Doris Daley

Doris Daley grew up on a cattle ranch at the edge of the Porcupine Hills near Granum, in the southern Alberta ranch country north of Fort Macleod. Her great-grandfather came west with the North West Mounted Police in the 1870s, and his wife Mary wrote about the adventure of starting a ranch under the open prairie sky before Alberta was a province, and about the terrible loneliness of it. Daley describes her family tree as a mix of Irish stowaways, homesteaders, bronc riders, sorry team ropers, two-steppers and great cooks, which she considers the ideal pedigree for a cowboy poet. In a town of a few hundred people, she was the kid who wrote the skits, plays, short stories and poems, and the one called on for verses at family reunions and local occasions.

After school she travelled the world and then came home to Alberta. Around 1991 she went to a cowboy poetry gathering in Pincher Creek planning to sit in the audience. Her brother talked her into getting up on stage, and the poems she had been writing for years found a crowd. Invitations followed from women's gatherings, 4-H shows and community halls, and by 1997 her work was appearing in anthologies such as Cowgirls: 100 Years of Writing the Range.

Her first trip to the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Elko, Nevada changed the way she worked. Watching working cowboys who took the craft seriously hold rooms of thousands, she went home determined to raise her game, deciding that a long, rambling, rollicking poem with a good ending was no longer enough. She became a ruthless editor of her own writing. Elko became a fixture from 1999 on, and she has been invited to perform there more often than any other Canadian poet, often as the only Canadian on the bill.

In 2003 she issued the book Rhyme and Reason and the CD Poetry in Motion on her own Fiddle DD imprint. She spent January 2004 as poet-in-residence in Santa Clarita, California, and later that year the Academy of Western Artists gave her its Will Rogers Award as Best Female Cowboy Poet, the first time any Canadian, man or woman, had won its cowboy poetry category. Around the same time she was taking her West Word Ho! workshop into classrooms from grade 3 to grade 12 in British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba and Ontario.

Good for What Ails You (Fiddle DD FDD-CD002, 2005) was recorded live in Martha's living room at Mountain Valley Ranch, west of Highway 22, before a crowd of friends, neighbours and family. Brothers Doug and Bruce Rawling recorded the evening and played guitar, Brenna Daley stepped up to sing, and Ben Crane drew the cover. In her liner notes Daley recalled the guitars coming out, the rain falling and the coffee perking, with most of the heckling aimed at the Rawlings. The nineteen tracks run from 'Skunk in the Bunkhouse' and 'Stand Upwind from Me (The Perfume Poem)' to 'Great Canadian Cowboy' and 'A Letter to Mr. Russell'.

In 2009 she released the CD Beneath a Western Sky, and at the Western Music Association awards in Albuquerque that November she was named Female Cowboy Poet of the Year and also took Cowboy Poetry CD of the Year, a pairing she announced as a Daley Double. Her next collection, West Word Ho! (2011), mixed old favourites, new material and some of her song lyrics.

For the Calgary Stampede's centennial in 2012, Daley teamed with Bruce Innes, the Calgary-born leader of the Original Caste, on 100 Years of Thunder: A Salute to Rodeo and the Calgary Stampede. Her poems and his songs took on Outlaw the bucking bull, the chuckwagon races, the white hat, the pancake breakfasts, and Stampede founder Guy Weadick and trick roper Flores LaDue. Innes produced and engineered the disc at Mountain Shadows, Calgary writer Wendy Bryden supplied a historical essay for each decade of the Stampede, and High River photographer Neville Palmer illustrated the booklet. The pair also staged it as a 90-minute show, and Daley later gathered its poems with new work in Poems from the Million Star Resort (2016).

She headlined the Texas Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Alpine, appeared at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, performed with the Reno Philharmonic Orchestra and the Saskatchewan Opera Company, and gave a TEDxCalgary talk. Closer to home she performed for Parks Canada and Heritage Canada, rural women's conferences and Stampede Foundation functions as poet and emcee.

Once Upon the West, released in January 2018, paired her with Saskatchewan singer-songwriter Eli Barsi. Daley would write lyrics in Alberta and send them east to Barsi, who set them to music; the title track grew out of Daley's signature poem of the same name. The album's 21 originals celebrate the open range, small prairie towns and the pioneers both women grew up admiring.

Singer-songwriter Doc Mehl became her regular stage partner, and the two worked so well together that they married. They tour western Canada as a duo with shows such as Romance on the Range. Living in Diamond Valley in the Alberta foothills, Daley founded a poetry club at the Sheep River Library, and that group helped spark Lucky Me (2024), a collection twelve years in the making that sets her trademark wordplay loose in unrhymed poems on everyday life alongside a handful of her western favourites. She returned to Elko again in 2025.

-Robert Williston