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Of course, there were shipwrecks on the Great Lakes before the freighter Edmund Fitzgerald went down with their 29-man crew in Lake Superior during a massive storm in 1975.

In fact, the writer John Bacon says in a new book that in the hundred years before 75, at least 6,000 ships went down.

Bacon says the lakes are different.

They can be more dangerous than the ocean.

The waves are more ragged.

They're steeper.

They're shoals and submerged ridges.

And the weather on the lakes can be more erratic than almost anywhere.

The singer Gordon Lightfoot had it right in his ballad. The lake never gives up her dead

when the gales of November come early. So yes, there were other shipwrecks on the lakes. But Bacon

tells us it's because of that song, that of the thousands that went down, it's the Edmund Fitzgerald,

people remember. What's amazing about that song, it's the Edmund Fitzgerald, people remember.

What's amazing about that song is it's very unlikely creation and it's very unlikely success.

He's working on the song that night the ship goes down. November 10th, 1975, he's in his attic in Toronto, working on an old Irish sea shanty that

he first heard when he's three and a half years old.

But he's got no words.

And as the wind is howling in Toronto past his attic office, he says to himself, man, it must be

hell on Lake Superior tonight.

This guy's an experienced sailor.

He's been in Lake Superior many times.

That bond he somehow got with these sailors is what I think informs this song.

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