In Memory Of ...

[Pacy]

Al Jaffee
March 13, 1921 – April 10, 2023

Al Jaffee, Inventive Cartoonist at Mad Magazine, Dies at 102

For 55 years he created the fold-in (as opposed to, say, Playboy’s fold-out), giving readers a satirical double-take on whatever was going on in the news or elsewhere.

Al Jaffee, a cartoonist who folded in when the trend in magazine publishing was to fold out, thereby creating one of Mad magazine’s most recognizable and enduring features, died on Monday in Manhattan. He was 102. His death, at a hospital, was caused by multi-system organ failure, his granddaughter Fani Thomson said.

It was in 1964 that Mr. Jaffee created the Mad Fold-In, an illustration-with-text feature on the inside of the magazine’s back cover that seemed at first glance to deliver a straightforward message. When the page was folded in thirds, however, both illustration and text were transformed into something entirely different and unexpected, often with a liberal-leaning or authority-defying message.

For instance, the fold-in from the November 2001 issue asked, “What mind-altering experience is leaving more and more people out of touch with reality?” The unfolded illustration showed a crowd of people popping and snorting various substances. But when folded, the image transformed into the Fox News anchor desk.

The first fold-in, in the April 1964 issue (No. 86), mocked Elizabeth Taylor’s marital record. (Unfolded, she is with Richard Burton; folded, she has traded him in for another guy.) No one, especially Mr. Jaffee, expected that fold-in to be followed by hundreds more.

“It was supposed to be really a one-shot,” he said in a 1993 interview with The Kansas City Star. “But because of the overwhelming demand of three or four of my relatives, it went on to a second time, and on and on.”

That “on and on” turned into a career that included other memorable contributions to Mad, like a “Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions” feature, and that in 2007 won him cartooning’s top honor, the Reuben Award, putting him in the company of Charles M. Schulz, Mort Walker, Gary Larson, Matt Groening and other luminaries of the trade.

With the fold-in, Mad was turning an industry trend on its head. “Playboy, of course, was doing its centerfold,” Mr. Jaffee told The Star. “Life, in almost every issue, was doing a three- or four-page gatefold showing how dinosaurs traversed the land, that kind of thing. Even Sports Illustrated had fold-outs.”

Mad went in the other direction, literally, although Mr. Jaffee said in a 2008 interview with The New York Times that he initially didn’t expect the magazine’s editor, Al Feldstein, and publisher, William M. Gaines, to go for the notion. “I have this idea,” he recalled telling them. “I think it’s a funny idea, but I know you’re not going to buy it. But I’m going to show it to you anyway. And you’re not going to buy it because it mutilates the magazine.”

The men did buy it, and then asked for more, and the inside back cover quickly became Mr. Jaffee’s turf. Although other regular Mad features changed artists over the years, no one but Mr. Jaffee drew a fold-in for 55 years.

In mid-2019, the magazine announced that it would stop printing issues full of new material, except for year-end specials. In the special issue that appeared at the end of 2019, the cartoonist Johnny Sampson, with Mr. Jaffee’s blessing, became the only other artist to draw a fold-in.

Almost as long-lived as the fold-in was “Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions,” a running compendium of the kind of retorts that people are never quite quick enough or brave enough to toss off in the heat of the moment. “Is it okay to smoke?” asks a man sitting directly under a no-smoking sign in an office. “Yes,” answers the receptionist, “the signs don’t apply to illiterates.”

In real life, however, Mr. Jaffee was the opposite of a smart aleck: a genteel, unassuming man whose in-person humor was delivered with a wink, not a cudgel. He adorned each of his drawings with a tiny self-portrait, a kind of logo, with his name scrawled in his hair.

“It’s not that Al does not have an ego,” Sam Viviano, Mad’s art director, said in 2008. “You don’t draw your face into everything you do without some kind of an ego. But it’s a really healthy ego.”

