Stan Paregien, Editor
Chris LeDoux
(Deceased)
Chris Lee LeDoux, rodeo star and singer, was born on Oct. 2, 1948 in Biloxi, Miss. His family moved to Austin, Texas when he was twelve. He began competing in local rodeos at age 14. He did well enough that he earned a rodeo scholarship to Casper College in Wyoming. LeDoux subsequently became Intercollegiate National Bareback Riding Champion. He continued winning awards and recognition in rodeo through his college years. He also changed colleges several times. By his third year LeDoux had joined the Professional Rodeo Cowboy's Association (PRCA).
During college, LeDoux had been a commercial art major. He made a bronze sculpture of a man riding a bronc which won him considerable acclaim. LeDoux reached the pinnacle of his rodeo career in 1976 when he became the World Champion Bareback Rider at age 28.
Chris LeDoux began writing songs in his teens while traveling from one rodeo competition to another. He self-recorded and published 22 albums on his own label, selling them out of a truck and by mail order. Then in 1991, LeDoux signed with Capitol Nashville and has recorded eight albums with the label.
His duet with Garth Brooks, "Whatcha Gonna Do With a Cowboy?" reached the Top Ten and received a Grammy nomination. The album it appears on, also called "Whatcha Gonna Do With A Cowboy?", was certified gold in 1993. Another album, "The Best of Chris LeDoux" was certified gold in 1997.
In Sept. of 2000 it was announced that Chris LeDoux
has a life-threatening liver disease and is on the organ donor list. It
is estimated that without a transplant he has no more than two years to
live. He did, in fact, receive a liver transplant in October of 2000.
However, doctors discovered cancer in his bile duct in
November of 2004. He died in a hospital in Casper, Wyoming on March 9,
2005. He and his family had lived on his ranch near Kaycee, Wyoming.
CLICK
HERE to view the discography of Chris LeDoux.
Katie Lee was born
Indiana but was brought to Tucson, Az. in 1919 at a few months of age.
Lee graduated from the University of Arizona in
1942 with a BFA. Then she studied with two of the most successful folk
singers of the 1940s, Burl Ives and Josh White. But she found the
market for folk singers very small. So she ended up 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. She knew and was a friend of such
folks as Burl Ives, Josh White and Harry Belafonte.
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 (I got to see her there in about 1993 or 1994) and all
around the United States and Mexico.
In 1972 she was the recipient of the "Cine Golden
Circle" Award. That was for her educational TV film titled, "The Last
Wagon".
She has several CDs of music to her credit.
Besides singing and playing the guitar, she is also an
author. Katie Lee wrote a book titled, Ten Thousand Goddam Cattle
(Flagstaff,
Arizona: Northland
Press,
1976).
I
have in my personal library a first-edition copy that I
bought in about 2005, but did not even open up until June of 2010. And,
lo and behold, there tucked inside the dust cover flag with a large
newspaper article titled "The best cowboy singer is a girl . . . Katie
Lee". That article title is actually a quote from a legendary folk
singer, the late Burl Ives.
In fact, it was Burl Ives who in 1954 worked closely
with Katie Lee to take her career from Hollywood to singing in
nightclubs.
The article was written by Andrew Means and published
in The Arizona Republic (p.
E-3) on
Sunday, March 23, 1986. The book had just been reprinted by Katydid
Books & Records, i.e., Katie Lee's own label.
In the 1986 article, Means wrote: "In song and in
conversation, Lee is a fierce defener of a fading era and a grim critic
of the changes that have strung wires and suburbs across the open range
and dams across the white water.
"Nowadays, Lee can pretty well call her own shots.
Bolstered by a little inherited money, she can perform when she wants
to and still find time to visit her beloved canyons and rivers in
northern Arizona and southern Utah."
Katie Lee's second book was, All My Rivers Are Gone.
The
book
documents,
through journal entries, Katie Lee's river trips
through Glen Canyon, above the Grand Canyon, in the mid 1950s. In the
early 60s 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.
So far as we know, Katie Lee is still alive and well.
