Canada prematurely mourns Gordon Lightfoot for a little while

Much of Canada was dismayed today to hear the news that folk music star Gordon Lightfoot had died.

Fortunately for Canadians, Lightfoot lives to croon another day. “Several prominent news sites in the CanWest chain” were duped by the hoax:

At 2:40 p.m. EST, for instance, the Vancouver Sun’s Web site posted a brief announcing Lightfoot’s death at 71, quoting fellow singer Ronnie Hawkins as saying his old friend had passed away last night. By 2:52, it was removed from the Web site.

“Gord’s alive as far as I know, unless something happened in the last half hour,” said Anne Leibold of Lightfoot’s Early Morning Productions. “I talked to Gord a half hour ago. He’s fine.”

Twitter, the source of many premature death rumors, has been cited as a possible source for the “RIP Gordon Lightfoot” meme. Lightfoot dismissed rumors of his death as premature:

“I haven’t had so much airplay on my music in weeks,” he joked on CP24 this afternoon after confirming he was very much alive.

“Everything is fine,” he said in an interview. “We are doing Casino Rama. We have an opening there and numerous other things. We’re starting back into our tour at the end of this month. We’ll be doing many things.”

So Canadians, despite what you may have heard via several Canadian news outlets, Gordon Lightfoot is not dead.

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