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Elizabeth Ebert, 'Grand Dame of Cowboy Poetry,' dies at 93

Elizabeth Ebert kept small stacks of paper in every room of the farmhouse — just in case. She wrote whenever the rhymes blossomed:

Ebert, who rose to queenly prominence within the chivalrous ranks of cowboy poetry, died on March 20 at a hospital in Bismarck, North Dakota, after breaking a hip. She was 93, and cognizant enough to remark, just hours before she died, that it was her wedding anniversary.

She left instructions for her funeral in a poem called “When I Leave This Life,” which is included in her 2006 collection, “Prairie Wife.” It reads in part:

Let the memories be of the happy times,

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Let the sound of laughter grace the day.

Find an old cowhand with an old guitar

To yodel me joyfully on my way.

Ebert wrote in secret for most of her life, often feeding her lines to the fire, and was already well into her 60s when her husband, Selmer Johannes Ebert, who went by S.J., persuaded her to perform at a cowboy poetry gathering in Bismarck. There she caught the eye — or rather, the ear — of Baxter Black, the genre’s most celebrated poet.

“I knew from the very first poem that she started at the top; she just had it,” Black told American Cowboy magazine. “It’s like you’re having a parade, and everyone is driving a Honda, and she comes in in a Cadillac, sitting on the top.”

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A somewhat esoteric genre today, cowboy poetry originated in the cattle drive era following the Civil War, as cowpunchers strained to keep themselves entertained during the long and often tedious journeys north from Texas. Typically narrative-based and following traditional ballad rhyme schemes, the genre mostly retreated from popular view until the founding of the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Elko, Nevada, in 1985.

Though cowboy poetry remains an outsider art, the national gathering helped launch several poets into a larger orbit, among them Black and Waddie Mitchell, both of whom performed multiple times on “The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson.”

After her first performance at the Elko gathering, in 1991, Ebert attracted an almost immediate following with her authentic portrayals not only of the cowboy but also of what she called “the cowman’s wife.” Her woman’s perspective helped open a male-dominated genre to female voices.

In one poem, titled “Cowboy Courtin’ Time,” she described a ranch romance, in which the woman invariably ends up between the cowboy and his dog.

The cowboy’ll put his arm around

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And hug you ‘til you hurt

And then he starts to pawin’

(The dog, that is) your shirt.

They’ve got you snuggled there between

Just a pawn within their game.

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It doesn’t matter where you turn

‘Cause they kiss about the same.

Long years have passed since courtin’ time

Changed me from Miss to Mrs.

And I’ll admit, I’ve grown to like

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Those cowboy-cowdog kisses.

Ebert later performed at gatherings all over the country, rising to the status of what her friend and fellow poet Yvonne Hollenbeck called “the Grand Dame of Cowboy Poetry,” a title quickly ratified by their peers.

“Elizabeth walks up to the podium, and every time you think, ‘What’s this old gray-haired lady doing here?'” Hollenbeck told American Cowboy. “And then she starts in her little high voice, and she just kills her audience.”

Besides “Prairie Wife,” Ebert wrote another full-length book of poetry, “Crazy Quilt,” a chapbook of Christmas poems and a spoken-word album titled “Live From Thunder Hawk.”

In perhaps her most popular poem, titled “He Talked About Montana,” she eulogized one of her husband’s hired hands.

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And he’d talk about Montana.

And you’d get a glimmer then,

Of the cowboy that he used to be,

And the man he might have been

Before the war and wife and whiskey

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Had bent him out of shape.

Now the war and wife were history

And the whiskey was escape.

Among her awards, Ebert was the inaugural recipient in 2012 of The Badger: Excellence in Cowboy Poetry Award, presented by the Heritage of the American West Performance Series. In 2005, Mike Rounds, then governor of South Dakota, proclaimed Feb. 24 of that year “Elizabeth Ebert Day.”

It’s doubtful that Ebert — who insisted that “if it isn’t meter and rhyme, it’s prose” — would have found similar success within the wider world of contemporary literature, which often considers the genre a folk art at best, if not mere doggerel. She didn’t seem to mind.

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“I don’t like their poetry, either,” Ebert said, “so it’s fair enough.”

Elizabeth Summers was born on Feb. 24, 1925, outside tiny Thunder Hawk, South Dakota, just south of the North Dakota border, one of four children. She spent her early years watching Dust Bowl storms scour the prairie.

When she was 4, Elizabeth’s impoverished family, chasing work, spent one summer in a three-sided tent attached to their car. Though her parents, John and Alma, worked odd jobs over the years, they were primarily small farmers, raising wheat and cattle.

Ebert attended Thunder Hawk High School, receiving her diploma as the valedictorian of a class of four. At 16, she enrolled at the Black Hills Secretarial School in Rapid City, South Dakota. She worked briefly as a bookkeeper for a bank in Lemmon, 10 miles east of Thunder Hawk, before following a friend to Washington, D.C., where she spent a summer waiting tables.

Miserable in the city, she returned to South Dakota. At 18, yearning to be a novelist, she moved to Minneapolis and spent a year at the University of Minnesota studying journalism and English and imagining a writer’s life, like that of Dorothy Parker.

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“At the time, I admired Parker’s long cigarette holder and wished to go to New York and hobnob with the literati,” she said. “One summer in secretary school, one year at the University of Minnesota, and a summer in Washington, D.C., cured me of that notion, and all I wanted was a piece of prairie that I could call my own and lot fewer people around.”

She met S.J. — a “cute” and “capable” World War II veteran, in her words — at a dance hall in Morristown, South Dakota, in November 1945. They married four months later, put money down on some farmland and spent their first 15 years together in a fixed-up homestead shack, upgrading to a newer farmhouse up the road in 1962. They raised three children on the farm.

Ebert said the best years of her life were spent with S.J. after their retirement, when they took the scenic routes to her poetry gatherings around the country. It was a time, she said, “when we got to do what we wanted to do and didn’t have to worry about things." S.J. Ebert died at 94 in 2008.

Saddled with a small oxygen tank during her last years, Ebert often cursed her immobility and the burden her frailties had placed on others.

“I don’t worry about dying — that’s the least of my problems,” she told American Cowboy. “Some days I wish I would, ′cause I’m tired of dragging this damn thing around.”

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Though physically spent, her daughter Jayne says, “she was Mother, bright and sharp, to the end.”

And though she was surprised by the attention she received, she appreciated it. “It’s nice that somebody recognizes you. It really is,” she said in October 2016. “They even know me in Lemmon now sometimes.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

CARSON VAUGHAN © 2018 The New York Times

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