Slim Dusty

Slim Dusty is Australia’s most prolific recording artist ever and in the true sense of the word a legend.  He can also claim to be our country’s best selling national artist with more than seven million units sold.

The release of “Looking Forward Looking Back”, his 100th album, in 2000 was a milestone in his career and in music history.

With this release Slim became the only recording artist in music history to have recorded 100 albums with the same label.  The album went on to have 4 top 10 country singles and to date has sold over 180,000 copies – and counting – not bad for a ten-year-old boy who, in the 1940’s on a remote dairy farm in the hills behind Kempsey, dreamed of being a country music singer.

Dr. David Kirkpatrick – Slim Dusty Foundation Chairman

& son of Slim Dusty.

He called himself “Slim Dusty” and began to live that dream.  But even the most optimistic farm boy would never have imagined the life that was to unfold, a life that would establish Slim as the voice of our nation, the chronicler of over half a century of our nation’s history.

Fifty years on and the dream is brighter than ever. The main reason Slim Dusty managed to hold on to those early visions of writing and singing about the bush is that during his lengthy career Slim kept in touch with his audience and managed to do this in a very real and meaningful way. So much so that they feel that Slim was one of their mates and his songs are “just as good as a yarn you might hear from a mate at the pub, around a campfire in the bush or at a backyard barbie”.

Slim described his music as “songs about real Australians”.  “I have to be fair dinkum with my audience.  I can’t see any other way of doing it.  You have to believe in what you are singing about.”

Keith Urban

Slim Dusty was the first Australian to receive a Gold Record (still the only 78 rpm gold in existence in this country). Slim was the first Australian to have an international record hit, and the first singer in the world to have his voice beamed to earth from space (in 1981, astronauts Bob Crippen and John Young played Slim’s “Waltzing Matilda” from space shuttle ‘Columbia’ as it passed over Australia).

His amazing career spanned five decades, has him holding 38 Gold Guitars from 72 nominations (an achievement as yet unequaled), and more Gold and Platinum Record Awards than any other Australian artist. He has been inducted into the ARIA Hall of Fame and has been given the ARIA Special Achievement Award. He has Platinum and Gold video sales Awards, the MBE and AO for his services to entertainment, one of the earliest members on the Roll of Renown and countless other awards and honours.

He is with out a doubt respected by all sides of the industry and rightly so. From the bush heartland to the soul of the cities, Slim has proved time and time again that consistency is important, family and heritage matters and that for him it is, and always has been, about the music.

Troy Cassar-Daley