Event Calendar

90 MINUTE GORDON LIGHTFOOT TRIBUTE WITH MIKE FORNES

Sponsored by the Friends of the Tamarack District Library


EXPLORE Gordon Lightfoot’s Fascinating Michigan Connections!
The links between Canadian-born singer Gordon Lightfoot and Michigan are many. Mackinaw City’s
Mike Fornes plays the role of the Canadian minstrel in a Michigan way, a sincere attempt to portray the
troubadour as if you are seeing Lightfoot live in concert. A member of the Historical Society of Michigan,
Fornes combines storytelling with Lightfoot’s hit songs to bring the music, poetry and culture of the folk-
icon to Great Lakes audiences.
Lightfoot’s songwriting often led him to the Wolverine State. His Michigan concert appearances have
been plentiful; he has crossed the state many, many times. From the 1967 song “Go Go Round,” the story
of a lonely boy “living up in Michigan,” and the painful ballad of Detroit’s 1967 racial strife, told in “Black
Day In July,” Gord wrote and sang about Michigan. The romance of 1980’s “On The High Seas” and
“Christian Island” followed the haunting “The Wreck Of The Edmund Fitzgerald,” the epic story of the 1975
Lake Superior shipwreck tragedy that claimed 29 lives. The ship’s bell is reverently displayed at the Great
Lakes Shipwreck Museum at Whitefish Point, Michigan. Fornes performs annually at the annual bell-tolling
ceremony for the Fitzgerald’s lost souls. His relationships with the crew’s surviving family members, and
Lightfoot himself, generate many first-hand accounts of the tragedy and the writing of the iconic song.
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MIKE FORNES – Appearing as Gordon Lightfoot, Live in Concert
Retired from a radio and television play-by-play career that spanned 26 years and more than 1,500
broadcasts in the National Hockey League and professional baseball, Mike’s musical interests now blend
the woods, the water and the wildlife with the North Country music you’ll hear in his shows.
His tireless research and personal interaction with Gordon Lightfoot have lead to accurate mannerisms,
speaking patterns, clothing, and of course identical guitars used by the Canadian icon on stage. Fornes
uses his program to demonstrate his love of a genre of timeless music that captured millions during the
1960s, 1970s and 1980s. His catalogue of Gord’s music includes 76 songs that he chooses from in concert.
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