Album Notes

Lee Murdock has uncovered a boundless body of music and stories in the Great Lakes. There is an amazing timelessness in this music. Great Lakes songs are made of hard work, hard living, ships that go down and ships that come in.

Voices Across the Water is Lee Murdock's eighth CD, released in 1997. It includes some popular maritime songs, including Murdock's great twelve-string guitar accompaniment on his performance of the Gordon Lightfoot hit, The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald. Murdock combines this song of an ill-fated voyage of an iron-ore boat in 1975, with The Red Iron Ore, a traditional song about the Rouse Simmons, a wooden sailing vessel which hauled iron ore in the 1800s.

Also included on Voices Across the Water is Lee's raucous rendition of Let the Lower Lights Be Burning, a hymn written by Phillip Bliss in the 1800s, after a shipwreck outside of Lorain, Ohio, at the port of Cleveland.

Murdock performs a combination of traditional and contemporary maritime songs, all from the Great Lakes. His arrangements of the songs are decidedly contemporary, and will appeal to the ear of folks who enjoy playing maritime music on their boats, or "land yachts".