'It was meant to be filler': Story of Gordon Lightfoot's 'Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald'

Gordon Lightfoot and his band recorded the "little ditty" in a Toronto studio in December 1975, just weeks after the shipwreck that took 29 lives.
Newsday

Without the song, 'The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald' may have been largely forgotten

NASHOTAH, Wis. — Without Gordon Lightfoot's song, the Edmund Fitzgerald could have faded from memory along with the names of the roughly 6,500 other ships that went down in the Great Lakes before it.