U.S. cowboy poet, storyteller and veterinarian Baxter Black, whose work was a fixture for years in farm journals including Grainews, died Friday at age 77, his family reported.
Born in New York in 1945, Black grew up in southern New Mexico and graduated from Colorado State University in 1969. He later relocated from Colorado to Benson, Arizona, about 60 km southeast of Tucson.
During the 1980s Black began publishing his poems and stories about ranching life. “My audience is my inspiration,” he said on his website. “Every cowboy, rancher, vet, farmer, feed salesman, ag teacher, cowman and rodeo hand has a story to tell, and they tell it to me. I Baxterize it and tell it back to ’em! It doesn’t seem fair, does it?”
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Black self-syndicated his column, ‘On the Edge of Common Sense,’ which included his poems, stories and essays, to multiple newspapers in both the U.S. and Canada and was a regular feature in the Cattleman’s Corner section of Grainews.
He performed his works regularly at farm shows and conventions, was a featured guest on U.S. National Public Radio’s (NPR) Morning Edition show and appeared on NBC TV’s The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson.
Black also published several books, CDs and DVDs of his work and briefly co-authored a comic strip, Ag Man, a campy series about a super-hero protecting farms and ranches, which also appeared in Grainews.
The cause of Black’s death wasn’t available Monday but an Arizona news outlet quoted Black’s wife Cindy Lou as saying earlier this year that he had been ill with leukaemia and dementia. No memorial service for Black has yet been publicly announced. — Glacier FarmMedia Network
