Obituary: Slim Dusty

By ARNOLD PICKMERE

Slim Dusty, country music entertainer, died aged 76.

David Gordon Kirkpatrick had a notion of where he was headed even as a 10-year-old on his parent's remote dairy farm in the hills behind Kempsey, near Port Macquarie in northern New South Wales.

That was the time, it is said, when he decided to change his name to Slim Dusty and planned to set out with his guitar to seek his fortune.

The first song he wrote, in 1937, was The Way the Cowboy Dies. It didn't make his fortune.

Indeed most people outside the cosy world of Australian country music may have heard little of Slim Dusty were it not for a 1957 recording which became an international hit.

A Pub with No Beer, at that time the biggest-selling record by an Australian, was a simple little song, sung to an even simpler little tune, Beautiful Dreamer.

But the lament about there being "nothin' so lonesome, so dull or so drear than to stand in the bar of a pub with no beer" was a winner.

The verse which most people remember is about "Old Billy, the blacksmith, the first time in his life/ Has gone home cold sober to his darling wife/ He walks in the kitchen; she says 'You're early me dear'/Then he breaks down and he tells her that the pub's got no beer".

Slim Dusty told the story, but there is still some argument about the origin of the words, and even the identity of the country pub which inspired the song.

Queensland locals claim the song was inspired by a poem written by Dan Sheahan, who could not buy a beer because of wartime rationing and had to settle for wine.

According to legend, the poem was the basis for the hit song, written by Dusty's mate, bush worker and country music man Gordon Parsons.

The Queensland claim rests in Lee's Hotel, in Ingham, north Queensland.

In New South Wales, the Cosmopolitan Hotel in the township of Taylors Arm (not far from Kempsey) seems to have the best claim and now benefits from the tourism it attracts.

Whether the pub ran out of beer because of a flood or delivery delays seems a little hazy.

In his long career Slim Dusty recorded 106 albums, had career sales of about six million records and compact discs and won a host of country music and other awards.

He sang "songs about real Australians. I have to be fair dinkum with my audience. I can't see any other way of doing it," he said.

He started the Slim Dusty Road Show, a tent show on the showground circuit with showman Frankie Foster in 1956.

And he thought his strong point was the big rural content in his music, drawn from songwriters who were living on stations or working on the roads.

"What they write, they have done it or are doing it, " he said.

Slim Dusty recorded at least five albums of truckie songs, partly inspired by the Wall of Memory at Tarcutta, outside Wagga Wagga in rural New South Wales, for Australian truckies who have been killed.

In Kempsey this week the mayor, Janet Hayes, reckoned there would some serious drinking at Taylors Arm: "They might even drink the bloody place dry to remember Slim."

Slim Dusty, who died at home after a lengthy battle with cancer, is survived by his country singer-songwriter wife Joy McKean and children Anne and David.