Since 1976 she has lived for many years in the high desert tourist
village and former mining town of
Jerome, Arizona.
Click here to
go to her personal web site. Those who wish to do so may write to her
at P.O. Box 395, Jerome, AZ 86331.
Jack H. Lee
(Deceased)
Jack H. Lee was from way up north in Deer Lodge, Montana. He
became far better known around the country by his stage name of
"Powder River Jack".
Powder River Jack, alias Jack H. Lee, was something of a
renaissance man. He first made his living as a working cowboy. Then,
like the layers of an onion, he began exercising his talent as a
writer. And he he took up singing songs about the Old West. And then he
worked at improving his ability as an artist.
Jack H. Lee wooed and married a woman named Kitty. At the
time she
was a friend of the world famous trick shot artist Annie Oakley, and
she was working as a trick rider.
Soon the team of Powder River Jack and Kitty Lee performed
together
during the 1920s and 1930s at any venue they could find to make a buck.
They entertained at rodeos and livestock events all across the United
States. Early on they even earned their 15 minutes of fame each night
performing as a part of the legendary Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild West
Show. That was pretty heady stuff, back then.
In 1932 there was an article in none-other than Time Magazine
that
described Powder River Jack as "a leathery, garrulous, honest-injun
cowboy from the wild old West." Such endorsements didn't get much
better than that.
However, there was a dark side to good ol' Powder River
Jack. He was often accused of being a literary rustler, i.e., a
plagiarizer of the first magnitude. Like some folks today, he
apparently
was not above using someone else's song or poetry and claiming that he
had written it. That is a cardinal sin among all writers, and that
includes cowboy poets and songwriters. Still, he also wrote a large
number of things based on his own experiences. And when the dust
settled, he had become one of the most well-known cowboy poets of his
day.
Jack H. Lee was killed in a car wreck in 1946. Fortunately,
he and
his wife had already published several books by then. And they made
four recordings as well, including the album When I Was a Cowboy, Volumes I and
II.
One of their books was titled, Powder River Jack and Kitty Lee's Cowboy
Song Book With Music: Cowboy Wails and Cattle Trails of the Wold West
(Butte, Montana: McKee Printing Company, 1938). I saw one copy of
this 92 page book for sale on tomfolio.com for $75.00.
[I am indebted to writer Jayne Jaudon Ferrer for unearthing
most
of the information above. She has one of Powder River Jack's poems,
Sourdough Bread, posted in the archives section of her web site. That
is found at "Your Daily Poem". And click above to go to her
personal web site.]
Does anyone know where we can find a photo of Powder River Jack, as well as one of Jack and Kitty, or even one of just Kitty?? We'd sure like to be able to post 'em here.
Wayne C. Lee, who sometimes writes as Lee Sheldon, is the author of Prairie Vengeance (1954), Broken Wheel Ranch (1956), Slugging Backstop (1957), His Brother's Guns (1958), Killer's Range (1958), Bat Masterson (1960), Gun Brand (1961), Blood on the Prairie (1962), Thunder in the Backfield (1962), Stranger in Stirrup (1962), The Gun Tamer (1963), Devil Wire (1963), The Hostile Land (1964), Gun in His Hand (1964), Warpath West (1965), Mystery of Scorpion Creek (1966), Showdown at Julesburg Station (1967), Sudden Guns (1968), Trouble at Flying H (1969), Showdown at Sunrise (1971), The Buffalo Hunters (1972), Wind Over Rimfire (1973), Scotty Philip, the Man Who Saved the Buffalo (1975), Law of the Lawless (1977), Petticoat Wagon Train (1978), Ghost of a Gunfighter (1980), Shadow of the Gun (1981), Putnam's Ranch War (1982), Barbed-Wire War (Bouregy, 1983), The Violent Trail (Bouregy, 1984), White Butte Guns (Bouregy, 1984), War at Nugget Creek (Bouregy, 1985).
