"We didn’t have electricity and that meant we didn't have T.V. We had darn poor radio too. So that meant we did the strangest things at night... we talked to each other!" --Waddie Mitchell Waddie explains the origin of his art in the following way: "All the time I was growing up we had these old cowboys around," he says. "When you live in close proximity like that with the same folks month after month, one of your duties is to entertain each other, and I suppose that's where the whole tradition of cowboy poetry started. You find that if you have a rhyme and a meter to start that story, people will listen to it over and over again," Waddie states in his down-to-earth description of its beginnings. "When my imagination first got let out of the gate, it was from an old-time cowboy, with a story set to rhyme," he says in his second recording from Warner Western, "Lone Driftin' Rider." By the age of 10, he was reciting poetry himself; at 16, he quit school to follow his heart and went to making his living as a cowboy.  "I'd never done anything else, never made money without horses or cows until I started telling cowboy poetry." The father of five children, ("They're all girls, except four of them!") his goal is to one day buy his own ranch. "I'm hoping," Waddie says, "for the opportunity to go broke on a ranch by myself instead of helping somebody else do it!" There came a time though, which he relates in his poem "Where To Go", when he had to choose between being a full-time cowboy (he managed a 36,000 acre ranch in Lee-Jiggs, Nevada) and the art form that he loved so much. In 1984, he helped organize the now internationally recognized Elko Cowboy Poetry Gathering and gave his first public performance. Although Waddle didn't think anyone would be interested (he thought it would be a pretty good party for the weekend), the first Cowboy Poetry Gathering was set for a cold, snowy weekend in January. This was one of the only times Waddle and his fellow cowboys ...