"Don't be a Yank" says Chad Morgan last of the old-time Aussie showmen still on the road
Neville Duguid
of Saturday's Courier Mail, along with THEN and NOW pics. (Chad's
trademark buck teeth make him as instantly recognizable at 70 as he was
at 19). The Courier Mail seems to have discontinued posting their
feature articles on their Website, but text-only versions are still
available on the Web from their Newstext archive for a minimal fee.
I'll let Chad speak for himself by quoting from the beginning and end of
the untitled article by Bruce McMahon from page 30, The Courier Mail,
10-May-2003. For the rest of the article, including a brief highlights
from Chad's career, refer to the original sources cited above.
'...The Sheik of Scrubby Creek may have disappeared off a few jukeboxes.
And perhaps the man and the songs have faded from urban playlists, yet
there remain generations of fans across the country from Mareeba to Moe.
"Mate, I've never stopped in 51 years," says the bloke with the
buck-toothed grin.
"In fact, I'm enjoying it more these days -- the next show might be
the last.
"And it's terrific. There's three or four generations at the shows,
little kids down the front singing along with my songs.
"A 93-year-old woman came up at one show the other day, she's been
following me since I started. And they still want to hear the old
songs."
...
Morgan was doing his National Service at Amberley when mates prodded
him on to a radio show. He sang "The Sheik [of Scrubby Creek]", left
them laughing as he picked up an EMI contract and outsold Frank Sinatra,
Bing Crosby and Frankie Lane...
...
Morgan is working on another album right now, and hopes to showcase
that at the Tamworth Country Music Festival next January.
"How many's that? I've lost count of the albums," says the
70-year-old larrikin.
He does remember doing one serious album about 49 years into his
career. That's still selling well.
His advice to up-and-coming country artists is blunt: "Try and be
Australian, be yourelf, don't be a Yank."
Morgan believes there are some terrific new artists out there but
there's also a couple he's not mad about. No names, because Morgan is a
gentleman.
"But some of those young ones are churning out what I'd call feral
music -- it's not country, it's not rock and it's not pop."
Highlights of a long career included singing at the Sydney Opera
House with Slim Dusty in 1978 and a couple of film spots, including
"Newsfront".'
(c) The Courier Mail, Brisbane, 10-May-2003.
Dean Turner
bushman!!
Neville Duguid
> good post, chad was a favourite of mine as a kid, keep on singing, u dinkum
> bushman!!
I found this bio of Chad Morgan in a s/h book I bought recently at an
eBay auction under Books -> Non-fiction -> Australiana (or was it
'History'?). It is also interesting from a music industry perspective to
compare what was happening here in Australia in the 1950s and early 60s,
about the same time Johnny Cash, Elvis Presley and others were getting
their careers under way in the USA (Hank Williams is the less familiar
example given by the book). In a much smaller and more tenuous way here
in Austrlia, and more easily snuffed out by the deluge of canned foreign
imports, of course.
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Quoted from 'Country Music In Australia', Vol 2, by Eric Watson,
Cornstalk Publishing, Sydney, 1983, pp. 72-78:
CHAD MORGAN
-----------
It is just a little over 160 kilometres from Toowoomba in Queensland,
where Steele Rudd observed the originals of the immortal "On Our
Selection" characters, to Howard, where Chad Morgan spent his youth 50
years later. Perhaps Chad had never heard of Rudd, though he would have
been familiar with the ridiculous and offensive caricatures into which
film and radio distorted Dad and Dave, but there is a kinship in the
early work of the two men which could only have come from a sensitive
observation on the part of each of the same basic realities.
Much had changed on the Darling Downs and neighbouring areas in the
years between, but subsistence farming was still the order of the day
for many. The people were two generations closer to coming to terms with
the land. Their attitudes had been modified by experience, but they were
still basically the same attitudes. The hope and the hopelessness,
paradoxically, had both increased.
