Joy McKean: queen of the hill
Few Australian musicians have seen more of this country than Joy McKean, soon to celebrate her 90th birthday with a concert in Tamworth.
On a Wednesday night in October, the second annual Australian Women in Music Awards were held at the Brisbane Powerhouse, where a series of mostly early-career women got up and gratefully accepted their awards, and in the process gave some of the most touching and inspiring speeches heard at any music industry event anywhere.
Yet one of the night’s major accolades was saved for near the end of proceedings, when country singer-songwriter Joy McKean was announced as a lifetime achievement award winner.
Slowly but surely, McKean made her way to the stage with her daughter, Anne Kirkpatrick, by her side. Having quietly sat through about two hours of entertainment and congratulations by this point, the 89-year-old saw her opportunity to say something meaningful and resonant, and she took it with both hands.
“The first thing I can say is I never thought it would ever happen – an awards night for us!” she said, smiling. “I used to always think that all this might eventually happen, but it took a darn long while. But it’s been a lot of fun along the way, and I’ve had a lot of help.”
A good portion of the audience may have looked down at the slight, bespectacled woman with a walking stick and sparkling top, and thought she looked like a relic from another era. In one sense they’d be correct, but through another lens, they were also looking at one of the indisputable pioneering figures of live musical entertainment in this country.
“I started off singing when I was a child,” said McKean. “Since then, I’ve done a lot of different things. With my sister, Heather, we were probably the very youngest of country music broadcasters: I was 18, she was 16. We sang together for a long time.
“You would know me also in relation to the years of travelling with my husband, Slim Dusty. And because I’ve done so many different things in my life, I have to give him credit with making me do them. You see, Slim was a great believer in what I could do, if he, you know, made the pressure heavy.”
In 1954 McKean and Dusty hitched a caravan to their car and began touring this wide land in such a comprehensive manner that it would blow the minds of many of today’s popular acts, for whom the idea of a national tour consists of visiting five capital cities, and maybe Newcastle and the Gold Coast, before flying home and putting their feet up.
For McKean and Dusty, touring meant just that: hitting the road for 10 or more months of every year, and driving from place to place as a travelling roadshow of entertainment. If there was a town hall, they’d hire it for the night – which usually meant sweeping and cleaning these oft-dusty spaces before and after the show – and camping behind the venue.
If there wasn’t a suitable indoor space, they’d sometimes set up their banners, staging and amplification somewhere outdoors, in the middle of town, and take ticket sales themselves.
“I want to thank all the musicians that have helped me along the way, and helped me learn to knock a bit of music out of something,” she said in Brisbane.
“I have done a lot of songwriting, and I began writing when I was a child of about 12. As all you songwriters out there can tell me, it’s a hard road, really, to try and put into one short song all that you want to say.”
The general idea of the Slim Dusty Show was to drop into small population centres and give the locals the sort of experience they’d be talking about for ages once the show rolled on elsewhere. And, ideally, when the show returned to the town again – the following year, if not sooner – word of mouth would have been such that they’d sell more tickets than the last time.
The term “work-life balance” had yet to be invented back then, but for the two partners in life and music, work and life were so bound up together as to be more or less perfectly balanced. Their first child, Anne, was two years old when they set out on their first tour; later, as a young adult, she decided to follow in her parents’ footsteps by becoming a country singer-songwriter and winning acclaim in her own right.
This was life on the road for travelling musicians in the 1950s, as documented in McKean’s rollicking 2014 memoir, Riding This Road. Its 300-odd pages are required reading for any contemporary artist who reckons they’ve got it tough today, in the era of bitumen roads, airconditioning and cheap air travel, among the many other modern conveniences we tend to take for granted.
As McKean writes with great humour and heart near the end of her book: “I was riding the roads of Australia in the days when potholes, dirt, mud and bogs were the norm; I revel now in dual highways of tar. I was riding these roads in the cab of an old Inter truck, or in an old car that vapourised the petrol in its lines the minute it got a bit hot; I was riding these roads before we had cars and caravans of comfort and reliable performance.”
Lest this short excerpt of a long and entertaining book give the wrong impression, it should be pointed out that McKean’s is not a hardluck tale, nor intended to resemble a comedy sketch in the vein of Monty Python’s old men spluttering “luxury!” at the ignorance or naivety of younger generations.
On the contrary, after making the above observations, McKean exhibits a progressive streak that might surprise those who have pigeonholed country music – and its players – as inherently conservative folk.
“Maybe it is all right for me to think I have seen the best of it – but maybe, too, the best is yet to come,” she writes. “I’ve had a great time one way or another. It’s been a very interesting ride … so far.”
