It's not the original but it sure helped popularise the melody, which is still beautiful

Still beautiful

I've always like this live version

Before my time and outside my taste in music, but impossible to deny his legend!

The world is a little less special without him, may he Rest in Peace!

RiP A great poet gone! 

Timely, live in London, Democracy

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vHI9BTpGkp8

My favourite recording artist - the Poet Prince of Canada.

Never much enjoyed his work myself but as @networkn said, can't deny his legend.

This year seems to have been a busy one for the Reaper taking well known people.

Transcript of an interview with Suzanne
(BBC 1998)

He had an incredible ability to write "emotion", not emotional words but pure emotion. A lot of what became songs were originally published as poems,(including "So long Marianne", and "Bird on a wire") and only later recorded as songs when others convinced him to allow them to record them. A real master of the word.

Leonard Cohen penned an emotional final letter to Marianne Ihlen, the woman who inspired his "So Long, Marianne" and "Bird on the Wire," just days before her July 29th death, Ihlen's friend Jan Christian Mollestad revealed to the CBC.

According to Mollestad, after he informed Cohen of Ihlen's looming death from leukemia, the legendary singer-songwriter-poet responded two hours later with a "beautiful" letter, which Mollestad then read to Ihlen.

"It said, 'Well Marianne it's come to this time when we are really so old and our bodies are falling apart and I think I will follow you very soon. Know that I am so close behind you that if you stretch out your hand, I think you can reach mine," Mollestad told the CBC of Cohen's letter.

"'And you know that I've always loved you for your beauty and your wisdom, but I don't need to say anything more about that because you know all about that. But now, I just want to wish you a very good journey. Goodbye old friend. Endless love, see you down the road.'"

Seakiwi:

 

 

 

"It said, 'Well Marianne it's come to this time when we are really so old and our bodies are falling apart and I think I will follow you very soon. Know that I am so close behind you that if you stretch out your hand, I think you can reach mine," Mollestad told the CBC of Cohen's letter.

 

That came right from the heart didn't it.