First Golden Guitar winner Joy McKean dies aged 93
The singer and songwriter, who married Australian country legend Slim Dusty, died on Thursday.
Joy McKean, the singer and songwriter who married Australian country legend Slim Dusty, died on Thursday aged 93.
McKean grew up on the dairy farm of her mother’s family, but her dad was a schoolteacher who played steel guitar and with his wife passed on an enthusiasm for country music.
It was an era in which more radios were to be found in Australian homes. And McKean’s mother encouraged Joy and her sister Heather to listen to Saturday radio shows when the diet favoured the American country music acts of the day – the Carter family and Jimmy Rogers, then the biggest US act of the day.
The girls played a variety of instruments, and Joy found she had an affinity for piano, accordion and, of course, her father’s steel guitar.
Aged just 10 she appeared on Sydney radio station 2GB and later both girls – by now Heather was more than proficient on the ukulele – would host radio shows on Saturdays. Both girls yodelled, a form of singing popular around the world. While studying at Sydney University, Joy also performed for its famous Revue.
In 1949 2SM broadcaster and country music star Tim McNamara introduced her to Slim Dusty, but Dusty was popular with women and it took a while for him to notice Joy.
They married in 1951 and she took Dusty’s real surname (he was David Kirkpatrick). She performed alongside Dusty and wrote songs with and for him for the rest of his life. Dusty passed away in 2003.
Joy was awarded an Order of Australia in 1991 for services to music. In 1973 she won the first ever Golden Guitar at Tamworth for a hit she wrote for Dusty The Lights on The Hill. In 2013, a cover version of it by Troy Cassar-Daley and Adam Harvey topped the charts. It has also been covered by Keith Urban and the band Mental as Anything.
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