Long before Aboriginal painters, film-makers and dance companies were winning world-wide acclaim, it was country music that first gave Aboriginal people a voice in modern white Australia. Country music and black skin may seem, to some, unlikely bedfellows – and indeed, for the longest time this music was buried to a broader Australian audience otherwise in love with bush balladry and Slim Dusty – but for indigenous Australians it made perfect sense, with its loping rhythms, plaintive melodies, storytelling bent and recurrent themes of lost love, the land, and mother.
Buried Country: Live in Concert is a touring stageshow version of Clinton Walker’s groundbreaking book, film and album Buried Country: The Story of Aboriginal Country Music.
Originally published in 2000, it was only in 2015, when new updated editions of the book and CD were released, that Buried Country took the leap from cult classic to “a masterpiece” as described by the Australian Book Review in its 2015 Books of the Year list – and all this recent acclaim and activity has inspired the creation of a long overdue concert adaptation.
Buried Country: Live in Concert is the ultimate celebration of Aboriginal country music, bringing together an extensive cast of star singers and songwriters from across the generations and across the continent, performing a selection of the genre’s greatest hits.
It will premiere on Saturday, August 20, in the Playhouse on Hunter Street in Newcastle.
The show had its first rehearsals in Tamworth during the country music festival there in January, and on its final day at Enrec Studios put on a special invite-only showcase attended by Paul Kelly, Catherine Britt, Allan Pigram and others, including The Australian’s music editor Iain Shedden, who described it as “a stirring occasion.”
The concert will emerge as a coherent and moving song cycle, mixing appearances by elders like Roger Knox, Auriel Andrew and L.J. Hill with those by younger artists like Leah Flanagan and Luke Peacock, and those in between like Warren H. Williams and Franny Peters-Little. Leading the house band The Backtrackers, Musical Director Brendan Gallagher (latter-day Jimmy Little producer) is calling on the talents of some of the best pickers in the country, including Jason Walker on pedal steel, Cruel Sea drummer Jim Elliott and, making for three generations of Knox on stage, gun guitarist Buddy Knox and his son, Teangi Knox, on bass (grandson of Roger Knox and Auriel Andrew): This is indeed Koori Country royalty!
The show will take audiences on a journey that’s at once sad, resolute and joyous, and it will ensure that the music – the songs and the stories – live on…
Buried Country – Live in Concert
Saturday 20 August 2016
Playhouse, Hunter Street Newcastle