Less than a year after the American cargo carrier SS Edmund Fitzgerald sank in the Great Lakes in November 1975, the late Canadian singer-songwriter Gordon Lightfoot released a folk-rock ballad titled

Twenty-nine sailors drowned when the Edmund Fitzgerald went down in the Great Lakes' icy waters on Nov. 10, 1975. The ship was immortalized in a surprise hit 1976 folk ballad by Gordon Lightfoot.

The ship, commanded by renowned Great Lakes Captain Ernest McSorley, left from Superior, Wisconsin on November 9 carrying a load of iron ore to the steel mill on Zug Island, Michigan. But the next day, gale-force winds moved into the Great Lakes, and snow reduced the ship’s visibility even further.

The Door County Maritime Museum's curator and exhibits manager looks back on the story of the SS Edmund Fitzgerald, 50 years after it sunk in Lake Superior

The Great Lakes’ most famous shipwreck – and inspiration for Gordon Lightfoot’s chilling ballad – still resonates: a tale of courage, loss and the haunting pull of the inland seas

The Canadian singer-songwriter Gordon Lightfoot and the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald are inextricably linked in a way few episodes are.