This article summarizes and analyzes Gordon Lightfoot's famous song about the sinking of the SS Edmund Fitzgerald. It examines several details from the song and verifies them against historical facts. The song provides an accurate depiction of key details like the ship's cargo capacity and size. However, it overstates the experience of the crew, some of whom were quite young. Overall, the article finds Lightfoot took some poetic license but still captured the essence of the tragedy in a way that immortalized it in popular culture.