightfoot's transformational transnational anthems. Here was a bardic voice capable of singing the difficult truths...

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