Cosmopolitan Hick

Greek bard, Provencal troubadour or Negro blues man, the folk singer has always played the role of a romantic wanderer. Fashioning his songs from real or imagined experiences along the way, he has sung for his supper and moved on. But lately, that style has been in danger of fading. The modern bards team up with commercial rock groups, or pa rade into well-publicized seclusion, or go wandering in their own psyches in stead of the countryside.

Canada's Gordon Lightfoot, 29, is one up-to-date folk singer who maintains the old tradition. He comes onstage in a battered buckskin jacket, as if he didn't plan to stay long enough to peel down to shirtsleeves. His mellow bari tone has a countrified accent that, no matter where he is, seems to come from somewhere else. And most of his 130 songs are plaints of a latter-day drifter. "Movin' is my stock in trade," he sings in For Lovin' Me. In Early Morning Rain, broke and marooned in an airport far from home, he sees a "big 707" on the runway,

But I'm stuck here in the grass . . .

As cold and drunk as I can be.

You can't jump a jet plane

Like you can a freight train.

Much of Lightfoot's wandering, musically speaking, is done amid the vast geography and pioneer history of his native country. "I believe there are times when you should return to the soil, at least in your own mind, and when you should live in the past," he says. Canadian Railroad Trilogy evokes a time

When the wild majestic mountains stood alone against the sun,

Long before the white man, and long before the wheel,

When the green dark forest was too

silent to be real.

But he also lives very much in the present, and his roving eye takes in the topical as well as the topographical. Black Day in July is a commentary on the 1967 Detroit riots:

They wonder how it happened, and

they really know the reason,

And it wasn't just the temperature,

and it wasn't just the season.

Lightfoot's assured, straightforward delivery shows him to be that rarity in the folk field, a well-schooled singer. He got his early training as a high school student in the central Ontario town of Orillia. "Man, I did the whole bit --oratorio work, Kiwanis contests, operettas, barbershop quartets." He also played drums and sang in a dance band, and taught himself folk guitar. After a year of study at California's Westlake College of Music, he launched his career by working as a studio singer on Canadian and British television. "Musically, I'm the product of a sophisticated background," he once said, "yet my songs are basic and simple. I hope to be known as a cosmopolitan hick."

Underground Figure. In the U.S., he hopes to be known--period. Lightfoot is Canada's top-selling male singer, with an annual income of about $250,000 and a 17-room house in a stockbroker-and-executive neighborhood of Toronto. But south of the 49th parallel, where his songs are performed by such singers as Harry Belafonte and Peter, Paul and Mary, he has remained chiefly a popular figure in the folk underground. Until recently, at least. Now he is getting numerous engagements in the club circuit; during the past few months he has performed at Manhattan's Bitter End, Los Angeles' Troubadour, and San Francisco's Fillmore auditorium. Is he about to wander into popular success in the U.S. too? Lightfoot shrugs. "The public gets around to you," he says. "You don't get around to them."

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