Canadian Railroad Trilogy

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

“Canadian Railroad Trilogy”
Single by Gordon Lightfoot
from the album The Way I Feel
Released 1967
Recorded 1966 (rerecorded 1975)
Genre Folk
Length 6:22 (rerecorded 7:04)
Label United Artists
Writer(s) Gordon Lightfoot

The "Canadian Railroad Trilogy" is a song by Gordon Lightfoot that describes the building of the Canadian Pacific Railway.

This song was commissioned by the CBC for a special broadcast on January 1, 1967. It appeared on Lightfoot's The Way I Feel album later in the same year along with the song "Crossroads," a shorter song of similar theme. The structure of the song was patterned after Gibson & Camp's "Civil War Trilogy" (famously recorded by The Limeliters on the 1963 live album Our Men In San Francisco), with a slow tempo section in the middle and faster paced sections at the beginning and end. In the first section, the song picks up speed like a locomotive building up a head of steam.

While Lightfoot's song echoes the optimism of the railroad age, it also chronicles the cost in sweat and blood of building "an iron road runnin' from the sea to the sea."

Lightfoot re-recorded the track on his 1975 compilation album, Gord's Gold.

According to Lightfoot, Pierre Berton said to him, "You know, Gord, you said as much in that song as I said in my book." Berton was referring to his two books about the building of the railway across Canada, The National Dream and The Last Spike.

In 2001, Gordon Lightfoot's "Canadian Railroad Trilogy" was honoured as one of the Canadian MasterWorks by the Audio-Visual Preservation Trust of Canada.

The song has been covered by John Mellencamp and George Hamilton IV, among others. James Keelaghan performed the song on the Lightfoot tribute album, Beautiful. In the summer of 2004, the song was performed by that year's Canadian Idol Top 6.

[edit] External links

v • d • e
Gordon Lightfoot discography
Main albums
Lightfoot! (1966) • The Way I Feel (1967) • Did She Mention My Name (1968) • Back Here on Earth (1968) • Sunday Concert (1969) • Sit Down Young Stranger (1970) • Summer Side of Life (1971) • Don Quixote (1972) • Old Dan's Records (1972) • Sundown (1974) • Cold on the Shoulder (1975) • Summertime Dream (1976) • Endless Wire (1978) • Dream Street Rose (1980) • Shadows (1982) • Salute (1983) • East of Midnight (1986) • Waiting for You (1993) • A Painter Passing Through (1998) • Harmony (2004)
Main Compilations
Gord's Gold (1975) • Gord's Gold, Vol. 2 (1988) • Songbook (1999) • Complete Greatest Hits (2002)
Notable Singles
"Canadian Railroad Trilogy" (1967) • "If You Could Read My Mind" (1970) • "Sundown" (1974) • "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald" (1976)