Abraham Jaffee (he later legally changed his name to Allan) was born on March 13, 1921, in Savannah, Ga. His parents, both Jewish, had immigrated from Lithuania, his father, Morris, arriving in New York in 1905 and his mother, Mildred, in 1913.

Morris Jaffee quickly adjusted to the pace of early-20th-century America, starting as a tailor in New York and then taking a job in retailing in Savannah. Mildred, though, was never comfortable in the United States, had some strict religious views and was somewhat unstable, leaving young Al with many traumatic memories.

“If you were to see some naked guy sitting on top of a mountain somewhere in India with pins stuck into his body, how would you know whether the guy was nuts or religious?” Mr. Jaffee recalled in “Al Jaffee’s Mad Life” (2010), a biography written by Mary-Lou Weisman and illustrated by Mr. Jaffee. “My mother was both.”

When Mr. Jaffee was 6, his mother threw their domestic life into turmoil by taking him and his three younger brothers back to her shtetl in Lithuania. The visit was supposed to last a month, but it stretched into a tug of war between the two parents that lasted six years, most of which Al spent in Lithuania living in what he described as 19th-century conditions. But there was a silver lining of sorts: Morris Jaffee sent the boys packages of the Sunday comics from American newspapers, and Al began to find his artistic talent.

His father finally brought him back to the United States for good when Al was 12. On the strength of his artistic ability, he was admitted to the first class of the High School of Music and Art in New York. His fellow students there included several who would later start Mad, but that was still years in the future when he graduated in 1940, directly into the golden age of comics.

“I came onto the scene when they were buying original material, and in a burst of creative who knows what, I created Inferior Man, which was a shameless rip-off of Superman,” Mr. Jaffee said in the 2008 interview. “My basic premise was that he fought crime and evil, but if it became too much for him to handle, he would sneak into some phone booth and change into civilian clothes.”

Will Eisner, then emerging as a force in the comics industry, bought the feature, and Mr. Jaffee went on to do work for Stan Lee, another major name in comics, as well. He began contributing to Mad in 1955, three years after it was founded by Mr. Gaines and Harvey Kurtzman, Mr. Jaffee’s former high school classmate.

When Mr. Kurtzman left Mad in 1956 to try other ventures, including the short-lived magazine Humbug, Mr. Jaffee followed. By 1958, he was back at Mad to stay. He was never on the magazine’s staff, however; all of his work was as a freelancer.

His early Mad contributions were as a writer, though he was honing his illustrating skills in other projects, like “Tall Tales,” a syndicated comic strip he drew from 1957 to 1963. Eventually Mad made him a writer-artist, and with the fold-in and “Snappy Answers” (a feature that first appeared in October 1965) he became one of the stable of regulars who set Mad’s style.

In 1977, Mr. Jaffee married Joyce Revenson, who died in January 2020. His first marriage, to Ruth Ahlquist, whom he had met and married while in the Army in World War II, ended in divorce.

He is survived by two children from his first marriage, Richard Jaffee and Deborah Fishman; two stepdaughters, Tracey and Jody Revenson; five grandchildren; one step-granddaughter; and three great-grandchildren. Mr. Jaffee lived in Manhattan but for years had split his time between his home there and another in Provincetown, Mass.

His Mad work was republished in countless books, many with self-deprecating titles like “Mad’s Vastly Overrated Al Jaffee.” In 2008, Harry N. Abrams published a collection of his “Tall Tales” strips. In 2011, Chronicle Books came out with “The Mad Fold-In Collection: 1964-2010,” a hardcover boxed set.

The impact of Mr. Jaffee’s fold-in gimmick was evident in many imitations and homages over the years, like Beck’s fold-in-themed video of his song “Girl” in 2005. Mr. Jaffee said he would often receive requests from high schools that wanted to create a fold-in for the school paper, mistakenly thinking they needed his permission.

“I write back and say, You have my blessings, go ahead and do it,” he said in 2008. “But no one can copyright folding a piece of paper.”

