Eleven years ago, Canadian musician Gordon Lightfoot told an interviewer that he was at peace with his eventual passing. “I’m fully prepared to go whenever I’m taken. . . . I’ve been almost dead a couple times, once almost for real. . . . I have more incentive to continue now because I feel I’m on borrowed time, in terms of age.” Yesterday, the borrower, age 84, had to pay up.

At the time of that interview, Lightfoot had already enjoyed a long, successful career in Canada and the United States, starting in his native country as a folk musician in the 1960s and crossing over into major international success in the 1970s with such hits as “If You Could Read My Mind,” “Sundown,” and “Carefree People.” His deep voice and acoustic arrangements made for pleasant listening but often masked the anguish behind his lyrics: “If You Could Read My Mind” was inspired by his divorce.

Americans can sometimes have a frosty relationship with our northern neighbors, and they with us. But residents of the Great Lakes states have adopted Lightfoot as a kind of regional bard, thanks largely to his most famous song, “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.” Released about a year after the 1975 sinking of the titular freighter on Lake Superior “when the gales of November came early,” the haunting, ethereal dirge took some liberties with the details of the wreck (over which Lightfoot agonized during the songwriting), but nonetheless immortalized it and the 29 sailors who went down with the ship. The song is now a kind of Great Lakes anthem, a fitting tribute to both the majesty and the might of the Midwest’s defining geographical feature. And Lightfoot welcomed its status as such, performing at Edmund Fitzgerald memorial events, forming relationships with those the perished crew left behind, and even changing the lyrics when performing the song live to make it more accurate. When Lightfoot learned that the Mariners’ Church of Detroit (what the song calls the “Maritime Sailors’ Cathedral”) was not, in fact, “musty,” he would describe it live as “rustic” instead, for example.

Superior, it’s said, never gives up her dead. But Lightfoot’s music and legacy will live on.