Finding Meaning in the Mundane

Words by Christine Van Dyk

The knock of boots on the old wooden stage of the Cactus Theatre in Lubbock, Texas tells you everything you need to know about Brigid Reedy. With a pearl-buttoned shirt and a cowboy hat atop braided hair, the 23-year-old singer, songwriter, poet, and yodeler tunes her fiddle for a duet of Desert Rose.

“…Riding and ropin’ now that’s what I love,

life in the open I crave, 

The wild mountain rose and the cactus in bloom, 

I’ll love them the rest of my days…”

Brigid is a cowboy poet. Her type of storytelling was born in the 1800s on long cattle drives across Texas and the West. The trail brought hard work to hardened men, and every night the bone-tired cowpunchers gathered ‘round the campfire and traded stories of home. Freed slaves, Scottish immigrants, Mexican charros, and pioneers created one of America’s most authentic art forms. And now, Brigid is adding her own verse.

“Cowboy poetry is more broad than it’s given credit for,” she claims. “It’s about honest ties to the land, honoring the horse, and the experience of hard-working people. Sure, there’s local color, but the greatest works transcend the genre because they are simply great art. Works like Buck Ramsey’s Anthem embody what Cowboy Poetry is capable of saying; they hold up alongside Chaucer and Beowulf and Hemingway.”

It’s an art form that celebrates simple, ordinary objects: a homemade biscuit, the leatherwork on a saddle, a red pin cushion.

“The red pumpkin pin cushion that belonged to my grandmother might be a mundane thing,” Brigid says, “but when I put it in my hands I feel the hundreds of pins she stuck into it during her lifetime. It connects me to generations of women who came before me and it is the inspiration for my poem, Handmade.”

“…Decades of saved fabric scraps, spools of thread, and hundreds of glass head pins

Gather together to create another part of our epic poem 

Piece by piece the quilt comes together, every stitch a word, every square a verse 

My chapter, my canto, my contribution

Endless stories written in thread”

Cowboy Poetry is also a reflection of the landscapes it describes. For Brigid, it is intrinsically tied to life under Montana’s big skies.

“Out here the land is young, raw, and energetic,” she says. “We live in a constantly-evolving piece of art. It’s a landscape that demands your attention and captures it at the same time. I can still remember crying as a kid looking at the sunrise because I knew I’d never see that particular one again.”

But Brigid cautions about romanticizing the art form or the life that inspired it, saying: “Cowboy poetry is a dance between the beauty and harshness of life.” It’s been said cowboy poetry is horse shit and poetry side by side; irreverent one moment, transcendent the next.

In the same way roper boots and cowboy hats aren’t confined to the Rockies, neither is Cowboy Poetry limited to the West. Brigid has performed everywhere from the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Elko, Nevada, to Carnegie Hall, and even the Grand Ole Opry.

“I’ve performed in Jonesboro, TN for people with no experience of my life in the West,” Brigid says, “and yet, they cried at the end because they felt something real.”

Brigid currently attends University of Montana Western where she is completing degrees in English Literature and Natural Horsemanship. To the casual observer it’s hard to see the intersection… but not for Brigid.

“Horsemanship is all about feel, a flow of energy that connects you to the horse,” she says. “When I recite a poem or sing a song and the audience connects, it’s the same kind of magic. You raise up into something greater.”

Brigid may find connection in a saddle or on a stage, but she finds inspiration with family. Her dad is a poet and a photographer and her mom is a visual artist who homeschooled her children in a house where language was important.

“My dad sang to me in the womb,” she jokes. “Before I came to be there was music in my world. I yodeled at two and played fiddle at five. Everything I learned was another color I added to my palette.”

Her brother, Johnny, is also a cowboy artist who started college at 16 and plays 16 different instruments.

“I come up with the lyrics,” she says, “and he finds the chords. He’s my collaborator and best friend. If I looked the country over I couldn’t find someone with his mind and talent.”

Over the course of our conversation, Brigid and I lit on a variety of topics: how storytelling can unite the farthest sides of the aisle and how her friendship with an 80-something saddle maker means she is one person removed from homesteading in Montana. She told me about the moose and elk that wander across her backyard and the luxury of being well-traveled. As our talk came to a close, I asked her to tell me what life was like on that particular September morning.

“It’s been so dry that today’s rain seemed to make the whole valley sigh,” she said. “There’s a rainbow coming through the lilacs and fresh tomatoes for my omelet. Later, I’ll ride my horse and he’ll be frisky. It’s as if the world just woke up and everything feels alive.”