Fifteen of his books have been reprinted in England, and some have been translated and published in Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Portugal and Spain. In an article in the January, 1979 issue of The Roundup, Lee noted that for years he wrote from 5 a.m. to 10:30 p.m., then would go out and work his mail route. After his retirement from the postal service, he still started writing at 5 a.m. and worked until noon. In that article Lee stated, "based on the hours spent on research and writing, I find that there is more money in fiction; more prestige in non-fiction. While I enjoy the non-fiction very much, I haven't found a merchant yet who will give me a cent of credit based on prestige."
Wayne C. Lee belongs to the Nebraska Writers Guild
(president in 1974-76), Nebraska Historical Society, South Dakota
Historical Society, Kansas Historical Society, Buffalo Bill Corral of
Westerners, the Butterfield Trail Association and Historical Society,
South Dakota Cowboy and Western Heritage Hall of Fame and Imperial
Toastmasters. Lee is listed in Who's Who in the Midwest, Two Thousand
Men of Achievement, Personalities in the West and Midwest, Creative and
Successful Personalities and Dictionary of International Biography.
Barbara Leigh was born in Ringgold, Georgia as Barbara Ann Kish on Nov. 16, 1946. Barbara lived in Georgia until the age of 5 when she, her mother, and siblings moved to Miami, Florida where she grew up. At the age of 16, Leigh visited her family in Georgia and Tennessee during her summer vacation and met the first love of her life. She ended up staying to marry, and finished school while living with her In-laws.
At the age of 19, Barbara and her family moved to Los Angeles, California. There she began to work as a nurse. She was soon divorced and settled into the life of a single mother.
Miss Leigh later moved to New York City and modeled for the famous Ford agency. She then moved back to Los Angeles and embarking on an acting career. When she joined the Screen Actors Guild, her married name "Barbara Haynes" had already been taken, bringing about the need for a change. One of her agents who happened to be reading that Vivian Leigh had died, abruptly blurted out to the whole office, "that's it, Barbara Leigh!" Vivian Leigh died and Barbara Leigh was born.
She was seen walking on the beaches of Malibu by French director Roger Vadim. Running from his beachfront home, he asked if she would like to audition for the role of Jean, Rock Hudson's wife in the movie "Pretty Maids All in A Row". After the test Vadim ended his search without auditioning any other actresses.
Of all Barbara's films she loved working on "Junior Bonner" the most. Being cast in the female lead opposite Steve McQueen was exciting, as was working with the controversial director Sam Peckinpah. Barbara met Mr. McQueen during the casting of the film and began dating him before shooting started. Miss Leigh has written in depth about her love affair with McQueen in her recent book, The King, McQueen and The Love Machine.
During this period of her life Barbara also dated the
President of MGM Studios, legendary Jim Aubrey AKA "The Smiling Cobra"
and "The Love Machine". Jacqueline Susanne's bestselling book, "The
Love Machine", was based on Mr. Aubrey's life, and was later made into
a movie. Jim Aubrey introduced Miss Leigh to Elvis Presley during one
of his shows at the Las Vegas Hilton Hotel, and shortly afterward,
Elvis and Barbara began dating. Barbara was thrilled to accompany him
on a number of his tours. She dated the King for several years, and
they remained close friends until his tragic death.
Barbara's biggest break came in 1975, when she was cast to play the most important role of her life, "Vampirella" for Hammer Films in England. However, the project was never completed changing her career forever. After the Vampirella project folded in 1978, Barbara married a New York lawyer and retired from the business, heart broken that she never fulfilled her dream to play the one character that meant so much to her. It wouldn't be until the 90's that the Vampirella character came back into Barbara's life. She is now, and will always be remembered, as the first and "Original Vampirella" to legions of Vampirella fans.
Today Barbara appears at selected autograph
conventions,
where she displays the original Vampirella costume and jewelry which
were made for her by the famed Western Costume.
Commit your way to the Lord;
trust in him and he will do this:
He will make your righteousness shine like the dawn,
the justice of your cause like the noonday sun.
--- Bible: Psalm 37:5-6
© 1999-2010 by Stan Paregien, Sr.
Last updated on June 26, 2010
