Nearly half a century after it first rose to No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100, Gordon Lightfoot’s 1976 masterwork “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” has finally claimed a Billboard No. 1.
According to Billboard, the song topped the Rock Digital Song Sales chart for the week ending Nov. 13, 2025 — a first for the classic. It drew 3.7 million U.S. streams and sold 5,000 downloads, up 140 percent and 328 percent week over week, as the 50th anniversary of the ship’s sinking renewed global interest.
The single also soared to No. 2 on Country Digital Song Sales and No. 4 on the all-genre Digital Song Sales chart, marking its highest U.S. chart position ever.
RELATED: Gordon Lightfoot’s Poignant Tribute: How ‘The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald’ Became His Finest Work
Released in August 1976 on Lightfoot’s Summertime Dream album, the six-minute ballad turned a brief Newsweek item about the November 1975 wreck into an enduring folk epic. “I didn’t want it to be forgotten,” Lightfoot once told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
In the song, he recounts the loss of the 730-foot freighter that vanished in a storm on Lake Superior, taking all 29 crewmen. Lines such as “The lake, it is said, never gives up her dead” and “Does anyone know where the love of God goes when the waves turn the minutes to hours?” turned tragedy into poetry — and cemented the story in popular memory.
RELATED: The Mystery of the SS Edmund Fitzgerald — What We Still Don’t Know 50 Years Later
Streaming Surge Across Generations
Billboard reports that Lightfoot’s entire catalog saw 9.1 million on-demand streams during the week of Nov. 7–13, a 67 percent gain. Both “If You Could Read My Mind” and “Sundown” returned to the Rock Digital Song Sales chart at Nos. 10 and 6, showing renewed interest from listeners born decades after the wreck.
YouTube reaction creator Polo Mars, whose video of his first listen has garnered thousands of views, said, “When he’s singing it, you can visualize what he’s saying. Some of the greatest storytellers can do that, and he’s doing it with these lyrics.” He described the final verse — “All that remains is the faces and the names of the wives and the sons and the daughters” — as “Powerful. I got chills with that.”
RELATED: 'The Untold Story of the Edmund Fitzgerald' — What a New Book Adds 50 Years On
The Legacy Lives On
Over the decades, Lightfoot became close with victims’ families and even rewrote a lyric to remove any suggestion of crew error. “There is a responsibility,” he said. He later established a scholarship fund for maritime students at Northwestern Michigan College — one that still operates today.
When Lightfoot died in 2023, the Mariners’ Church of Detroit tolled its bell 30 times — once for each of the 29 crewmen and a final time for Lightfoot himself. The church had already been immortalized in his lyric as “the Maritime Sailor’s Cathedral.”
As John U. Bacon, author of The Gales of November, told the Associated Press, “The song has made this by far the most famous Great Lakes shipwreck.” Half a century later, the music that preserved the memory of 29 lost sailors has finally sailed to the top of the charts.
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