In 2020, Mad celebrated Mr. Jaffee with a “Special All Jaffee Issue,” full of his work. It was to mark his formal retirement, and it included a fold-in that he had created in 2014 in anticipation of that eventuality.

It starts with an image of Alfred E. Neuman, Mad’s mascot, amid assorted stores that have all posted going out of business signs, under the headline “Economy Collapsing! Unemployed Starving!” But when it was folded in, a new message appeared: “No More New Jaffee Fold-Ins.” Mr. Jaffee’s blissful image is seen hovering above the cityscape.

Source: The New York Times

[pelham456]

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[ghost2509]

Sharon Acker, actress who appeared in Star Trek and played Lee Marvin’s wife in Point Blank – obituary



The Telegraph
Telegraph Obituaries
April 24, 2023

Sharon Acker, the Canadian actress, who has died aged 87, is best known to sci-fi fans as Odona in the 1969 Star Trek episode “The Mark of Gideon” and as the courageous Anne in Galactica 1980, a reboot of the popular 1970s series, Battlestar Galactica. Away from sci-fi she played Lee Marvin’s ill-fated wife in John Boorman’s hardboiled and highly regarded crime thriller Point Blank.

Sharon Eileen Acker was born in Toronto on April 2 1935, and was adopted when she was nine. She graduated from a four-year commercial art course at Northern Collegiate Vocational School in the city in 1953.

She made her acting debut around the same time with minor television roles, most notably in Anne of Green Gables (1956). She then joined the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in Ontario, securing a small part in Henry V with a pre-Captain Kirk William Shatner in the title role.

When the Festival travelled to England, Sharon Acker elected to stay. “I had to give it a shot,” she said in 2005. She was rewarded with the part of Christine Callaghan, principal love interest of the hero Jim Dixon (Ian Carmichael) in the 1957 adaptation of Kingsley Amis’s novel Lucky Jim, produced by the Boulting brothers John and Roy and co-starring Terry-Thomas. She was, wrote the Telegraph reviewer “R. P. M. G.”, “a very stunning newcomer”.

But despite favourable column inches, she secretly married her Canadian sweetheart Ronald MacDonald and returned to Canada – angering the Boultings, who had offered her a seven-year contract. “It is a great pity Miss Acker has chosen marriage and babies,” Roy Boulting told reporters, “as she is the most promising, the most talented young actress we’ve found in quite a while.”

Back home in Canada, she played Lady Macduff in a five-part CBC production of Macbeth (1961), featuring Sean Connery, who was shortly to become the biggest film star in the world as James Bond. “He was dreamy but something of a meanie,” she recalled. “Let’s say Sean wasn’t one to offer to buy lunch.”

Besides her acting, Sharon Acker did some lucrative modelling work, and by 1967 she had found her way to Hollywood, where she was signed by John Boorman for Point Blank, playing the unfaithful wife of Lee Marvin’s gangster, Walker.

Two years later she was Odona in Star Trek, playing an inhabitant of a severely overpopulated planet planning to introduce a virus to bring down the numbers; naturally, as the episode’s leading lady, she shared a passionate clinch with William Shatner as Captain Kirk.

The same year she played a divorcee having an affair with a married man (Arthur Hill) in Don’t Let the Angels Fall, the first Canadian feature-length film to play in competition at the Cannes Film Festival, despite mixed reviews and mediocre box office back home.

For the next two decades Sharon Acker’s career consisted largely of one-off appearances in such programmes as Alias Smith and Jones, Mission: Impossible, McMillan and Wife, The Streets of San Francisco, The Rockford Files and Murder, She Wrote, and she was in several episodes each of the soaps Days of Our Lives and The Young and the Restless.

In 1973 she was in all 15 episodes of The New Perry Mason as the titular defence lawyer’s secretary Della Street (played in the original series by Barbara Hale). It was cancelled mid-series after failing to overtake NBC’s The Wonderful World of Disney and ABC’s The FBI in the Sunday-night ratings.