At the awards night in Brisbane, all of that went unseen and unheard by the audience in attendance; after all, how do you summarise 89 years of life in a few minutes before a largely unfamiliar crowd? Either way, McKean gave it her best shot and, judging by the warm response toward her impromptu and plain-spoken speech, she won over a few new fans, too.
Approaching the end of her time on stage, she offered this: “The other thing I want to say is that I am absolutely so pleased with the progress of country music in Australia, and the way that women are taking such a huge part of it in these days. Because in the first place, women and their writing in country music was being held back in a very stilted way. Now, I think that women in country music are writing what they want to write, and they’re singing it loud and clear.”
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On January 22, McKean will be in the audience to experience something rare and extraordinarily well-earned. Eight days after her 90th birthday, she will watch and listen as a dozens-strong cast of several generations of Australian musicians will perform her songs at The Concert for Joy, where her life’s work will be sung and played by the likes of Paul Kelly, Kasey Chambers, Troy Cassar-Daley, Beccy Cole and Don Walker, among many others.
“We don’t see each other that often, but we write to each other from time to time,” Paul Kelly tells Review. “We have connections through a love of history and poetry – and music, of course. People think of Slim’s influence as huge – which it is – and I think hers is as strong as [his]. Lights on the Hill, The Biggest Disappointment, Indian Pacific – lots of songs. Great storytelling songs.”
“But the other thing that’s important to say about her songwriting is that, musically, it’s really interesting, too,” says Kelly. “The Biggest Disappointment is not really a traditional country song, musically: it’s got a key change and interesting chords. There’s a sophistication to her writing. I’m really fond of her; she’s tough as. When I heard about the tribute night, I was really keen to be there.”
As for Don Walker, the songwriter who, at McKean’s request, penned a song named Looking Forward Looking Back for Slim Dusty’s 100th album release in 2000?
“The best example of her writing that everybody knows about is Lights on the Hill,” he says. “It has crossed my mind in years past – in decades past – to see if she’d like to write [music together]. But I’ve never asked that question. I don’t imagine that she’d write with too many people, and I don’t know if I would be in that cohort.
“Joy and Slim come from a much older tradition: as long as I’ve been doing this, for them, it’s like the last five minutes.”
The Cold Chisel pianist and songwriter recalls the first time he met McKean, when he was in a studio with Dusty and his bandmates recording a duet of Walker’s song, Charleville. When she dropped in on the session to check on how things were progressing, from the other side of the glass, he could detect a sudden shift in the atmosphere.
“There was a change in air pressure,” he says. “All these blokes who were part of Slim’s world all straightened up and stopped swearing.” A mark of respect toward her? “Absolutely, yes,” he replies. “It was like the boss had dropped into the workplace.”
Walker isn’t particularly fond of the moniker sometimes associated with McKean: the queen of Australian country music. “I wouldn’t put labels on Joy,” he says. Like Kelly, though – and like just about everyone who has come into contact with McKean – he’s certainly fond of her. “She’s a really nice person,” he says. “I have phone conversations with her, very occasionally, for no better reason than to say hello.”
It’s a fine idea, then, to gather some of the nation’s best songwriters to perform her best songs in celebration. As for whose idea that was? “It certainly wasn’t mine!” McKean tells Review by phone in mid-December. “I don’t quite know. I think everybody suddenly realised that it was my 90th birthday.”
She mentions that, following her husband’s death in 2003, the country music industry united for a tribute concert to raise funds for the Slim Dusty Foundation, which helped to buy a parcel of freehold land to establish the Slim Dusty Centre near his hometown of Kempsey, NSW.
“This time the thing that’s different is that everyone is singing one of my songs. I’m hugely complimented by that,” she says. “It’s fantastic; I’m going to be listening to different interpretations and wondering, ‘Now, why didn’t I think of doing it that way?’. It’s a huge thing that seems to be bigger than Ben-Hur, getting all this together. I’m staying well out of it; everybody else has been working like demons. It’s a lovely change, isn’t it, when you get old.”
After so many years spent riding the roads of Australia, working her backside off, writing songs, keeping the Slim Dusty Show running at all costs and connecting with vast swaths of the population, it seems only fair that, on this occasion, the woman at the centre of the celebration should be allowed to sit back and enjoy it as an onlooker, rather than the participant she has been on thousands of occasions throughout her long life in show business.
Still, the endlessly curious part of McKean can’t help but ask the occasional question about what might be in store for the concert in her name. Who’s singing such-and-such? Is someone singing Marty, her favourite song? They are? You beauty! Oh, they’re doing that other one as a duet? That should be all right, she reckons.
“Don’t worry – I’m enjoying myself!” she says, her laugh echoing down the line. “Oh, dear. It makes life interesting, it does indeed.”
The Concert for Joy will be held at the Tamworth Regional Entertainment Conference Centre (TRECC) on January 22.