Toowoomba’s Gowrie Gals host 1940s-themed music, dinner event with DownsSteam Railway

A trio of talented Toowoomba women are bringing back the 1940s with their pitch-perfect vocals — and their next show will have their guests travelling back in time.

When Bronwyn Blanck met Sara Hales and Ebony Rosier through the Toowoomba big band scene about 18 months ago, they quickly realised they were not just vocally harmonious.

“These girls came along, and we’re just gelled and our voices seem to blend really nicely,” Ms Blanck said.

The trio, who call themselves the Gowrie Girls, is earning a reputation as Toowoomba’s own version of the famous Andrews Sisters, pairing tight vocal arrangements with styles from bygone eras.

But rather than being a straight tribute to the iconic 1940s act, Ms Rosier said the group was taking the musical style and applying it to more contemporary tunes.

Toowoomba vocal trio The Gowrie Gals, made up of Sara Hales, Bronwyn Blanck and Ebony Rosier, are performing on DownsSteam Railway's Commissioner railcar on its trip to Clifton as part of 1940s-style event on November 22.

“If you read about the Andrews Sisters, they themselves were imitators of the Boswell Sisters, another group that was around before them,” she said.

“They did their own little take and there have been many musicians since then, like Christina Aguilera and Bette Midler who’d done their own versions of the Andrews Sisters stuff.

“I feel like while we want to leave that music in that style, we also want to make it our own.”

This is culminating is a special event this month organised with DownsSteam Tourist Railway, which will treat guests to an evening train ride on “The Commissioner” to Clifton.

Dubbed The Gowrie Girls’ Glamour Special, the 1940s-themed experience will see the trio performing songs in the style of the era both to and from Clifton.

Evening the food will be inspired from the period, in what Ms Hales said would be an immersive journey.

“It’s a whole 1940s-themed event, we leave Drayton at about 5pm and we all go to Clifton, and there’ll be a 1940s dinner there (at O’Shanley’s Irish Pub),” she said.

“We’ll perform on the way there and on the way back — there’s even a competition for the best 1940s costume.

“It’ll be really fun event – we’ve done a few events with DownsSteam because of the historic nature of what they do, and the trains really fit what we do.”

Toowoomba vocal trio The Gowrie Gals, made up of Sara Hales, Bronwyn Blanck and Ebony Rosier, are performing on DownsSteam Railway's Commissioner railcar on its trip to Clifton as part of 1940s-style event on November 22.

Ms Hales said the Gowrie Girls will also resurrect an arrangement of a musical piece they found at an antiques shop — a song for which they can’t find any digital recording.

“I was at the antique shop up at Crows Nest months ago and we found this big stack of antique sheet music and I’m leafing through this sheet music thinking ‘we really need something’ and I find this song,” she said.

“It’s called Yokosan, a Japanese love song by James B Beam and it’s a vocal arrangement (by William Stickles) from 1929 for three voices — I was chatting with the guy in the antique shop, because I said ‘I wonder what this sounds like, I’ve never heard of this song before’.

“He just gave us the sheet music, so we’ve actually got that in our repertoire.

“You can’t find it anywhere, there’s no YouTube version, so it’s really fun for us to discover this piece of music that no one has heard before (digitally), and it’s really good.”

Tickets for the Gowrie Girls Glamour Special can be found by heading to the DownsSteam website and clicking on “book tickets”.