Gale, Buddy

Websites:  No
Origin: Buck Lake, Alberta, 🇨🇦
Biography:

Buddy Gale was born in Buck Lake, Alberta, during the hard economic years of the 1930s — a time when long days of work were not a matter of “want to” or “don’t want to.” You simply had to. Raised in an environment of mud, bush, horses, hunting and trapping, Gale absorbed the realities of ranch life early, forming the foundation for the authentic voice that would later define his poetry.

At just 12 years old, Buddy and a friend jumped a freight car out of Winfield, Alberta, riding through Lacombe and Calgary en route to the famed ranches of southern Alberta. Those early cowboy days stayed with him for life. On one of his final days working as a cowboy, he scored a 90-point ride when icy water splashed the belly of his horse — a vivid memory that would resurface decades later in his verse.

In 1948, Gale shifted from horseback to heavy industry, taking up trucking, then logging, and later pipelining. Yet even as his working life changed, he never lost his close observation of the cowboy way. He remained a careful chronicler of ranch culture and rural change, watching as the landscape evolved from “20 acres per horse” to “20 horses per acre.” As he has said, “I’d like to keep the 20 acres per horse in my poems and songs.”

Gale began writing cowboy poetry nearly two decades ago after reading stories and reviews about the growing cowboy poetry movement. Realizing that he had lived the stories others were telling, he began committing his own memories to paper. The result has been substantial: more than 600 poems, with over 100 set to music by some thirty artists who value the authenticity and accuracy that characterize his work.

Through performance, collaboration, and steady output, Buddy Gale has helped preserve not only the image of the cowboy, but the lived detail of the cowboy way — the labour, the humour, the hardship, and the land itself.
-Robert Williston

Email: budgale@gmail.com