Slim Dusty

When Slim Dusty sang at the closing ceremony of the 2000 Sydney Olympics, the world heard the original bush balladeer on the grand stage he deserved, even though, in galactic terms, the transmission of his 1957 hit "A Pub with No Beer" from the space shuttle (in 1983) was perhaps a tad more impressive. Slim's greatest hits begin here.

Slim's 1967 album, [i]Songs My Father Sang to Me[/i], makes clear his debt to the sounds of rural USA: "My Old Kentucky Home" was written by Stephen Collins Foster (aka the Father of American Music) and remains the anthem of the Kentucky Derby, which makes "The Melbourne Cup," about Oz's great horse race, a companion tune.

In 1951 Slim married fellow performer and country music trooper Joy McKean, and three years later the couple embarked on the first of their legendary traveling Slim Dusty shows: Joy wrote "Lights on the Hill" for her husband, which won Song of the Year at the inaugural Australasian Country Music Awards in 1973.

Like many rural Aussies (including Kasey Chambers) David Gordon Kirkpatrick was raised on the American roots country of Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family. He chose the moniker Slim Dusty at the age of 11, and set about uniting imported musical traditions with the folklore, poetry, and sounds of the bush. The result was a type of music that belongs exclusively to the country men and women of Australia. When he died in 2003, he was working on his 106th album, which says all you need to know about his dedication to his art. A man, a hat, a guitar . . . and the vast Australian landscape painted into our imaginations in song.