Daryl Braithwaite sings The Horses with hit writer Rickie Lee Jones

MUCH-loved performer Daryl Braithwaite has finally joined forces in song with Rickie Lee Jones with the pair teaming up to perform the enduring hit, The Horses, during Jones’s Melbourne concert tour.

MUCH-loved performer Daryl Braithwaite has finally joined forces in song with Rickie Lee Jones with the pair teaming up to perform the enduring hit, The Horses, during Jones’s Melbourne concert tour.

A two-time Grammy winner, Jones wrote and recorded The Horses in 1989, and it was rerecorded by Braithwaite in 1991 and hitting number 1 on the Australian charts.

The song has become an Australian anthem — and is known as the Moonee Valley anthem on Cox Plate Day.

Braithwaite was welcomed on stage by Jones five songs into her set at the Melbourne Recital Centre on Friday night for the much-anticipated duet.

``He sang it a lot better than me, that is why he had a big hit,’’ Jones told the crowd, expressing her gratitude to Braithwaite turning the song into an iconic crowd pleaser.

Jones said she realised the enormity of Braithwaite’s version of her song, a track she wrote her for her daughter, when she saw the Cox Plate TV telecast when she was in town for the Melbourne Festival in 2011.

``I got into Melbourne and when I got to my hotel I turned on my TV and there was a horse race on,’’ she said.

``The whole horse race auditorium was singing `That’s the way it’s gonna be little darling,’ and that is when I realised it had become anthemic here.’’