SLIM Dusty, Australia's king of country who died last Friday aged 76, hit a warm chord among working-class Australians when he released his most famous song, "A Pub With No Beer", back in 1957.
What could be worse in hot, dusty, thirsty Australia than to walk into your local pub only to be told there was "no flaming beer"!
Well, it mightn't be quite such a tragedy today with trendy wines and spirits now flowing almost as freely as cold lager but back in the days when the lyrics to the first record to ever go gold in Australia first saw light of day - appropriately, at the Day Dawn Hotel at Ingham, north Queensland - beer drinking was almost a national sport.
Ingham cane cutter and local poet, Dan Sheahan, a glass of warm wine in his gnarled hand, angrily penned a poem about a pub with no beer when he turned up at the Day Dawn (Lee's Hotel now stands on the site) just after American troops had drunk the place dry during World War II.
(Pubs had beer quotas back then and visiting Yank soldiers often exhausted those limits.)
Not far from Kempsey, there was similar reminiscing going on at the Taylors Arm Hotel, formerly the Cosmopolitan - the pub where singer and songwriter, Gordon Parsons, adapted Mr Sheahan's poem 12 years later to include some of the Cosmopolitan's local characters and turned it into a song for Slim Dusty.
Such an uncomplicated song and more than 1000 others like it were what gave Slim Dusty so much of his appeal and why country music fans from across the country are expected to pack St Andrew's Cathedral Square tomorrow for his State funeral in Sydney.
They will be paying tribute not only to a country music career which spanned 60 years and achieved record sales of about six million but also to a genuine bushie (he grew up on a dairy farm at Nulla Nulla near Kempsey) who helped foster and support the continual growth of the country music industry in Australia.
In the late 1960s, Slim and his wife, Joy McKean, threw their weight behind moves to establish Tamworth as Australia's country music capital, and the couple were great supporters of the inception of the Country Music Awards in 1973.
When upheaval struck the awards format in 1991 without consultation with the country music industry, Slim, Joy, John Williamson, Mr Williamson's manager, Phil Matthews, and one of the awards' founders, Max Ellis, formed the Country Music Association of Australia (CMAA), electing Slim as the first chairman.
Within a year the CMAA had taken over the awards.
Slim stayed on as chairman until his retirement in 2001.
Mr Ellis said Slim led the association with the down-to-earth and uncomplicated attitude that was reflected in his songs and demonstrated his immense passion for the development of Australian country music in the position.
The current CMAA president, Mr Williamson, said Slim's vision for country music in Australia was evident in the help he gave so many young Australian musicians and his involvement in the Country Music College at Tamworth, taking many students on tour to help them build their own profiles and identities.
"Slim gave so many young country music singers the courage to pursue those dreams," he said.
"He had a unique purity, which he proved can be popular, and communicated beautifully with people from the bush.
"The fact that his first country song, 'Rain Tumbles Down in July', is still strong today is proof to other country music singers that simple, uncomplicated songs never lose their appeal."
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