Canadian Railroad Trilogy

Infobox Single
Name = Canadian Railroad Trilogy


Artist = Gordon Lightfoot
from Album = The Way I Feel
B-side =
Released = 1967
Format =
Recorded = 1966 (rerecorded 1975)
Genre = Folk
Length = 6:22 (rerecorded 7:04)
Label = United Artists
Writer = Gordon Lightfoot
Producer =
Certification =
Chart position =
Last single =
This single =
Next single =

The "Canadian Railroad Trilogy" is a song by Gordon Lightfoot that describes the building of the Canadian Pacific Railway.

This song was commissioned by the CBC for a special broadcast on January 1, 1967. It appeared on Lightfoot's "The Way I Feel" album later in the same year along with the song "Crossroads," a shorter song of similar theme. The structure of the song, with a slow tempo section in the middle and faster paced sections at the beginning and end, was patterned more or less opposite to Gibson & Camp's "Civil War Trilogy" (famously recorded by The Limeliters on the 1963 live album "Our Men In San Francisco"). In the first section, the song picks up speed like a locomotive building up a head of steam.

While Lightfoot's song echoes the optimism of the railroad age, it also chronicles the cost in sweat and blood of building "an iron road runnin' from the sea to the sea."

Lightfoot re-recorded the track on his 1975 compilation album, "Gord's Gold".

According to Lightfoot, Pierre Berton said to him, "You know, Gord, you said as much in that song as I said in my book." Berton was referring to his two books about the building of the railway across Canada, "The National Dream" and "The Last Spike".

In 2001, Gordon Lightfoot's "Canadian Railroad Trilogy" was honoured as one of the Canadian MasterWorks by the Audio-Visual Preservation Trust of Canada.

The song has been covered by John Mellencamp and George Hamilton IV, among others. James Keelaghan performed the song on the Lightfoot tribute album, "Beautiful". In the summer of 2004, the song was performed by that year's "Canadian Idol" Top 6.

External links

* [http://archives.cbc.ca/IDC-1-68-743-4651/arts_entertainment/gordon_lightfoot/clip2 CBC video clip]
* [http://www.avtrust.ca/mw/mw.php?display&en&37 AVTrust.ca - Gordon Lightfoot's "Canadian Railroad Trilogy", MasterWorks recipient 2001 (video clip)]