Slim Dusty

Slim Dusty stood out as Australia’s most prolific and highest-selling recording artist, moving more than five million units inside a home market of roughly twenty million while earning comparison with the enduring icons of country music. During 2000 the seventy-three-year-old legend issued his one-hundredth album.

Born David Gordon Kirpatrick in Kempsey, New South Wales, he passed the greater part of his early years on a dairy farm. His father’s habit of singing to his own fiddle accompaniment supplied the first decisive musical spark while the future artist was still a toddler. At ten he heard an Aboriginal man perform “The Drunkard’s Child,” an experience that redirected his life; that same year he composed his initial song, “The Way the Cowboy Died.” One year later he adopted the stage name Slim Dusty. In 1942, already presenting himself as a seasoned fifteen-year-old performer, he persuaded a local radio station to let him cut two tracks—“Song for the Aussies” and “My Final Song”—at his own expense. He soon became a regular broadcaster and, in 1945, wrote the enduring classic “When the Rain Tumbles Down in July.” November 1946 found him in Sydney, where he laid down six sides that became his first three 78 rpm singles, beginning with the same rain song. By then he was balancing these efforts with part-time work in music halls and tent shows. In 1952 he married fellow country performer and songwriter Joy McKean.

By April 1957 Slim already possessed more than a decade of recording experience yet lacked one track to complete a scheduled four-song session. While traveling with Gordon Parsons, who had set a poem by Dan Shean to music, Slim requested the number as a B-side for “Saddle Boy.” Parsons agreed, viewing “A Pub With No Beer” as nothing more than a novelty. Months afterward, while working in outback Queensland, Slim learned that the flip side had entered Brisbane’s pop charts; within the following weeks “A Pub With No Beer” became the first Australian-made single to top the national chart. It later reached number three in England and enjoyed strong sales in the United States, remaining for a considerable period the best-selling single in Australian history.

Thereafter Slim’s path was secure. Instantly recognizable in his workman’s hat with its turned-down brim, he embodied the sort of country performer many Americans felt they had lost—an artist who, across a century of albums, chronicled the Australian landscape and its inhabitants while crisscrossing the continent. Leading local songwriters regularly offered him material. Over the decades he collected every major honor, from Golden Guitars at the Tamworth Music Awards to the Member of the British Empire medal.

Slim’s life ended in Sydney on 19 September 2003 after a battle with kidney cancer. His stature within Australian music remained enormous; one vivid demonstration occurred in September 2000 when he appeared among the performers at the closing ceremony of the Sydney Olympic Games and delivered the nation’s unofficial anthem, “Waltzin’ Matilda.” No other artist would have suited the moment as fittingly.