OrilliaMatters welcomes letters to the editor at [email protected] or via the website. Please include your full name, daytime phone number and address (for verification of authorship, not publication). The following letter is in response to a letter about Gordon Lightfoot memorabilia being put up for auction, published Oct. 28.
I’ll preface this with: Mr. Lightfoot must have approved the auction. But I question whether his intention included selling serious Lightfoot artifacts.
He influenced Bob Dylan, who has his own museum.
At 72, with 50 years of songwriting behind me, I can’t underestimate this artist’s influence in shaping what I know about song structure/melody/intent and word usage. I’ve a version in my music YouTube site of It’s Worth Believin’, and tried to match it to his structure. What a great voice, and writer. America has no one like him other than maybe James Taylor.
Gordon, in his comments, seemed down on himself late in his life for writing certain songs that apparently ‘hurt’ people close to him. But if artists all based their work on fear and/or regret, well, that’s why many personal letters of great writers have been destroyed. And no art would be created.
I’m hoping he didn’t, at life’s end, look down on his works to the degree of allowing a wholesale auction (perhaps to ‘make it up’ to certain close ones). If he did, I would hope his closest ones would step in and judiciously save his essential memorabilia and important works for a Gordon Lightfoot museum.
Daniel Lawton
Sterling Heights, Mich.