She retired in 1994 to concentrate on her art, particularly sculpture. She settled back home in Ontario with her second husband, the actor and producer Peter J Elkington. He died in 2001, and she is survived by two daughters, including the casting director Kim Everest.

[Pacy]

Harry Belafonte
March 1, 1927 - April 25, 2023

Harry Belafonte, Calypso King Who Worked for African-American Rights, Dies at 96

Singer, actor, producer and activist Harry Belafonte, who spawned a calypso craze in the U.S. with his music and blazed new trails for African-American performers, has died of congestive heart failure at his Manhattan home. He was 96.
An award-winning Broadway performer and a versatile recording and concert star of the ’50s, the lithe, handsome Belafonte became one of the first Black leading men in Hollywood. He later branched into production work on theatrical films and telepics.

As his career stretched into the new millennium, his commitment to social causes never took a back seat to his professional work.

An intimate of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Belafonte was an important voice in the ’60s civil rights movement, and he later embarked on charitable activities on behalf of underdeveloped African nations. He was an outspoken opponent of South Africa’s apartheid policies.

Among the most honored performers of his era, Belafonte won two Grammy Awards (and the Recording Academy’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 2000), a Tony and an Emmy. He also received the Motion Picture Academy’s Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award at the Governors Awards ceremony in 2014.

Harold George Belafonte Jr. was born in New York but was sent to live with his grandmother in Jamaica at age 5, returning to attend high school in New York. But Jamaica’s indigenous calypso and mento would supply crucial material for his early musical repertoire.

After serving in the war, Belafonte gravitated to the New York theatrical scene. An early mentor was the famed Black actor, singer and activist Paul Robeson. He studied acting with Erwin Piscator and attended Broadway shows — on a single ticket he would hand off at intermission — with another struggling young actor, Sidney Poitier. Like Poitier, he performed at Harlem’s American Negro Theater.

Belafonte first made his mark, however, as a nightclub singer. Initially working in a pop and jazz vein, Belafonte began his singing career at New York’s Royal Roost and made his recording debut in 1949 on Roost Records. He soon developed a growing interest in American folk music.

A national tour and dates at New York’s Village Vanguard and Blue Angel followed. A scout for MGM spotted him at the latter venue and, following a screen test, Belafonte secured a role opposite Dorothy Dandridge in “Bright Road” (1953).

The same year, Belafonte made his Rialto debut in the revue “John Murray Anderson’s Almanac,” for which he received the Tony for best performance by a featured actor in a musical.

Ironically, while Belafonte was cast as a lead in Otto Preminger’s 1954 musical “Carmen Jones” — based on Oscar Hammerstein II’s Broadway adaptation of Bizet’s opera “Carmen” — his singing voice was dubbed by opera singer LeVern Hutcherson. Belafonte would soon explode in his own right as a pop singer.

He made his RCA Records debut in 1954 with “Mark Twain and Other Folk Favorites”; he had performed the titular folk song with his guitarist Millard Thomas in his Tony-winning Broadway turn. The 1956 LP “Belafonte,” featuring a similar folk repertoire, spent six weeks at No. 1.

Those collections were a mere warm-up to “Calypso.” The 1956 album sparked a nationwide calypso craze, spent a staggering 31 weeks at No. 1 and remains one of the four longest-running chart-toppers in history. It spawned Belafonte’s signature hit, “Banana Boat Song (Day-O),” which topped the singles chart for five weeks. A parody of that ubiquitous number by Stan Freberg reached No. 25 in 1957. Director Tim Burton employed the tune to bright effect in his 1988 comedy “Beetlejuice.”

Belafonte would cut five more top-five albums — including two live sets recorded at Carnegie Hall — through 1961. His 1960 collection “Swing Dat Hammer” received a Grammy as best ethnic or traditional folk album; he scored the same award for 1965’s “An Evening With Belafonte/Makeba,” a collaboration with South African folk artist Miriam Makeba.

