Slim Dusty

All Music Guide:

Slim Dusty was the most prolific and biggest-selling recording artist in Australia, with more than five million of his recordings sold on the domestic market of 20 million people and a status akin to the all-time greats in country music. In 2000, the 73-year-old Australian music legend released his 100th album.

He was born David Gordon Kirpatrick in Kempsey, NSW, Australia, and spent most of his younger days at a dairy farm. The first major influence on his career in music was his father, who liked to vocalize to the accompaniment of his fiddle playing when Kirpatrick was still a toddler. The event that changed his life forever took place when he was ten and heard an aborigine sing a song called "The Drunkard's Child." He was so fascinated, that same year he wrote his first song, "The Way the Cowboy Died." At age 11, he decided to rename himself Slim Dusty. In 1942, as a "seasoned performer" of 15, Slim talked his way into the studios of the local radio station, and at his own expense recorded two songs: "Song for the Aussies" and "My Final Song." He became a regular performer and in 1945 wrote his first classic, "When the Rain Tumbles Down in July." In November 1946, the singer hit the big smoke and in a Sydney studio recorded the six tracks which would be released as his first three 78 rpm singles, starting with "When the Rain Tumbles Down in July." By now, he had a part-time career in show business as an intermittent radio performer playing in music halls and tent shows. In 1952, he married country performer and songwriter Joy McKean.

By April 1957, Slim Dusty already had a recording career of ten-plus years behind him when he was scheduled to record four more songs, but only three had been chosen. At the time, Slim was traveling with Gordon Parsons, who was singing a song he'd written based on a poem by Dan Shean. Needing that extra song, Slim asked Parsons if he could record his song, thinking it would make a good B-side for a song called "Saddle Boy." Parsons had no problem with that as to him, "A Pub With No Beer" was just a novelty song. Months later, while Slim was working in outback Queensland, he was told that the B-side of his latest single had made the pop charts in Brisbane, and as the months rolled on "A Pub With No Beer" became the first-ever Australian-made single to reach the national number one spot. The record went on to reach number three in England, and also sold well in the U.S. For a long time, it was the biggest selling single in Australian music history.

From then on, the Slim Dusty career was assured. Unmistakable in his workman's hat with the turned down brim, Slim was the kind of country music performer America lamented having lost. He was someone who, throughout his 100-album career, sang songs about the Australian landscape and the people who occupy it, someone who toured the length and breadth of the land. The cream of Australian songwriters lined up to offer him songs. Over the years, Slim won every accolade possible, from Tamworth Music Awards Golden Guitars to his Member of the British Empire medal.

Slim's long journey came to an end in Sydney on September 19, 2003, the victim of kidney cancer. His importance to the Australian music landscape was immense. Just one example of his homeland's pride came in September 2000, when he was one of the Australian performers featured in the closing ceremony of the Sydney Olympic Games. Slim was given the job of singing Australia's unofficial national anthem, "Waltzin' Matilda." No one else would have been as appropriate.

Wikipedia:

David Gordon "Slim Dusty " Kirkpatrick AO, MBE (13 June 1927—19 September 2003) was an Australian country music singer-songwriter and producer, with a career spanning nearly seven decades. He was known to record songs in the legacy of Australian poets Henry Lawson and Banjo Patterson that represented the Australian Bush Lifestyle, and also for his many trucking songs. Dusty was the first Australian to have a No. 1 Hit song with Gordon Parsons (Pub With No Beer). He received an unequalled 37 Golden Guitar and two ARIA awards and was inducted into the ARIA Hall of Fame and the Country Music Roll of Renown. At the time of his death at the age of 76, Dusty had been working on his 106th album for EMI Records. In 2007 his domestic record sales in Australia surpassed seven million.

Early life and career

David Gordon Kirkpatrick was born on 13 June 1927 in Kempsey, New South Wales, the son of a cattle farmer. Kirkpatrick adopted the stage name "Slim Dusty" in 1938 at eleven years of age. His earliest musical influences included Jimmie Rodgers. In 1945, Dusty wrote When the Rain Tumbles Down in July and released his first record that year at the age of eighteen. In 1946, he signed his first recording contract with Columbia Graphophone for the Regal Zonophone label.

