Ted Albert Award - Joy McKean

THE TED ALBERT AWARD FOR OUTSTANDING SERVICES TO AUSTRALIAN MUSIC, 2021

The Australian Music Vault is proud to honour the achievements of this year’s recipient of the Ted Albert Award for Outstanding Services to Australian Music, Joy McKean OAM. The Ted Albert Award is one of the nation’s most prestigious music awards. It is awarded annually by the Australasian Performing Right Association (APRA) in honour of pioneering independent record producer Ted Albert, whose company, Albert Productions, was home to music icons The Easybeats, AC/DC, The Angels, Rose Tattoo and John Paul Young. Previous winners of the award include The Seekers, Ian “Molly” Meldrum, Fifa Riccobono, Archie Roach, Midnight Oil, Rob Potts and Midnight Oil.

FROM POLIO TO IGNITE LIGHTS ON THE HILL

Music journalist David Dawson reflects on the career of Australian bush balladeer and ‘Queen of Australian country music’, Joy McKean.

The long colourful life of singer-songwriter, yodeller and bush music pioneer Joy McKean OAM reads like a country hit song. Joy suffered polio as a child, debuted on Sydney radio station 2GB at the tender age of 9 and wrote her first song at 12. She also hosted a weekly commercial country music radio show on major Sydney AM station 2KY at the age of 18 alongside younger sister Heather, then 16. The Melody Trail Show ran for 11 years whilst they recorded for Rodeo Records and performed widely.

Born in 1930 in Singleton NSW to schoolteacher father Silas ‘Mac’ McKean, who played Hawaiian steel guitar and mother Millie, who played piano. Joy was raised in a household filled with self-made music. Joy was treated for polio at the clinic of famed Australian bush nurse Sister Elizabeth Kenny. Sister Kenny was honoured in a 1946 American biographical movie that eulogised her altruism despite opposition from the then medical establishment. Joy learned accordion, piano and acoustic guitar while Heather played ukulele as they both became renowned for their yodelling. In 1942, Joy and Heather started performing together, and in 1945 formed The McKean Sisters, releasing singles ‘Gymkhana Yodel’ and ‘Yodel Down The Valley.’ 

Joy married country music icon Slim Dusty in 1951 and started touring together in 1954. Together they blazed a trail as they toured the outback 10 months a year in the rain and heat. Their extended inter-generational music family began annual national tours in 1964 encompassing 30,000-mile, 10-month journeys. Their car towed a caravan and they played agricultural shows and town halls where they often sold their own tickets and cleaned the venues before and after concerts. Joy and Slim also raised two University educated children – Dr David Kirkpatrick and singer Anne Kirkpatrick – who followed in their musical footsteps as singers and songwriters. That was long after going on the road as infants and watching shows from bush and town concert hall stage wings in cradles.

Now at 91 years of age, Joy’s life is not just a country song – she wrote some of the best that became huge hits for Slim and many other peers. She started writing in an era when male stars as diverse as Slim Dusty, Smoky Dawson and expat Kiwi Tex Morton reigned in the cities, suburbs and way beyond in remote red dirt towns, Indigenous communities and arid farmlands.

“I have done a lot of songwriting and I began writing when I was a child of about 12,” Joy revealed on the eve of the all-star 2020 Concert For Joy in Tamworth. “As all of you songwriters out there can tell me it’s a hard road, really, to put into one short song all that you want to say.”

McKean’s song recipients have endured seven decades to the new millennium where major artists including Keith Urban, Adam Harvey, Don Walker, Paul Kelly, Troy Cassar-Daley, Kasey Chambers and Beccy Cole have earned the soulful survivor lucrative publishing royalties.

“I am absolutely so pleased with the progress of country music in Australia and the way that women are taking such a large part in it 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.”

McKean’s songs connected because they reflected reality rooted tales from her journey on pot-holed and muddy backroads and humane homages. They have long been illustrated in movies, DVDs, books, television and radio shows, driven by the release of more than 100 vinyl and CD albums by Slim and Joy.

In 1983 the McKean Sisters were inducted into the Australian Roll of Renown and Joy was inducted as a solo act in 2020 so it’s no surprise that she has won an eclectic array of Golden Guitars and APRA Awards for her song writing. Her major songs include ‘Lights on the Hill’, ‘Indian Pacific’, ‘Angel of Goulburn Hill’, ‘Walk A Country Mile’, ‘Biggest Disappointment’, ‘Beat of the Government Stroke’, ‘Lady is a Truckie’, ‘Peppimenarti Cradle’ and ‘Kelly’s Offsider’.

But the journey doesn’t end there. Joy and Slim were two of the co-founders of the Country Music Association of Australia in 1992, with Joy serving as Treasurer for some ten years and then as Chairman before retiring in 2003. Joy worked tirelessly alongside her family, and with the Slim Dusty Foundation Board, to establish and open the Slim Dusty Centre in Slim’s hometown of Kempsey in northern NSW in 2015. Slim & Joy purchased the Nulla-Nulla Creek farm where he was raised shortly before he died after a protracted battle with kidney cancer on 19 September 2003 at the age of 76.  This led to Joy being involved in a NSW Government campaign to enforce smokefree environments for performers, musicians and workers in music and entertainment venues, seeing that smoking has been linked as a factor in kidney cancer. Joy’s incredible story has been shared in her 300-page 2014 memoir Riding This Road, as well as in other autobiographies written with Slim.

The 2020 Australian documentary film Slim and I, directed by Kriv Stenders of Red Dog fame, told their story with covers of her songs by artists including Missy Higgins, Paul Kelly, Troy Cassar-Daley and Keith Urban. The film’s soundtrack included a new McKean composition called ‘I Don't Believe You’, co-written with grandson James Arneman and his wife Flora Smith who perform in Melbourne and beyond as Small Town Romance.
 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

David Dawson
Veteran Australian journalist, TV and radio show host, songwriter and awards show judge David Dawson began writing about country music as a cadet on the Launceston Examiner in 1965. He first toured the U.S. in 1978 as a mainstream media feature writer and genre guest on Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne commercial radio stations. Dawson, 74, co-hosted High In The Saddle on 3RRR for a decade from the late 80s and another two years on PBS.

He was founder and President of aspirant broadcaster Nu Country FM from 1994-2001 before producing and co-hosting Nu Country TV from 2002-2021 on Channel 31/Digital 44 in Victoria. Dawson is also a country music judge in the Age, ARIA and Tamworth Golden Guitar Awards.

He has written satirical country songs including the Dead Livers tune ‘I’d Love To Have A Joint With Willie’ about the Slim Dusty hit ‘Duncan and Hillbillies Hate Change’ with expat Kiwi Darcy LeYear and Slim’s late brother-in-law Reg Lindsay OAM. Dawson also penned other songs including ‘Death Breath’ with LeYear for late trucking singer Nev Nicolls and ‘Jodie’, released by LeYear and fellow country singer B. J. McKay.

He was one of five Australians in the international section of the 2019 U.S. Country Music Awards in the U.S. when nominated for Wesley Rose International Media Achievement Award.