He also supplied early employment for a future folk icon: His 1962 album “Midnight Special” featured harmonica work by Bob Dylan.

A frequent guest on TV variety shows, Belafonte became the first Black performer to garner an Emmy with his 1959 special “Tonight With Belafonte.”

Belafonte made his first steps into film production with two features he toplined: end-of-the-world drama “The World, the Flesh, and the Devil” (1959) and the heist picture “Odds Against Tomorrow” (1960). However, discontent with the roles he was being offered, he would remain absent from the big screen for the remainder of the ’60s and busied himself with recording and international touring as his involvement in the civil rights movement deepened.

Closely associated with clergyman-activist King, Belafonte provided financial support to the civil rights leader and his family. He also funded the Freedom Riders and the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee and was a key figure in the organization of the historic March on Washington of August 1963.

The racial tumult of the ’60s hit close to home: In 1968 he became the center of a furor when he appeared as a guest star on an NBC special hosted by British pop singer Petula Clark. During a performance of an anti-war ballad, Clark clutched Belafonte’s arm. Doyle Lott, VP for sponsor Chrysler-Plymouth, was present at the taping and demanded the number be excised, saying the “interracial touching” might offend Southern viewers. But Clark, who owned the show, put her foot down and the show aired as recorded, while exec Lott was fired by the automaker.

Belafonte returned to feature films in 1970 in the whimsical “The Angel Levine” alongside Zero Mostel. He co-starred with old friend Poitier in the comedies “Buck and the Preacher” (1972) and “Uptown Saturday Night” (1974), both directed by Poitier.

His acting appearances would be sporadic for the remainder of his career. Notably, he appeared opposite John Travolta in “White Man’s Burden” (1995), an alternate-universe fantasy-drama about racism; Robert Altman’s ensemble period drama “Kansas City” (1996); and “Bobby” (2006), Emilio Estevez’s account of Sen. Robert Kennedy’s 1968 assassination.

In 1985, Belafonte’s activism and musicianship intertwined when he helped organize the recording session for “We Are the World,” the all-star benefit single devoted to alleviating African famine. His appearance on that huge hit led to “Paradise in Gazankulu” (1988), his first studio recording in more than 10 years.

His latter-day production work included the 1984 hip-hop drama “Beat Street” and the 2000 miniseries “Parting the Waters,” based on historian Taylor Branch’s biography of Martin Luther King Jr.

In 2002, “The Long Road to Freedom: An Anthology of Black Music,” an immense collection of African and African-American music recorded and compiled by Belafonte over the course of a decade and originally set for release by RCA in the ’70s, was finally released as a five-CD set on Universal’s Buddha imprint. It garnered three Grammy nominations.

In later years, Belafonte remained as outspoken as ever, and his views sometimes courted controversy. He was a foe of South African apartheid, opposed the U.S.’s Cuban embargo and denounced George W. Bush’s military incursion into Iraq.

Belafonte was the son of a Jamaican housekeeper and a Martiniquan chef, spending the early and late parts of his childhood in Harlem but the crucial middle period in Jamaica. He enlisted in the Navy in 1944; during his service, he encountered the writing of W.E.B. DuBois, co-founder of the NAACP and a key influence.

He was accorded the Kennedy Center Honor in 1989 and the National Medal of the Arts in 1994.

Belafonte published his memoir “My Song,” written with Michael Shnayerson, in 2011. Susanne Rostock’s biographical documentary “Sing Your Song” was released in early 2012.

He is survived by his third wife Pamela; daughters Shari, Adrienne and Gina; son David; stepchildren Sarah and Lindsey; and eight grandchildren.

Source: Variety.com.

[Indicboi95]

Jerry Springer

http://msn.com/en-us/news/us/je...e2e7cbf85&ei=5

[Dan2018]

Jerry Springer, R.I.P.

