Elizabeth Garrett (songwriter)

Elizabeth Garrett (1885-1947) was a musician and song writer who composed New Mexico's official state song, O Fair New Mexico.

Garrett's father, Pat Garrett, was a Western lawman best known for killing Billy the Kid near Fort Sumner, New Mexico in 1881. Her mother was Apolinaria Gutierrez. Shortly after birth, Elizabeth became blind. According to U.S. Vice President John Nance Garner, an acquaintance of Pat Garrett, he gave his daugher "everything to make her happy and I think finally made quite a musician of her." In 1892, he enrolled her in a school for the blind in Austin, Texas, where she studied piano, organ, and voice. She graduated in 1904 and then received further musical training in New York and Chicago.

From 1907 to 1915, Garrett taught at the New Mexico Institute for the Blind in Alamogordo, New Mexico. She gave small concerts around the United States and was promoted as the "Songbird of the Southwest."

In 1915, three years after New Mexico was admitted to the U.S. as the 47th state, Garrett wrote its official state song, O Fair New Mexico. The song is in the form of a tango. Garrett moved to Roswell, New Mexico in 1920 and taught piano as well as writing song lyrics and music. Later in life, she developed a friendship with the blind author and political activist Helen Keller.

Garrett died on October 16, 1947, after a fall on a city street in Roswell.

References

• "Elizabeth Garrett," in Don Bullis, New Mexico: A Biographical Dictionary, 1540-1980, vol. 1 (Los Ranchos de Albuquerque: Rio Grande Books, 2007). 99.
• "Elizabeth Garrett, 1885-1947," biography at Find-a-Grave.com.