ERIC FREEDMAN
The Edmund Fitzgerald, carrying a load of iron ore, went down in Lake Superior in 1975 and became the most famous Great Lakes shipwreck thanks to a song by Gordon Lightfoot.
“The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” also provides evidence of what researchers at Michigan Technological University and the nonprofit Center for Maritime and Underwater Resource Management in Leslie say: “The relationship between shipwrecks and folk tradition, as represented in folk music, has served to preserve memory of the events.” (Wikipedia via Capitol News Service)
“The legend lives on from the Chippewa on down of the big lake they called Gitche Gumee,” singer Gordon Lightfoot wrote of Lake Superior. “The lake, it is said, never gives up her dead.”