Born 84 years ago in Orillia, Lightfoot became closely familiar with Muskoka in his youth and, as Cochrane pointed out, successfully translated his experiences in this far-famed district into chart-topping songs for responsive audiences in Canada and beyond our borders.
“This rock I’m sitting on is over two billion years old,” gestured Gordon with his arm during the summer of 1967, as waves rhythmically lapped a quiet Muskoka shoreline nearby. “It will probably be here another two billion years.”
Without warning, a shattering dynamite blast startled him and interrupted filming. Road-crews were reworking a section of the ancient Canadian Shield he was in mid-sentence celebrating. “That is,” startled Lightfoot blurted out in acid annoyance, “if they don’t destroy all this natural beauty first!”
The seasoned performer then paused. He took long slow breaths, and regained composure. He nodded and the cameraman resumed filming. “I remember these rocks,” continued the becalmed 29-year-old, “from a long time ago. A lot of the images in my songs are drawn from this kind of country.”
That year Canadians enthrallingly celebrated 100 years of Confederation, a modest timespan in the context of Lightfoot’s “billions of years” message. The CBC cameraman was recording the creator of soulful ballads and heartfelt love songs describe, for a national television audience, how he drew inspiration from Muskoka.
“This is part of the Canadian Shield, this rock. It starts about four miles south of here and you don’t see any more of it going south after that. I have been a lot of places and I’ve seen some nice country, but I don’t think any of it will stay with me or impress me as much as this country here in Muskoka. It is the country I grew up in.”
During his 1950s summers, Gordon Meredith Lightfoot Jr. drove a Wagg’s Laundry delivery van north from Orillia, a guitar his constant companion, making the rounds of Muskoka’s resort hotels to exchange clean bed sheets, towels, and table linens for soiled ones to be laundered. “Long before he was famous,” wrote Kirsten Worley in her 2019 memoir describing Bala Bay Manor and its mostly American vacationers, “Lightfoot would often sit in the Manor lounge and play guitar for the guests.”
Then, driving farther north to Lake Rosseau, the touring troubadour arrived at Windermere House to swap more laundry and check in on Ruth Crouchly, a welcoming waitress in the summer resort’s coffee shop. “Gordon would sometimes steal an hour from his summer job to serenade teenagers down on the docks,” she fondly recalled, or create music with “local lads who played guitar.”
For Lightfoot and thousands of others, Muskoka’s ancient rocks, fresh lakes, green pines, and particular people fashioned a hedonistic paradise. In his own words, he sometimes “stole away in the noonday sun,” or after “the mill shut down,” to Bill Skinner’s Windermere farm and entered a “wonderland in love among the flowers where time got lost.” Summertime loving meant a young couple could “rendezvous” and “live like a king and a queen in a one-horse way” down a road by a butternut grove and pond. These lyrics, a few years later, would convey Lightfoot’s rich Muskoka imagery to millions of North Americans when his hit “Summertime Dream” soared up the charts.
In someone born and raised in adjacent Simcoe County, Lightfoot’s Muskoka adventures awakened in him awe for the Shield’s magnetic presence. Lured north from Simcoe’s warm-water mud-bottom lakes, the athletic and sensitive youth could swim the invigorating rock-rimmed waters of Muskoka, hike its green-canopied back roads, clamour up its massive outcroppings, gaze across its primal landscapes, and loose himself in Time…
When the green dark forest
Was too silent to be real
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