I only have one concrete memory of Aussie music icon Slim Dusty, and as embarrassing as it may seem, I’m fairly certain I’m not the only one in my generation who remembers him for this. It was when he did a duet with the Wiggles on I Love To Have A Dance With Dorothy, a kid-friendly reworking of his drinking song Duncan. Wiggly Wiggly World was in pretty heavy rotation for me as a kid, and to this day, it’s one of the main things I remember from my childhood. Even listening to it today, it gets my toes tapping… and fills me with a slight melancholy, as the singer tragically passed away from cancer when I was only eight years old. And yet that one core recollection I have of him, singing about mates joining together in dance, oddly fits with the depiction of him given in this documentary about him and his wife Joy McKean.
As described by his friends, colleagues, and family, and as shown through candid video of him at home and on the road as well as bits from Rob Stewart’s film The Slim Dusty Movie, Slim was a hard-working entertainer. Always on tour, recording like no one could stop him (over 100 albums during his lifetime), and restless any time he stayed in town for any longer than a couple weeks, if even that long. There’s definite reverence for the man coming through all the talking head interviewees here, even in spite of Joy’s occasional exasperation at his workaholic tendencies, but in service to a man who turned out to be a key part of Australian bush culture, and our first musical artist to break internationally, it’s reverence that feels deserved.
Provided you can deal with country-and-western music, that is. I know that country music is more hateable than ever these days, what with the rampant hip-hop-ification it’s gone through in the mainstream, but even before all that, country music was a punchline as far as music goes. A music historian in this film describes country music as the punk rock of the ‘30s: Iconic fashion (like the cowboy hat Slim literally didn’t recognised without), it started in America, and as far as middle-class snobs were concerned, it was trash. As funny as it is to hear this same dude describe yodelling as the guitar solo of Australian country music (with Joy and her sister McKean being described as the Hendrixes of that style), considering how much classic Western iconography runs through our country’s history (we have cowboy culture that can rival even the likes of the U.S.), it makes all the sense that one of our most famous artists would break ground with that style.
Personally, my foot never stopped tapping while watching this, and it helps that the film’s depiction of that music fleshes out a lot of what is provided on-film. Admittedly, the sound mixing could’ve been better, as the songs in the background do drown out the interview footage a few too many times here, but it’s clear when it needs to be, and it thankfully puts emphasis on who is providing it and for what reason.
The bulk of Slim’s music was written by Joy, and between that and her role as manager and strong-woman-behind-the-strong-man, her impact on his career (and, by proxy, Australian music and culture as a whole) deserves to be highlighted. Especially when the film gets into the artists they would influence like Paul Kelly and Missy Higgins, not to mention their music being able to unite rural Aussies, urban Aussies, and remote indigenous communities that most other artists didn’t bother bringing their music to. He’s the iconic Australian artist because he got all of Australia to sing to the same tune.
It makes for a refreshing change-up from what I’ve come to expect from director Kriv Stenders, whose previous work I found to be under-performing at best and downright unnecessary at worst. I guess he’s got a bit of that Ron Howard syndrome, where his docos stay good while the rest flounders. Regardless, it’s a comforting, if not exactly revealing, look at a local legend, and while the idea of combing through his exhaustive discography still feels a bit confronting, this film at least put me in a proper frame of reference so I can get started. Might be time to check out that Very Best Of compilation, methinks.
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