Punch Brothers – Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald
An evening pause: Performed live March 2022 in Boston, where it appears things might finally be going back to normal.
Hat tip Tom Biggar.
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An evening pause: Performed live March 2022 in Boston, where it appears things might finally be going back to normal.
Hat tip Tom Biggar.
Readers!
Please consider supporting my work here at Behind the Black. Your support allows me the freedom and ability to analyze objectively the ongoing renaissance in space, as well as the cultural changes -- for good or ill -- that are happening across America. Fourteen years ago I wrote that SLS and Orion were a bad ideas, a waste of money, would be years behind schedule, and better replaced by commercial private enterprise. Only now does it appear that Washington might finally recognize this reality.
In 2020 when the world panicked over COVID I wrote that the panic was unnecessary, that the virus was apparently simply a variation of the flu, that masks were not simply pointless but if worn incorrectly were a health threat, that the lockdowns were a disaster and did nothing to stop the spread of COVID. Only in the past year have some of our so-called experts in the health field have begun to recognize these facts.
Your help allows me to do this kind of intelligent analysis. I take no advertising or sponsors, so my reporting isn't influenced by donations by established space or drug companies. Instead, I rely entirely on donations and subscriptions from my readers, which gives me the freedom to write what I think, unencumbered by outside influences.
You can support me either by giving a one-time contribution or a regular subscription. There are four ways of doing so:
1. Zelle: This is the only internet method that charges no fees. All you have to do is use the Zelle link at your internet bank and give my name and email address (zimmerman at nasw dot org). What you donate is what I get.
2. Patreon: Go to my website there and pick one of five monthly subscription amounts, or by making a one-time donation.
3. A Paypal Donation or subscription:
4. Donate by check, payable to Robert Zimmerman and mailed to
Behind The Black
c/o Robert Zimmerman
P.O.Box 1262
Cortaro, AZ 85652
You can also support me by buying one of my books, as noted in the boxes interspersed throughout the webpage or shown in the menu above.
Tom–
Good find!
I would submit the following, as one of the best compilation videos available….
“The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” music video
Peter Dingle (2017)
https://youtu.be/lE2LOhs5jaE
7:33
Remember enjoying the song.
I can’t find it now, but I seem to remember someone put together a parody called “The Reek of the Emu Fits Gerald.”
Like the Titanic, Hindeburg, Wreck of old 97, and other infamous disasters, some people have latched on the Edmund Fitzgerald. I have a comrade from the military that has been to Great Lakes, the Museum, the old “mariners cathedral” (which is not a cathedral), and talked to people who had done a season or two on Her.
We humans are an interesting lot when it comes to disasters and catastrophes.
Freak wave most likely. I remember an interview where a man remembered seas from three directions
Herman Melville on the Great Lakes, from Moby Dick: [quoting…]
“[…] the ‘Town-Ho’ had all but certainly arrived in perfect safety at her port without the occurrence of the least fatality, had it not been for the brutal overbearing of Radney, the mate, a Vineyarder, and the bitterly provoked vengeance of Steelkilt, a Lakeman and desperado from Buffalo.
“‘Lakeman! — Buffalo! Pray, what is a Lakeman, and where is Buffalo?’ said Don Sebastian, rising in his swinging mat of grass.
“On the eastern shore of our Lake Erie, Don; but — I crave your courtesy — may be, you shall soon hear further of all that. Now, gentlemen, in square-sail brigs and three-masted ships, well-nigh as large and stout as any that ever sailed out of your old Callao to far Manilla; this Lakeman, in the land-locked heart of our America, had yet been nurtured by all those agrarian freebooting impressions popularly connected with the open ocean. For in their interflowing aggregate, those grand fresh-water seas of ours, — Erie, and Ontario, and Huron, and Superior, and Michigan, — possess an ocean-like expansiveness, with many of the ocean’s noblest traits; with many of its rimmed varieties of races and of climes. They contain round archipelagoes of romantic isles, even as the Polynesian waters do; in large part, are shored by two great contrasting nations, as the Atlantic is; they furnish long maritime approaches to our numerous territorial colonies from the East, dotted all round their banks; here and there are frowned upon by batteries, and by the goat-like craggy guns of lofty Mackinaw; they have heard the fleet thunderings of naval victories; at intervals, they yield their beaches to wild barbarians, whose red painted faces flash from out their peltry wigwams; for leagues and leagues are flanked by ancient and unentered forests, where the gaunt pines stand like serried lines of kings in Gothic genealogies; those same woods harboring wild Afric beasts of prey, and silken creatures whose exported furs give robes to Tartar Emperors; they mirror the paved capitals of Buffalo and Cleveland, as well as Winnebago villages; they float alike the full-rigged merchant ship, the armed cruiser of the State, the steamer, and the beech canoe; they are swept by Borean and dismasting blasts as direful as any that lash the salted wave; they know what shipwrecks are, for out of sight of land, however inland, they have drowned full many a midnight ship with all its shrieking crew.”
[/unQuote]
My opinion, one of the great ballads in the English language, matching anything offered. I read an interview in which Mr. Lightfoot said that he felt an obligation to the crew and families; an obligation that comes through in interpretations.
When I was 4 years old I watched something on TV about this wreck with my dad. He took me and plopped me down on the chair next to his vintage record player. He put these ancient, heavy headphones on me and played the Gordon Lightfoot original. Even at that age I was blown away. It is still the best funeral dirge I have ever heard, aside from the one a man in Galway, Ireland sang to me in exchange for a cigarette about 20 years later.
Captain Jesse B. Cooper (1919-1993) of the freighter Arthur M. Anderson
Coast Guard audio requesting search & assistance
November 10, 1975
https://youtu.be/Zp9sYD7Jx1U?t=792
“I’ll turn around and give it a whirl, but God, I don’t know, I’ll give it a try…”
“Courage is being scared to death but saddling up anyways”
John Wayne