"I can't ever remember 'finding' cowboy poetry," Waddie Mitchell says of the entertaining and enduring art. "It was always there. The cowboys sure never called it poetry. I know I wouldn't have liked it if they would have. Seems like an oxymoron, don't it?" From his earliest days on the remote Nevada ranches where his father worked, Waddie was immersed in the cowboy way of entertaining, the art of spinnin' tales in rhyme and meter that came to be called cowboy poetry, a Western tradition that is as rich as the lifestyle that gave birth to it. "We didn't have electricity and that meant we didn't have TV. We had darn poor radio, too. So that meant we did the strangest things at night ... we talked to each other!" Within his stories, told in a voice that is timeless and familiar, are the common bonds we all share, moments both grand and commonplace, the humorous and the tragic, the life and death struggles and triumphs that we each recognize. And yet, Waddie presents his material with personal insights and the lessons learned during his life spent as a buckaroo. "When my imagination first got let out of the gate, it was from an old-time cowboy, with a story set to rhyme," he says in his second recording from Warner Western, "Lone Driftin' Rider." By the age of 10 he was reciting poetry himself; at 16, he quit school to follow his heart and went to making his living as a cowboy. "I'd never done anything else, never made money without horses or cows until I started telling cowboy poetry." The father of five children, ("They're all girls, except four of them!") his goal is to one day buy his own ranch. "I'm hoping," Waddie says, "for the opportunity to go broke on a ranch by myself instead of helping somebody else do it!" There came a time, though, which he relates in his poem "Where To Go," when he had to choose between being a full-time cowboy (he managed a 36,000 acre ranch in Lee-Jiggs, Nevada) and the art form he loved so much. In 1984 he helped organize the internationally recognized Elko Cowboy Poetry Gathering and gave his first public performance. Since then he has performed internationally for audiences from Los Angeles to New York, Zurich to Melbourne, and all points in between. With television appearances ranging from The Tonight Show (his neighbor took the first phoned invitation, drove 40 miles to deliver the message to the remotely based Waddie and returned with a "No Thanks" because it was calving time and he'd never heard of Johnny Carson), Larry King Live, Good Morning America, TNN, The History Channel, PBS, and BBC, Waddie has also been featured in People, Life, New York Times, USA Today, Fortune, National Geographic, Wall Street Journal and the Official Program for Super Bowl XXX, along with numerous other appearances, performances, articles and books. The Reno Gazette-Journal published a list from a panel of writers, historians and other notables, who selected the Top 20 Artists, Authors and Entertainers To Influence Nevada in the 20th Century. Sure enough, pards, there was Waddie! Waddie Mitchell has received the title of Adjunct Professor from the University of Wyoming. This honor was based on "Real world credentials which Waddie possesses in wealth." |
