David Gordon "Slim Dusty " Kirkpatrick AO, MBE (13 June 1927—19 September 2003) was an Australian country music singer-songwriter and producer, with a career spanning nearly eight decades.
He was known to record songs in the legacy of Australian poets Henry Lawson and Banjo Patterson that represented the Australian Bush Lifestyle, and also for his many trucking songs. Dusty was the first Australian to have a No. 1 Hit song with Gordon Parsons (Pub With No Beer).
He received an unequalled 37 Golden Guitar and two ARIA awards and was inducted into the ARIA Hall of Fame and the Country Music Roll of Renown. At the time of his death at the age of 76, Dusty had been working on his 106th album for EMI Records. In 2007 his domestic record sales in Australia surpassed seven million.
In 1951, Dusty married singer-songwriter Joy McKean and with her help, achieved great success around Australia. In 1954, the two launched a full time business career, including the Slim Dusty Travelling Show. McKean was Dusty's wife and manager for over 50 years. Together the couple had two children: Anne Kirkpatrick and David Kirkpatrick who are also accomplished singer-songwriters.
McKean wrote several of Dusty's most popular songs, including: "Walk A Country Mile", "Indian Pacific", "Kelly's Offsider", "The Angel Of Goulburn Hill" and "The Biggest Disappointment".[5] Although himself an accomplished writer of songs, Dusty had a number of other song writers including Mack Cormack, Gordon Parsons, Stan Coster and Kelly Dixon who were typically short on formal education but big on personal experience of the Australian bush. Drawing on his travels and such writers over a span of decades, Dusty chronicled the story of a rapidly changing post-war Australian nation. Nevertheless, the arrival of rock and roll music saw major metropolitan music radio stations abandon support for country artists and despite record sales in the multi millions, after the 1950s, Dusty was rarely heard on-air outside regional centres in Australia.
Dusty recorded and released his one-hundredth album, Looking Forward, Looking Back in 2000. All 100 albums had been recorded with the same record label, EMI, making Dusty the very first music artist in the world to record 100 albums with the same label. He was then given the honour of singing Waltzing Matilda in the Closing Ceremony of the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games, with the whole stadium singing along with him.
Dusty died at his home in St Ives, New South Wales on 19 September 2003 at the age of 76, after a protracted battle with cancer.
