Dusty Thou Art
It happens too often. I first learn about someone from an obituary.
Australian singer Slim Dusty died in late 2003. I was especially taken with the fact that he’d kicked the bucket after setting a worldwide record of having made 105 albums and CDs with a single label (EMI and it predecessors) over his career. That’s worth a listen, isn’t it?
So I ordered a “best of” CD, cranked it up and … didn’t like it much. The singing seemed middle of the road semi-country, uninspired. My wife, by contrast, latched on immediately – not big time, but she found if bouncy, authentic (tell me you don’t you cringe at that word), homey, all of that. So I listened again, liked it a bit more.
With every replay, the songs became … more familiar of course, but somehow right. I came to realize that what Dusty was putting across wasn’t a goofy version of laidback American country, but the face of the Aussie outback, which isn’t quite like anything we have here: We see the Great Plains and the expanses of the West as the ultimate reach in desolation. But in Australia, cattle stations (their equivalent of our ranches) are as big as Rhode Island. It doesn’t just take hours to cross them in a beatup Land Rover, it can take days. It makes you understand the value of your “mate” – human faces are so few and far between you don’t know when you’ll see another human being, so you value every encounter.
The opposite side of listening to these lonesome songs is that the approach is almost 100% musically modeled on the U.S. Two thirds of Slim Dusty’s output is based in Western Swing, if a milder, more restricted Western swing. Check out youtube: You find that most of his performances feature only guitar backup, plus a couple woman singers, probably locals roped in for that performance. Now and then you hear drums, keyboard and/or fiddle, but that’s unusual. And I didn’t see a banjo anywhere.
The CD I picked up (which of course includes “Waltzing Matilda”) is mostly guitar solo or additional minimal backup. That’s where and who Slim Dusty is. You’re in the middle of the end of the world, sitting under a eucalyptus (if you’re lucky): That’s all you have, all you need.
(I have a two-disc collection of Australian harmonica tunes, “Band in a Waistcoat Pocket.” Think about it – you’re a hundred miles from the nearest Robert Johnson crossroads, stripped to the bare essentials, what’s your minimalist instrument? A harmonica.
(But what do you play? Strangely, through the mid 20th century, in Australia you played medleys of such American tunes as “The Sidewalks of New York.” Were there no indigenous Aussie tunes? Maybe not. But why not snatches of English ballads and music hall? There’s a bit of that in the collection, but that wasn’t what carried into the waste. Either the outbackers illusioned the American West as their nearest counterpart, or they wanted nothing to do with Mother England, a momma who had shipped their ancestors across thousands of miles of ocean to the vastest dry nowhere on earth.)
Slim Dusty is friendly, immediate, no-bullshit, true-to-tomorrow. You’d love to meet the man, not only in an Aussie pub, but in a bar anywhere in the world. You’d buy him a round, he’d buy you a round, no trouble, fair dinkum. He’d tell you a story and put it to music. A simple story, one you maybe heard before, but he makes it more familiar, more … Yeah … I know what that’s like.
There’s lots of simple humor. He sings about the “Wobbly Boot” that besets his foot when he’s had a bit too much to drink. But that’s another interesting thing with Dusty: He sings more than a bit about the joys of imbibing, but he slips in more than the occasional note of caution about drink, praising “G'day Blue,” a quiet mate anyone would buy a drink but who never gets over the edge; or lamenting “He’s a Good Bloke When He’s Sober,” but “a pain in the rear when he’s full,” a pleasantly inane little man in “real” life who bores everyone soporific while sozzled.
Dusty had one international hit, “A Pub with No Beer.” It’s a funny, half joke song, but why should it go worldwide when it’s quintessentially Australian: the sweaty, filthed-down traveler slogging all those behind-the-world’s-wainscoting miles to get a drink with his seldom-scene mates – and there’s no beer! Ain’t that the wombat’s pajamas?
Slim Dusty’s in my 1200-song random-shuffle car player that runs from Gregorian chant to Beethoven to the Missa Luba to Tuvan throat singers to Andean pipers and beyond. Linda and I both drift mellow when we travel Slim’s “The Indian Pacific,” a train chugging thousands of miles across the southern arc of Australia. It’s a gentle paean to somewhere I’ve never been but should have, rattling through a nowhere landscape I hope someday to see. It makes me nostalgic for a place I’ve never been.
That’s music.
by Derek Davis