Katie Lee

Born in Illinois during 1919, Katie Lee relocated with her family to Tucson while still an infant and spent her formative years in Arizona. After an initial period acting on stage and screen in Hollywood, she launched her performing and recording work in traditional folk and cowboy music, training under Burl Ives and Josh White. Following the appearance of her early folk-meets-novelty releases Spicy Songs for Cool Knights in 1956 and Songs of Couch and Consultation in 1957, Lee adopted a more serious stance that grew increasingly indignant and politically engaged once Glen Canyon—located just upstream from the Grand Canyon—faced inundation by the Glen Canyon Dam, constructed from 1956 to 1966 by the U.S. Bureau of Land Reclamation. Her hostility toward the agency, an attitude shared with Desert Solitaire and Monkeywrench Gang author Edward Abbey, surfaced explicitly in “The Wreck-the-Nation Bureau Song” from Colorado River Songs, first issued on cassette during the 1980s and later reissued on CD by her own Katydid Records label in 1998. Lee also wrote three books—Ten Thousand Goddam Cattle: A History of the American Cowboy in Song, Story & Verse, All My Rivers Are Gone, and Sandstone Seduction—examining cowboy traditions and her attachment to the canyon country of the Southwest. Known as “the Grand Dame of Dam Busting,” Katie Lee passed away in November 2017 at her residence in Jerome, Arizona, at the age of 98. Prior to the Colorado River rising behind the 710-foot-high concrete barrier of Glen Canyon Dam, she had guided others and explored the canyon’s sculpted sandstone and side canyons herself, seeking discovery, inspiration, and renewal. Once the structure was finished she never revisited the submerged landscape.