TAMWORTH’S famous country music awards turn 40 this month and the woman who collected the very first Golden Guitar, Joy McKean, will be arriving in style.
Australian country music royalty, Joy and her late husband Slim Dusty travelled Australia time and again, taking their ballads to most remote corners and creating a bush life like no other.
Many of those miles were made in a deep purple 1972 Ford Fairlane, which pulled the family’s caravan, and today is as much-loved and famous as the legendary artists themselves.
“Old Purple” will star in the 2012 festival’s big Saturday cavalcade on January 28.
Joy has her “all done up, tyres checked and all” and will drive the car up from Sydney herself.
“But I won’t be driving her in the parade,” Joy said.
“Old Purple has a mind of her own. She is totally temperamental. Sometimes she’ll not drive slowly in high temperatures and I’m not taking the risk of her coming to a complete halt when all eyes are on me.”
So the majestic car, whose speedo has circled the clock at least three times indicating more than 300,000 dusty kilometres covered during three around-Australia trips, will ride the cavalcade on the back of a truck.
It’s fitting that some of the drawcards of the 10-day 2012 festival, which kicked off on Friday, will come at the hands of the family who were there at the start.
Joy won the first Golden Guitar for Song of the Year for penning “Lights on the Hill”, inspired by at trip she took over the Moonbi Range, just out of Tamworth, towing a caravan in the dark and rain.
It’s a song Slim used as a concert “closer” for about 30 years, that is considered the first Aussie trucking song, and one that on any day of the annual January festival you’ll hear being performed by a busker, a pub band or a big star.
Through the years Joy said she’s heard so many strange and creative tales of how that song originated.
There was even one, she said, that had her driving Old Purple to Mount Isa when the incident occurred.
“You tell me where on the Western Queensland plains there is a steep cliff on the highway,” Joy laughs.
So entrenched in Australian culture are Slim Dusty songs, many written by Joy, that it seems if people didn’t know the real story behind them, they invented one to fit.
So to “set the record straight”, Joy McKean has told, in her own words, the yarns behind some of Australian country music’s best known songs in a new coffee table book I’ve Been There (and back again), published by Hachette Australia.
At the 2012 Tamworth Country Music Festival, she will be giving a talk about the book, which includes some never-before-seen photographs of Slim - even some of him minus his trademark Akubra hat.
Joy has six Golden Guitars for her song writing and Slim an incredible 37, and Joy has missed only two Tamworth country music festivals, due to illness.
The couple did their first concert at the festival as a donation in order to kick the event along.
The 2012 Golden Guitars, announced on January 28, will be hosted by radio presenter Ray Hadley and artist Felicity Urquhart and in the running are Adam Harvey, Shane Nicholson, Beccy Cole and international superstar Keith Urban.
Also coinciding with the 2012 festival is the launch of an album of Slim songs, performed by the cream of Australia’s traditional country music artists.
To mark its release, a concert to celebrate, hosted by Slim and Joy’s children Anne and David Kirkpatrick, will be held on January 27 at the Balladeers Homestead in Tamworth.
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