[ghost2509]

Ron Faber has died.
The Exorcist star dies

msn.com
Story by BANG Showbiz
Apr. 27, 2023

The Obie Award-winning stage actor - who was best known for a brief but vital role in 'The Exorcist' - passed away from lung cancer at the age of 90 on March 26, Deadline reports.

Although he died a month ago, Ron's death has only just been announced and his friend and colleague David Patrick Kelly remembered him on Facebook as a “great artist and gentleman with a wonderful voice and laugh.”

Ron had won an Obie Award for his 1972 performance in 'And They Put Handcuffs on Flowers', an off-Broadway show, when he was spotted by director William Friedkin and offered the role of Chuck in the 1973 horror classic.

Chuck is the assistant director of 'Crash Course', the movie-within-a-movie in which Chris MacNeil (Ellen Burstyn) stars, and he most memorably has a scene where he informs the actress that the film's director, Burke Dennings (Jack MacGowran) has been found dead.

In addition, Ron also added some of the deeper, guttural vocal sounds that were layered into Mercedes McCambridge's recordings as the voice of the demon in order to suggest there was more than one presence inside Regan (Linda Blair).

The actor previously admitted he was annoyed that this contribution to the movie went unknown.

He told ComingSoon in 2016: “Friedkin told me that there were three people doing the voice of the demon for the film.

“He was determined to make sure that the devil did not sound like just one person, he wanted it to sound like a legion of voices.

"So he had Mercedes McCambridge do the core part of the voice of the demon, and myself and someone else, and I never got any credit for it. That was my shock when I saw the movie – Mercedes McCambridge got the sole credit on the end film, so that p***** me off...
“There were things from that recording that I was certain made it into the final film, and these were mostly sounds that I made – deep guttural moaning and groaning. The sound design people on the film played with the voices, mine included, and did the overlapping and so forth. Mercedes was the person responsible for all the wheezing! She was a well known asthmatic!”

Ron - whose other credits include roles in 'Kojak', 'The Edge of Night', 'Law and Order' and 'Third Watch' - is survived by his wife, Kathleen Moore Faber, and children Hart, Raymond, Elise Manuel, and Anthony. Another son, Eric, died before his father.

[ghost2509]

Canadian folk singer Gordon Lightfoot dies at 84

AP
yahoo.com
May 1, 2023

Gordon Lightfoot, Canada's legendary folk singer-songwriter whose hits including “Early Morning Rain” and “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald" told a tale of Canadian identity that was exported worldwide, died on Monday. He was 84.

Representative Victoria Lord said the musician died at a Toronto hospital. His cause of death was not immediately available.

Considered one of the most renowned voices to emerge from Toronto’s Yorkville folk club scene in the 1960s, Lightfoot went on to record 20 studio albums and pen hundreds of songs, including “Carefree Highway” and “Sundown.”

Once called a “rare talent” by Bob Dylan, dozens of artists have covered his work, including Elvis Presley, Barbra Streisand, Harry Belafonte, Johnny Cash, Anne Murray, Jane’s Addiction and Sarah McLachlan.

Most of his songs are deeply autobiographical with lyrics that probe his own experiences in a frank manner and explore issues surrounding the Canadian national identity.

His 1975 song “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” chronicled the demise of a Great Lakes ore freighter, and 1966’s “Canadian Railroad Trilogy” depicted the construction of the railway.

“I simply write the songs about where I am and where I’m from,” he once said. “I take situations and write poems about them.”

Often described as a poetic storyteller, Lightfoot remained keenly aware of his cultural influence. It was a role he took very seriously.

“I just like to stay there and be a part of the totem pole and look after the responsibilities I’ve acquired over the years,” he said in a 2001 interview.

While Lightfoot’s parents recognized his musical talents early on, he didn’t set out to become a renowned balladeer.

He began singing in his church choir and dreamed of becoming a jazz musician. At age 13, the soprano won a talent contest at the Kiwanis Music Festival, held at Toronto’s Massey Hall.

