A dear friend broke the news to me last night that Gordon Lightfoot, one of our mutual musical heroes, had just passed away. I hadn’t heard. To be sure she wasn’t the victim of social media bullshit, I checked the New York Times and found him on the home page. Gone at the age of 84.

I marveled at the exhaustiveness of the Times’s obituary, considering he’d only died hours before. I wondered how long the article had been on their news server in a folder marked “Any Day Now.”

Perhaps I shared the Times’s Spidey Sense when I decided to see him in concert here in Lexington late last summer. I explained to my wife that I wanted to see and hear him while he was in town, as his coming again someday was, to me, in question. (His last visit to Lexington was about 13 years prior when he announced that news of his death was highly exaggerated.)

His was a voice I’d grown to rely on during my childhood and throughout my radio-listening years. Once upon a time, I recall, the local radio station WLAP-FM (Ninety-four and a Half: The “Lifesound”) would play a couple of current hits followed by a former hit from the last 15 or so years. This was in the late 70s, so anything from the Beatles’ catalog to a singer-songwriter ballad from the previous year would extend its longevity in that third slot before going to five minutes of ad spots. This third slot is where I received my initiation to Mr. Lightfoot and his pained, soulful baritone. Hits from Sundown were probably the ones I heard the most—the title cut and “Carefree Highway.” “If You Could Read My Mind” was in heavy rotation on The Lifesound, as well as “Don Quixote,” “Pussywillows, Cat-Tails,” “Summer Side of Life,” and “The Circle Is Small,” among others. My favorite was “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” the tragic true story of the ill-fated freighter and its crew that met their fate in the raging waters of Lake Superior in the fall of 1975. Lightfoot spun the tale so deftly, and with such explicit imagery the mystery of it haunts me even now. I imagined Lightfoot standing on a jagged stone pedestal in a dark storm, playing that guitar refrain as the roiling waters punched furiously at the base.

In my mid-50s, I’ve come to know, admire, and appreciate all of Gordon Lightfoot’s records. Some tell beautiful stories of new love, old flames, and nature’s splendors, while others bear his shortcomings and warts. There’s no instance of a friend’s or my leaving a visit that isn’t followed by my humming the sad strains of “Saturday Clothes” to myself.

From the balcony of the Lexington Opera House, I heard how his voice had become shaky by the end of his show. At that moment, I recognized my good fortune of having seen and listened to a Canadian treasure when I did (though, in his humble, self-deprecating way, he would eschew such a description applied to him).

Mr. Lightfoot, your musical stories have become the soundtrack for so many people for many a decade. Though you and I never met nor communicated personally, I still feel I lost a lifelong friend last night. Goodbye, Ol’ Gord.