In the early 1960s, before he was a household name, Gordon Lightfoot was invited to play a folk concert in Sault Ste. Marie. The day after his death at the age of 84, sons of one of the organizers of that concert recall the lifelong friendship their father had with the Canadian legend.
Alan Gordon had participated in the thriving Toronto folk music scene prior to moving north, said his eldest son Andrew Gordon. Alan died in the Sault at the age of 90 in 2019.
“When my father moved to the Sault in 1959, he brought all of these folk traditions and was sort of horrified when he got to the Sault and realized there was nothing,” said Andrew.
His father was so dismayed, Andrew said, that he decided to co-found the Sault Folk Concert Association to start bringing more folk music to Sault Ste. Marie.
The concerts included acts like The Travellers, Alan Mills, Ian and Sylvia and Orillia-born Gordon Lightfoot.
“After the concerts were over, all of the performers would come back to my dad’s house and party into the long tall hours,” recalled Andrew, who was a young boy at the time. “I can remember the house being full of smoke because everybody smoked at the time — Ian Tyson right there pounding them back, Gordon Lightfoot there smoking and just noise, music and guitars all over the place. It was just insane.”
These house parties happened a couple times over the years in the 1960s, as Lightfoot was growing more and more notable on his way to becoming a Canadian icon.
“I remember one morning I got up afterwards and I came into the living room and there was this guy lying on the couch and, as it turned out, it was Gordon Lightfoot," Andrew said. "He never made it home to his hotel."
The family albums include photographs of the house parties, said Alan’s youngest son, Rob.
”There’s some snaps and blurry photos taken around the house of Lightfoot playing the guitar,” he said.
Legend has it that Lightfoot went for a walk to Bellevue Park to see the buffalo that were penned there at the time — and was inspired to write one of his classic ballads.
“I’m not sure if it’s true, but he got up before he went to bed and decided to walk down by the St. Marys River down in Bellevue Park and it was sort of a misty, rainy day," Andrew said. "And that's where, apparently, he had the vision of Early Morning Rain."
Others have said the song was inspired by Lightfoot seeing a friend off at an airport in Los Angeles, but many artists can have more than one inspiration for a song.
Rob wrote to Lightfoot a few years ago, hoping to confirm the Sault connection to the song. Unfortunately, he never heard back.
“My brother and I believed that for many, many years and tried to find out whether it was true or not, but never did,” said Andrew.
One person who was in Bellevue Park that fateful 1964 morning remembers it well.
Beverlie Robertson, then Beverlie Sammons of The Chateclairs, remembers being at the party at Alan's house after the festival.
“The party ended quite late and by the time we had a bite to eat and our plane was leaving at 8 in the morning — there was no point in going to bed. There just wasn’t," she recalled.
A group of artists, including Robertson and Lightfoot, ended up at the zoo in Bellevue Park in the early morning hours.
“We all went for a wander and ended up in the zoo and there were buffalo. I had never seen buffalo at that point," said Robertson. "There was a female with a young calf and it was nursing. It was just misty and rainy, but not quite enough for an umbrella, and it was quite magical."
"It was very early and we were going to catch an early flight and that’s where the inspiration for Early Morning Rain came from,” she added.
From there, the group went to the airport to board plane — but not before Alan took an iconic photo of the folk artists boarding. Later, it was used in one of the books penned by Lightfoot.
As the years went on and Lightfoot became more famous, the Gordon family made a point to come out to his shows every time he was in the twin Saults.
“Our family would always go and Gordon Lightfoot would say something on stage about my father like: ‘Is Al Gordon in the audience here? My old buddy Al — we used to party together,’” recalled Andrew.
“He took me backstage and the bouncers would clear the way when they knew my dad was coming. They chatted and shook hands and just went at it for a while,” said Rob. “It seemed like every time he came to town that would happen.”
Even as the two men grew older and grew apart, Andrew said somehow his father would always end up in Lightfoot’s dressing room after a show, even as recently as his last Sault performance in 2011.
When Rob was in his twenties, he happened to bump into Lightfoot in an airport in Yellowknife. He recalled the encounter in his book I, Wayne Gretzky.
“I said: 'You probably wouldn’t recognize me, I am from Sault Ste. Marie and my name is Rob Gordon.' And he went: 'Al Gordon’s son? Does he still work at the bug lab?’” Rob said. “He had a really strong memory of my dad and those times, even though it was a fairly short time period.”
Robertson said songwriters in the 1960s, including Lightfoot, were very productive and inspired. "It was a really magical decade," she said.
Lightfoot's death is Canada's loss and a loss for music as a whole, said Robertson.
“He was productive right to the end. He never stopped writing, never stopped recording and never stopped performing right to the end. It’s inspiring,” she said. “I am 83 and still singing and performing. There are precious few of us left."