Country musician Chad Morgan proves after chart-topper the Sheik of Scrubby Creek he’s no one-hit wonder

SOME 65 years ago, he and the most famous overbite in Australia were launched into recording history. Where is Chad Morgan now?

Country music icon Chad Morgan at the Woodford Folk Festival last year. Picture: Lachie Millard

THE documentary about his life is called I’m Not Dead Yet and at 84, Queensland’s unstoppable country music trouper Chad Morgan is still a big hit wherever he plays.

Barry Humphries used Chad’s distinctive choppers as his inspiration for Les Patterson’s teeth and 65 years after he and the most famous overbite in Australia were launched into recording history, Chad told me this week that he is still performing when he’s not looking after his ailing wife Joanie.

Australian comedic country music singer Chad Morgan, The Sheik of Scrubby Creek, as many will best remember him.

Whenever he can Chad dons the big cowboy hat, picks up his well-worn guitar and heads off to entertain audiences as he has for almost all his life, playing alongside artists as diverse as Bob Dylan, Tex Morton, the Bee Gees and Mental as Anything.

Chad was up in his old stamping ground last month at Blackbutt in the South Burnett, opening the Bunya Nut Cafe’s Scrubby Creek Bar, named after his first and most famous recording hit.

A few weeks earlier he was on stage in Tamworth.

Some while ago I was at Chad’s house at Caboolture, interviewing the grand old man of Australian entertainment. He ushered me inside, past three cats, big bags of cat food and, propped against a wall, several gold records and a platinum one for the 1981 album Sheilas, Drongos, Dills and Other Geezers.

“That’s for sellin’ 50,000,” he told me nonchalantly, “but it’s done more than that now.” So has the tune that put him on the map, his 1952 debut hit The Sheik of Scrubby Creek.

Singer Chad Morgan is inducted to the Australasian Country Music Roll of Renown at the Tamworth Country Music Festival in 1987.

Chad limped into his “inner sanctum’’, a small, cluttered study with an open filing cabinet spewing paperwork, a couple of battered old amplifiers, more framed records, a small audio mixing console and an impressive desktop computer he built himself.

“I can take computers apart and build my own,” said the man who grew up mustering cattle around Wondai and Goomeri.

“Built one for my brother, one for my daughter, one for my son-in-law ... built about six of the bastards.”

He offered to burn me a disc of his new song. “It’s easy,” he told me, feeding a blank disc into his disc drive. He took off his cap and scratched his bald pate. “Let’s see ... I switch this bastard on. Then I turn this bastard off. Then I turn this bastard on.”

Silence. “Get up there, ya mongrel,” Chad said, whacking the computer with his good hand like he was back in the bush cracking a stockwhip behind a mob of wild steers.

The Sheik, about a backwoods Romeo and sung with dog yelps peppered throughout, had its first public airing in 1952 when Chad, then a 19-year-old National Service cook at the Amberley RAAF base, stepped up to the mic in Brisbane for the radio talent show Australia’s Amateur Hour. He scored a recording contract with Regal Zonophone, EMI’s country label.

The Sheik outsold Bing Crosby, Frankie Laine and Frank Sinatra in Australia that year. In 1956 he was invited to tour Australia with Slim Dusty’s country music show.

Five years later he was a father of three and took his family touring to gigs right across the map. Chad’s son Allan told me that he went to 14 schools from Cabramatta to Kalgoorlie and by the time he was eight he’d been around Australia three times, crossing the Nullarbor twice before it had bitumen.

One of Chad’s proudest moments came in 1978 when he and Slim Dusty sang together on the steps of the Sydney Opera House. At the Tamworth Country Music Festival in 2010 Chad had the audience of 5000 on their feet when he received the inaugural lifetime achievement award.

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Grantlee Kieza’s latest book Mrs Kelly: The Astonishing Life of Ned Kelly’s Mother is published by HarperCollins/ABC Books