Remembering 'Grand Dame of Cowboy Poetry,' Elizabeth Ebert

The New York Times remembers 'Grand Dame of Cowboy Poetry' Elizabeth Ebert, who passed away recently at the age of 93. As Carson Vaughan explains, "Elizabeth Ebert kept small stacks of paper in every room of the farmhouse — just in case. She wrote whenever the rhymes blossomed: sometimes in the middle of the night, sometimes at the chirp of dawn, sometimes in the summer fallow tractor, where she’d draw a finger across the dusty windshield." From there: 

She started with a single line, a single rhyme, and “then you have to fill in all this other garbage,” she once said, with the sort of dry, self-deprecating humor that often infused her verse.

Ms. Ebert, who rose to queenly prominence within the chivalrous ranks of cowboy poetry, died on March 20 at a hospital in Bismarck, N.D., 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,

Let the sound of laughter grace the day.

Find an old cowhand with an old guitar

To yodel me joyfully on my way.

Ms. 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.

Learn more at the New York Times.