Bob Dylan once named Gordon Lightfoot one of his favorite songwriters, and called the musician “somebody of rare talent” while inducting him into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame in 1986.
On Dylan’s 1970 album “Self Portrait,” he even recorded Lightfoot’s “Early Morning Rain,” and the respect was mutual — Lightfoot listened carefully to Dylan’s songs, which instilled in him “a more direct approach, getting away from the love songs,” he once said.
In an expansive career that drew from Greenwich Village folk and Laurel Canyon pop, Gordon Meredith Lightfoot Jr., who died on Monday at 84, was embraced by a diverse group of musicians: Elvis Presley and Duran Duran, Lou Rawls and the Replacements.
“Lightfoot’s is the voice of the romantic,” Geoffrey Stokes of The Village Voice wrote in 1974.
“We’re capable of sensitivity and poetry.” In the process, Lightfoot became one of the most successful recording artists of the 1970s.