Judith Durham

Judith Durham is best known internationally for the four years she spent in the 1960s as the lead singer for the Seekers, the Australian-spawned folk quartet that, at one point, rivalled the Beatles and the Rolling Stones in chart records. Her own taste in music, before and since her involvement with the Seekers, however, runs more toward old-time jazz and big-band blues—-left to her own devices, Durham showed herself more attuned to the work of Bessie Smith or Billie Holiday, or Helen Morgan, than Mary Travers or Joan Baez, and she also knows how to write a good song, and what made the best songs of the 1920s and '30s tick — in an ideal world, she would've been in (and on the soundtracks of) the TV version of Pennies from Heaven or The Singing Detective. Her solo albums are few and far between, although they have begun appearing on compact disc, and she still records anew in the 1990s.