He formed the folk duo Two Tones with fellow “Hoedown” performer Terry Whelan. The duo recorded his album Two Tones at the Village Corner live in 1962. The following year, while traveling in Europe, he hosted his BBC Television’s ‘The Country and Western Show’.
As a songwriter, Mr. Lightfoot progressed beyond hula hoops, but not by much. “There was no identity,” he told the authors of The Encyclopedia of Folk, Country and Western Music, published in 1969. before, he said.
In 1965, he made his American debut at the Town Hall in New York, appearing at the Newport Folk Festival. “Mr. Lightfoot has a rich, warm voice and dexterous guitar his technique,” Robert He Shelton wrote in The New York Times. “If he paid a little more attention to his stage personality, he could be quite popular.”
A year later, after signing Mr. Dylan and Peter, Paul and Mary’s manager, Albert Grossman, Mr. Lightfoot recorded his first solo album, Lightfoot! The album was critically acclaimed for its performances of “Early Morning Rain,” “For Lovin’ Me,” “Ribbon of Darkness,” and the 1963 Canadian hit “I’m Not Sayin’.”
Real commercial success came when he moved to Warner Bros., initially recording for the company’s Reprise label. “By the time I moved to Warner Bros. around 1970, I had reinvented myself,” he told Savannah’s Connect newspaper in 2010. By doing so, you may be able to create music that people want to listen to. “
Playing a 12-string acoustic guitar and often trembling with emotion, Mr. Lightfoot gave a discreet and direct account of his material. He sang loneliness, troubled relationships, the roaming itch, and the majestic Canadian landscape. As Canadian author Jack Batten put it, he was “a journalist, a poet, a historian, a humorist, a short story writer, and a folk recollector of bygone days.”
