Originally published at ABC Arts Online, May 2015
Two
years ago during a visit to Alice Springs, I was invited to an open mic at one
of the town’s few music venues, the Todd Tavern. Among a line-up of acts full
of contrasts in terms of both style and quality, there was one smiling, fairly
unkempt middle-aged man wearing a wide-brimmed hat and check shirt who played
his own set of country ballads on acoustic guitar, before later joining several
other musicians who performed as the night wore on.
This
turned out to be Warren H Williams, one of the Northern Territory’s most
treasured musical exports, revered nationwide for continuing the spirit of
Indigenous country music, a movement documented with zealous passion and
rigorous attention to detail in Clinton Walker’s Buried Country: The story of Aboriginal country music, a revised
and updated new edition of which was recently published by Portland,
Oregon-based Verse Chorus Press.
In
the original 2000 edition of the book Williams is portrayed as a more nascent
talent emerging from the fog of alcoholism. His late father, however, Gus
Williams, is one of Buried Country’s
stars, along with artists like the clean-cut, showbiz-ready Jimmy Little, the
melancholic troubadour Dougie Young, boxer-cum-singer Lionel Rose, songwriter
Herb Laughton with his more sensitive artistry, the combustible Bobby McLeod
and many more.
The
new edition of Buried Country
features a poetic foreword by Paul Kelly, as well as an updated introduction
and afterword from Walker. The rest of the book, with each chapter dedicated to
celebrating one artist or community of artists, remains largely as in the
original edition. Its reprint comes as a timely, gentle reminder of this rich
Australian musical tradition.
But
to many, it may be strange – Aboriginals appropriating a music that is often
associated with the white American South and the potentially dubious ideologies
that come with that, seems like an odd match. But after 20 years of observing
its ebb and flow, Walker remains as convinced as ever of the profundity of
Indigenous Australia’s connection with country music. Of course, the soundtrack
to Warwick Thornton’s wonderful 2009 Alice Springs-set film Samson and Delilah, with its Charley
Pride songs, hints at this relationship too.
“I
found, and still find, that the love for country music among Aboriginal people
is genuine and incredibly enduring,” says Walker from his home in Sydney’s
Inner West. “I understand why it can be seen as kind of bizarre – why didn’t
Aboriginal people do, say blues music? One simple answer is that the exposure
of Aboriginal people in Australia, or any people in Australia, to black
American music was really limited. It just didn’t reach here. But country music
was always popular.”
Sheer
musical logistics is one reason for country’s popularity among Aboriginal
musicians – the style was all that could be heard outside Australia’s cities
for many years in the first half of the twentieth century. Other reasons,
Walker notes in his new introduction, include that country music was dominated
by story songs, something that chimed with Aboriginal culture’s oral tradition;
the fact the style is played mainly on guitar, rendering it portable and
accessible; the fact it allowed Aboriginal artists to utilise their tradition
of mimicry and therefore “throw the white man’s songs back at him” and finally,
and arguably most importantly, its rhythms and melodies were infused with a
mournfulness and sense of loss that Aboriginal people could identify with all
too easily.
Though
Buried Country is a warm tribute to
unheralded voices, as with any study that addresses Aboriginal culture in the
twentieth century, there is a thread of deep sadness running through this tome.
Walker tells some confronting, disturbing tales, including that of Herb Laughton,
who was stolen when he was two years old and spent much of his early life
trying to find his mother, leaving him with emotional scars that led to him to
attempting suicide in the eighties. His music endured. Alcoholism, violence,
mental illness and incarceration are all themes in the lives of Dougie Young,
Vic Simms, Bobby McLeod and Roger Knox. The best of the genre’s songs, too, are
infected with tragedy, none more moving than Bob Randall’s ‘Brown Skin Baby’
with its haunting wail and elegiac lyrics for the stolen generation (Randall’s
death was recently reported).
Despite
this, Walker managed to give the book a strong sense of hope, while still being
unflinching about the injustices many of these musicians suffered. “Of course I
wanted to keep the focus on the music,” he says, “but I had to put it in the
context of the larger background, that’s how I tell a story.
“Many
people comment that there is an uplifting nature to the book, though I don’t
know if I set out with an agenda to have that. Obviously I didn’t want it all
to be down, as it’s difficult to make that work as a writer, but I think this
is a story about ‘doing it’, about not surrendering. That’s what’s so amazing
about these people, the mere fact that they did it.”
