Katie Lee Cowboy Poetry Collection

Katie Lee was born in Tucson, Arizona, in 1919. Lee graduated from the University of Arizona with a BFA, then studied with two of the most successful folk singers of the 1940s, Burl Ives and Josh White. She found the market for folksingers very small, so she began working summer stock theater instead. Her luck with acting proved a little better, and she went on to work in radio on such shows as “The Halls of Ivy,” “The Railroad Hour,” and “The Great Gildersleeve.” She continued to develop her singing, though, and became one of the early regulars at clubs like the Hungry i and the Gates of Horn.

Katie Lee, a folksinger who appreciates her Western roots, created a sub-genre all her own–the Freudian folksong. And to that she contributed two albums: Life is Just a Bed of Neuroses, and Songs of Couch and Consultation. Katie Lee writes and performs her own songs about the Old West. She has appeared at the National Cowboy Hall of Fame in Oklahoma City and around the U.S.

Besides singing and playing the guitar, she is also an author. Katie Lee wrote two books titled, Ten Thousand Goddam Cattle and All My Rivers Are Gone. The second book documents through journal entries Katie Lee’s river trips through Glen Canyon, above the Grand Canyon, in the mid 1950s. In the early 1960s the Colorado River was dammed at Glen Canyon, forming Lake Powell, the second largest man-made lake in the United States, and thus put most of the canyon underwater.