“I remember the thrill of being in front of the crowd,” Lightfoot said in a 2018 interview. “It was a stepping stone for me...”

The appeal of those early days stuck and in high school, his barbershop quartet, The Collegiate Four, won a CBC talent competition. He strummed his first guitar in 1956 and began to dabble in songwriting in the months that followed. Perhaps distracted by his taste for music, he flunked algebra the first time. After taking the class again, he graduated in 1957.

By then, Lightfoot had already penned his first serious composition — “The Hula Hoop Song,” inspired by the popular kids’ toy that was sweeping the culture. Attempts to sell the song went nowhere so at 18, he headed to the U.S. to study music for a year. The trip was funded in part by money saved from a job delivering linens to resorts around his hometown.

Life in Hollywood wasn’t a good fit, however, and it wasn’t long before Lightfoot returned to Canada. He pledged to move to Toronto to pursue his musical ambitions, taking any job available, including a position at a bank before landing a gig as a square dancer on CBC’s “Country Hoedown.”

His first gig was at Fran’s Restaurant, a downtown family-owned diner that warmed to his folk sensibilities. It was there he met fellow musician Ronnie Hawkins.

The singer was living with a few buddies in a condemned building in Yorkville, then a bohemian area where future stars including Neil Young and Joni Mitchell would learn their trade at smoke-filled clubs.

Lightfoot made his popular radio debut with the single ”(Remember Me) I’m the One” in 1962, which led to a number of hit songs and partnerships with other local musicians. When he started playing the Mariposa Folk Festival in his hometown of Orillia, Ontario that same year, Lightfoot forged a relationship that made him the festival’s most loyal returning performer.

By 1964, he was garnering positive word-of-mouth around town and audiences were starting to gather in growing numbers. By the next year, Lightfoot’s song “I’m Not Sayin’” was a hit in Canada, which helped spread his name in the United States.

A couple of covers by other artists didn’t hurt either. Marty Robbins’ 1965 recording of “Ribbon of Darkness” reached No. 1 on U.S. country charts, while Peter, Paul and Mary took Lightfoot’s composition, “For Lovin’ Me,” into the U.S. Top 30. The song, which Dylan once said he wished he’d recorded, has since been covered by hundreds of other musicians.

That summer, Lightfoot performed at the Newport Folk Festival, the same year Dylan rattled audiences when he shed his folkie persona by playing an electric guitar.

As the folk music boom came to an end in the late 1960s, Lightfoot was already making his transition to pop music with ease.

In 1971, he made his first appearance on the Billboard chart with “If You Could Read My Mind." It reached No. 5 and has since spawned scores of covers.

Lightfoot’s popularity peaked in the mid-1970s when both his single and album, “Sundown,” topped the Billboard charts, his first and only time doing so.

During his career, Lightfoot collected 12 Juno Awards, including one in 1970 when it was called the Gold Leaf.

In 1986, he was inducted into the Canadian Recording Industry Hall of Fame, now the Canadian Music Hall of Fame. He received the Governor General’s award in 1997 and was ushered into the Canadian Country Music Hall Of Fame in 2001.

[KDO]

Gordon Lightfoot
Gordon Meredith Lightfoot Jr
November 17, 1938 - May 1, 2023

Gordon Lightfoot, Hitmaking Singer-Songwriter, is Dead at 84 - NYT

Gordon Lightfoot, Canadian Folk-Rock Troubadour, Dead at 84 - RollingStone

Gordon Lightfoot, the Canadian bard, wrote the tune for a nation’s identity - Toronto Globe and Mail

Gordon Lightfoot - Wikipedia

*

[lolita22]

Thanks for all the wonderful memories you have posted. I remember hearing "If You Could Read My Mind." When I was around 12. Hauntingly sad. I still consider it in the top 50 songs of all time. I can't believe it only went to fifth on the charts that year. A true Poet was Gordon. Never to be forgotten!