page_title: Australian country music
section_title: Development of modern country
hierarchical_section_title: Australian country music / Overview / Development of modern country
caption_attribution_description: English: Chad Morgan at the premiere of I'm Not Dead Yet in June 2011.
context_page_description: Australian country music is a part of the music of Australia. There is a broad range of styles, from bluegrass, to yodeling to folk to the more popular. The genre has been influenced by Celtic and English folk music, the Australian bush ballad tradition, as well as by popular American country music. Themes include: outback life, the lives of stockmen, truckers and outlaws, songs of romance and of political protest; and songs about the "beauty and the terror" of the Australian bush. Early pioneers included Tex Morton, Smoky Dawson, Buddy Williams, Slim Dusty and Johnny Ashcroft all members of the Australian Roll of Renown.
context_section_description: Pioneers of a more Americanised popular country music in Australia included Tex Morton (known as The Father of Australian Country Music) in the 1930s and other early stars like Buddy Williams, Shirley Thoms and Smoky Dawson. In 1932, Tex Morton arrived from New Zealand, aged 16, and humped his swag around outback stations where he began to earn a name as a performer. In 1936 he cut his first commercial records in Australia. He went on to establish a distinctly Australian bush ballad style, shifting from American songs to songs about Australia. He attained national popularity in the 1930s and formed a traveling "Rodeo and Wildwest Show" in the 1940s. In 1949 he travelled to North America and Europe enjoying great success as a stage hypnotist, working in film and with artists such as Hank Williams. He returned to Australia in the early 1960s, by which time a generation of performers had carved a place for the Australian themed country music he pioneered.
  Smoky Dawson cut his first recording in 1941: "I’m a Happy Go Lucky Cowhand". In 1952, Dawson began a radio show, and went on to national stardom as a yodelling, whip cracking, knife throwing, singing cowboy of radio, TV and film.
  Known as "Canada's Yodelling Cowboy", Donn Reynolds (1921-1997) began a 40-year international career upon cutting several popular sides in 1947 on the Regal Zonophone label including "Old Bush Shanty of Mine" and "Stockman's Lullaby". He toured with Willard (Bill) Ferrier's Famous Hillbillies in what was Sydney's first all-country format variety shows and became the voice of Australia's iconic Peters Ice Cream as the "Peter's Singing Cowboy". Reynolds achieved notoriety through song and screen performances worldwide, and later established 2 world records for yodeling.
  Slim Dusty (AM) (1927–2003) was known as the "King of Australian Country Music", and helped to popularise the Australian bush ballad. His successful career spanned almost six decades and his 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. Dusty remains Australia's most successful and prolific performer, and won more Gold and Platinum albums than any other Australian artist. Dusty recorded and released his one-hundredth album in the year 2000 and was given the honour of singing Waltzing Matilda in the closing ceremony of the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games. Dusty was accorded a state funeral upon his death and with over 7 million Australian record sales he remains Australia's most successful domestic music artist.
  Slim Dusty's wife Joy McKean, (OAM) penned several of his most popular songs including "Indian Pacific", "The Biggest Disappointment" and “Lights on the Hill”. Their daughter Anne Kirkpatrick is also a successful singer-songwriter. The family began annual round Australia tours in 1964 - encompassing a 30,000-mile, 10-month journey which was the subject of a feature film, The Slim Dusty Movie in 1984.
  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. Coster wrote popular Dusty bush ballads including "The Cunamulla Fella" and "Three Rivers Hotel" based on his own experience of working as a sheep hand and railway construction worker. Drawing on his travels and such writers over a span of decades, Dusty almost inadvertently chronicled the story of a rapidly changing post-war Australian nation. Nevertheless, the arrival of rock and roll music saw major metropolitan music radio stations abandon support for country artists like Dusty and despite record sales in the multi millions, he and other successful Australian country artists were rarely heard on air outside regional centres in Australia until the new cross-over pop-country styles of the 1990s began to be heard again on city airwaves.
  In 1951, country singer-songwriter Reg Lindsay, 
caption: Chad Morgan, the "clown prince" of Australian country music. Morgan has been performing since the 1950s. His works are peppered with colourful Australian vernacular.
exif: {"Image ImageWidth": "2592", "Image ImageLength": "3888", "Image BitsPerSample": "[8, 8, 8]", "Image PhotometricInterpretation": "2", "Image Make": "Canon", "Image Model": "Canon EOS 40D", "Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image SamplesPerPixel": "3", "Image XResolution": "72", "Image YResolution": "72", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "Adobe Photoshop Elements 9.0 Windows", "Image DateTime": "2011:10:06 22:07:54", "Image Artist": "Eva Rinaldi", "Image YCbCrPositioning": "Co-sited", "Image ExifOffset": "332", "GPS GPSVersionID": "[2, 2, 0, 0]", "Image GPSInfo": "1140", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "1254", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "5219", "EXIF ExposureTime": "1/200", "EXIF FNumber": "5", "EXIF ExposureProgram": "Program Normal", "EXIF ISOSpeedRatings": "400", "EXIF ExifVersion": "0221", "EXIF DateTimeOriginal": "2011:06:14 20:58:48", "EXIF DateTimeDigitized": "2011:06:14 20:58:48", "EXIF ComponentsConfiguration": "YCbCr", "EXIF ShutterSpeedValue": "61/8", "EXIF ApertureValue": "37/8", "EXIF ExposureBiasValue": "0", "EXIF MaxApertureValue": "3", "EXIF SubjectDistance": "61/50", "EXIF MeteringMode": "Pattern", "EXIF Flash": "Flash did not fire, compulsory flash mode", "EXIF FocalLength": "64", "EXIF SubSecTime": "00", "EXIF SubSecTimeOriginal": "00", "EXIF SubSecTimeDigitized": "00", "EXIF FlashPixVersion": "0100", "EXIF ColorSpace": "sRGB", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "550", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "825", "Interoperability InteroperabilityIndex": "R98", "Interoperability InteroperabilityVersion": "[48, 49, 48, 48]", "EXIF InteroperabilityOffset": "1108", "EXIF FocalPlaneXResolution": "324000/73", "EXIF FocalPlaneYResolution": "2592000/583", "EXIF FocalPlaneResolutionUnit": "2", "EXIF CustomRendered": "Normal", "EXIF ExposureMode": "Auto Exposure", "EXIF WhiteBalance": "Auto", "EXIF SceneCaptureType": "Standard"}