Email to a friend Printer friendly Font: * * * * Like the American-influenced Urban, Australian country music has long been cross-pollinated by North America. Radio helped spread Australia’s native, folk-based country music in the 1930s, but it also introduced highly influential American acts like the Carter Family and the yodelling Jimmie Rodgers.

Radio and records also shot Tex Morton, the Yodelling Boundary Rider and acknowledged father of Australian country music, into the spotlight in the ’30s. Publicity pictures of Morton who, like Urban, was born in New Zealand, find him decked out in cowboy hat and boots in the fashion of Gene Autry and countless other American singing cowboys. “I have a picture disc, a vinyl record, by Tex,” says the 40-year-old Urban.

“You can hear him roll his Rs like an American, which is funny because years later Australian singers are getting criticized for singing with a twang.” With town halls, fair grounds and even circuses featuring country music performers, the groundswell continued through the 1940s and ’50s. Singer Smoky Dawson, a whip-cracking matinee idol, enjoyed a ten-year radio run starting in 1952 along with television success.

More memorably, Slim Dusty wrote the first of 1000 country songs by the age of ten and released Australia’s first international number one hit, The Pub with No Beer, in 1957. He eventually released more gold and platinum albums than any other Australian on record. Accorded a state funeral when he died in 2003, Dusty had “tremendous compassion for the land and the indigenous peoples,” says Urban, who toured with Dusty.