Sadly,
this perseverance did not lead to a recorded legacy for many artists. Walker’s
favourite albums of Aboriginal country include Vic Simms’ The Loner, recorded in 1973 while Sims was in Bathurst Gaol (and
recently reissued by Sandman Records); Olive Knight’s more recent Gospel Blues at the Edge of the Desert and
Black Allan Barker’s Fire Burning, a
cassette-only album that is now nigh on impossible to find. There are, however,
countless artists who didn’t even get that far.
“There
were lots of black artists that didn’t get through by dint of the way music in
those communities worked – people just going around and playing little dos. There’s
probably a lot of people we didn’t get to hear, and that’s a terrible loss.”
Another
factor that contributed to Aboriginal country artists not achieving more
success than they did is adroitly described in the book: “The very Aboriginal
concept of collective ownership discourages self-promotion. Songs are shared
around – only for the common good, not commercial gain.”
Bob
Randall, for instance, insisted on not accepting royalties for ‘Brown Skin
Baby’, while most performers profiled and interviewed in Buried Country exhibit a rare, soft humility. However, the issue of
Indigenous culture being at odds with self-promotion and, let’s say, artistic
ego, is one way the landscape of Aboriginal country music has changed since the
book’s first edition in 2000. In short, the democratisation and self-publishing
possibilities of the internet have determined that Aboriginal artists must now
make at least some claim on their original work.
“Aboriginal
copyright is a white-hot, or black-hot issue,” says Walker. “The Aboriginal
artists that I’ve met and got to know, like any songwriters, have their
identity threatened by the internet and the destruction of copyright.
“When Aboriginal people first came to modern music, it was indeed those old
ways or principles that might have held them back a bit. But as soon as you hit
the music business, you have to protect yourself because otherwise you're going
to get ripped off, and that happens to white as well as black. So as much as
promotion, it's protection, or self-preservation, and Aboriginal artists
quickly adapted. I think most anyone who writes a song in this day and age will
be trying to protect their creation to some extent.”
Readers
of Buried Country will note that the
history of Aboriginal country music is, largely, male – simply due to which
artists were able to penetrate rather than any omissions on Walker’s part. The
women featured in depth include Wilga Williams, the Pitt Sisters, Auriel Andrew
and Ruby Hunter – all remarkable stories, yet the book is dominated by male
talents. This is partly why Walker’s next book will be a history of black
female singers in Australia. Entitled Deadly
Woman Blues, it is set for publication in 2016.
“I
realised there was this other whole story,” says Walker of his experience
researching the music of Australia’s Deep North and discovering a diverse range
of female sounds and characters, which then led to him delving into black
female vocalists from across the country, dating back to the nineteenth
century.
Deadly Woman Blues will be
somewhat more adventurous in terms of format than Buried Country, in that it will be an illustrated, Robert
Crumb-inspired piece of graphic non-fiction, “kind of like a comic book”. Walker
has been an artist since childhood and cites Guy Peellaert and Nik Cohn’s 1973 book
Rock Dreams, a seminal fusion of
image and text as music journalism, as a formative influence along with Crumb.
Over 100 singers will be covered.
“It will
be a bit like a set of bubblegum cards – presenting an image and then you flip
over the card and there’s a profile of your favourite footballer.
“There are
amazing stories of Aboriginal women who filtered through the early days of
jazz, blues, folk and serious opera singing. There were also black women who
moved to Australia at the turn of the twentieth century and became big
vaudeville stars.
“I suppose
the centre of the book is the sixties and seventies, and maybe one way of
describing it is that it will tell the story beyond the Sapphires. That was one
Aboriginal vocal group that had its moment – and never cut a record – but there
were many other women on the club circuit.”
Until Deadly Woman Blues is published next
year, Walker will continue on the promotion treadmill for Buried Country – something of a challenge for an author working
with an independent publisher based overseas – as well as work on his PhD, a
cultural history of Saturday Night Fever.
The death
of Bob Randall marks the passing of another important voice in this genre, yet
this, and the new edition of Buried
Country, can stand as impetus to revisit this desperately soulful, often
heartbreaking trove that is Aboriginal country music.
“I can’t
describe it in any other way than ‘sad ballads’,” says Walker. “There’s some
kind of tone, it’s in the language, it’s in the rhythms, it’s in the textures
that come through.”
Buried
Country: The story of Aboriginal country music is
available now through Verse Chorus Press.
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