Rise to fame and enduring popularity

In 1951 Dusty married singer-songwriter Joy McKean and, with her help, achieved great success around Australia. In 1954 the two launched a full time business career, including the Slim Dusty Travelling Show. McKean was Dusty's wife and manager for over 50 years. Together the couple had two children, Anne Kirkpatrick and David Kirkpatrick, who are also accomplished singer-songwriters. McKean wrote several of Dusty's most popular songs, including: "Walk A Country Mile", "Indian Pacific", "Kelly's Offsider", "The Angel Of Goulburn Hill" and "The Biggest Disappointment". Although himself an accomplished writer of songs, Dusty had a number of other songwriters, including Mack Cormack, Gordon Parsons, Stan Coster, and Kelly Dixon, who were typically short on formal education but big on personal experience of the Australian bush. Drawing on his travels and such writers over a span of decades, Dusty chronicled the story of a rapidly changing postwar Australian nation. Nevertheless, the arrival of rock and roll music saw major metropolitan music radio stations abandon support for country artists, and despite record sales in the multimillions, after the 1950s Dusty was rarely heard on-air outside regional centres in Australia.

Dusty's 1957 hit "A Pub With No Beer" was the biggest-selling record by an Australian to that time, the first Australian single to go gold, and the first and only 78 rpm record to be awarded a gold disc. Over the course of his career, he collected more gold and platinum albums than any other Australian artist. (The "Pub with No Beer" is a real place, in Taylors Arm, not far from Kempsey where Slim was born). In 1959 and 1960 Dutch and German cover versions of the song became number one hits (even evergreens) in Belgium, Austria and Germany, brought by the Flemish country singer-guitarist and amusement park founder Bobbejaan Schoepen.

1964 saw the establishment of the annual Slim Dusty Australia-round tour, a 48,280 kilometres (30,000 mi) journey that went on for ten months. This regular event was the subject of a feature film, The Slim Dusty Movie, in 1984.

Dusty recorded not only songs written by himself and other fellow Australian performers but also classic Australian poems by Henry Lawson and Banjo Paterson, with new tunes to call attention to the old 'Bush Ballads.' An example is The Man from Snowy River by Paterson. In 1970 he was made a Member of the Order of the British Empire for services to music. In 1973 he won Best Single at the inaugural Country Music Awards of Australia at the Tamworth Country Music Festival (McKean won Song of the Year as writer of "Lights On The Hill"). In all, he won a record 35 "Golden Guitars" over the years.

Slim Dusty and his wife were patrons of the National Truck Drivers' Memorial located at Tarcutta, New South Wales. The General Manager of the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville, Tennessee, invited him and his wife to perform in 1997, recognising 50 years contributing to Country Music. The following January, he was awarded an Officer of the Order of Australia for his service to the entertainment industry.

Dusty recorded and released his one hundredth album, Looking Forward, Looking Back, in 2000. All 100 albums had been recorded with the same record label, EMI, making Dusty the very first music artist in the world to record 100 albums with the same label. He was then given the honour of singing Waltzing Matilda in the Closing Ceremony of the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games, with the whole stadium singing along with him.

Death

Dusty died at his home in St Ives, New South Wales, on 19 September 2003 at the age of 76 after a protracted battle with cancer.

Thousands gathered at St. Andrew's Cathedral, Sydney, on 26 September 2003 at a state funeral attended by the prime minister and the opposition leader. Anglican Dean of Sydney Phillip Jensen's tribute included leading the congregation of family, statesmen, fans, and musicians in the singing of "A Pub With No Beer". The funeral featured tributes from Slim's children as well as words from other national music stars (Peter Garrett and John Williamson) and music from Graeme Connors, Kasey Chambers, and Troy Cassar-Daley. Thousands of fans travelled from around Australia to stand outside the cathedral.

At the time of his death, Dusty had been working on his 106th album for EMI. The album Columbia Lane - the Last Sessions debuted at number five in the Australian album charts and number one on the country charts on 8 March 2004. It went gold after being on sale for less than two weeks.

Columbia Lane is a tribute to the laneway juxtaposed to Parramatta Road in Strathfield (near the railway bridge link), where the EMI studios once stood (now Kennards Hire), and it is where he traversed to begin his music career.

In 2004, Tamworth hosted the "Concert for Slim" as a memorial tribute featuring more than 30 Australian musical artists including Paul Kelly, Keith Urban, Lee Kernaghan and Kasey Chambers

In 2005, a statue of the "Cunumulla Fella" was unveiled in Cunnamulla, Queensland, in tribute to Dusty and Stan Coster and to the iconic song of that name performed by Dusty with lyrics by Coster. The song recalls Coster's days working as a sheep-shearing "ringer" around Cunnamulla in the 1950s. Dusty recorded the song and it became an enduring country music hit, later covered by Lee Kernaghan. The statue was unveiled by country music personalities Anne Kirkpatrick (Dusty's daughter), Jayne Kelly, and Tracy and Russell Coster.

EMI Records' Australian sales of Slim Dusty records surpassed 7 million in 2007.

Honours and milestones

Slim Dusty was Australia's most successful and prolific musical artist, with more Gold and Platinum albums than any other Australian artist. Slim Dusty was also:

Legacy