There is a literati in popular music, a group of people with refined musical taste, education, and judgment, and my contention that Gordon Lightfoot is at the head of it just keeps getting more plausible with every record he makes. Lightfoot imposes increasingly tougher standards upon himself, and his albums consistently add poetry to the mostly commercial form in which he works. In short, he keeps adding songs to that precious five or so per cent of everything new that is worth keeping.

Technically, his work is excellent; he's every bit the craftsman the old boys were before rock-and-roll made amateurish writing and performing the most profitable kind. Yet he is a folk artist in the sense that he works down among the people instead of in an ivory tower overlooking Broadway and Twenty-eighth Street (Tin Pan Alley, that is). He's relevant, accessible, and all that, working … in...