Morgan's work, either as a literary product or a social comment, does
not have the breadth, the finish or the volume of Rudd's. Nevertheless,
at its best, in songs like The Duckinwilla Dance, there is the same
accurate perception of the same world, the same basic approach: he never
tells you how his people feel or what they think, he looks at them with
a penetrating eye and tells you what they do and say. Like Rudd's,
Morgan's rare vision did not last for long, but degenerated into comic
farce and slapstick. This probably occurred partly because his changed
lifestyle removed those tensions in his environment which precipitated
his early work, and partly, as was the case with Rudd again, because
that was what his audience understood.
Chad Morgan was born at Wondai, Queensland, on 12 February 1933. His
parents were still in their teens, and could not find work in the
troubled depression times. He was the first of a family which finally
totalled 14 children, but was brought up by his grandparents.
Grandfather was a migratory bush worker, and Chad's early life was spent
in an assortment of houses and camps as they moved from job to job. His
education was a rather spasmodic affair of correspondence lessons,
varied now and then by brief attendances at regular schools. The
schools, at Gayndah, Narrabundah and Hervey Bay, were hard for him. He
never stayed long enough to get past the status of the new kid, he had
not learned to mix with other children, and his prominent teeth made him
a sitting shot for tormentors. He was never sorry when they moved on.
When he was 13 his grandfather died, and Chad and his grandmother
went to live with his real parents at Scrubby Creek, near Howard, which
appears on the maps as Duckinwilla Creek. His dad was cutting mine
timber, and Chad joined him instead of continuing school.
Chad listened to country music as far back as he can remember. His
earliest memory is at four years of age, when a farmer from whom they
got milk used to give him a penny each afternoon to yodel for him. Tex
Morton and Buddy Williams were his youthful idols, and when he was 14 he
taught himself to play a guitar borrowed from a friend.
He wrote a couple of straight country songs which he never sang to
anybody, and fell in love with one of the local girls. Social contacts
were not easy for him, and he was too shy to even say hello to the girl,
let alone tell her how he felt. He was 16 at the time, and was in the
process of pouring his heart into a love song for her when he became
angry with himself, told himself he was the "Sheik of Scrubby Creek" and
could get any girl he wanted. He wrote the immortal opus then and there,
instead of the forlorn love song, as a gesture of defiance.
When he had finished, there was no feeling of having done anything
special. He sang it to the family who were mildly amused, and nobody
else was to hear it for another three years. Shortly after that he went
cane-cutting, and wrote a lot more songs, some of which he sang to his
mates in the camps as he went from job to job. Quite a lot of people
told him he should be doing more with his talent, but he didn't take a
lot of notice.
Singing idly for your mates in the huts at night was one thing, but
public performance was another, and Chad only once made the effort in
those years. He was prevailed upon to sing one of his songs at a
Duckinwilla dance, but sang behind a wall, out of sight of his audience
because he was too shy to face them.
In 1950 Chad joined the RAAF, and was stationed at Amberley. He got
used to singing his songs for the boys in the barracks, and opened out
enough to sing at air force dances and between bouts at their boxing
tournaments.
Then one of the boys auditioned for Australia's Amateur Hour, and
Chad's mates said, "If he can do it, so can you". He was accepted and
was a sensation in his Brisbane heat, winning by a mile, singing The
Sheik of Scrubby Creek. They flew him to Sydney for the semi-finals, and
the result was the same. Then came the finals, and he filled second
place to a brother and sister piano duo.
When the Amateur Hour people told him EMI wanted to record him, Chad
hastily declined. "I want to record for Regal Zonophone," he said. When
they explained that EMI was Regal Zonophone, it was one of the greatest
moments of his life. The power of the famous red and green label was so
strong among Australian country artists that most of them would have
given 20 years of their lives to see their names on it.
Chad recorded The Sheik of Scrubby Creek on 24 October 1952, and
remembers being scared to death at the session. He was out of the RAAF
then, living with a stepsister in Tewantin, Queensland, and working in a
garage. After the session he went back to Scrubby Creek. He didn't feel
like a celebrity and wasn't treated like one; in fact, life went on
exactly the same. He went to work on a cattle station near Rockhampton,
and returned home for Christmas.
Returning home from town on his motor bike, laden with Christmas
presents for the kids, he met a car on a corner with its lights on high
beam and on the wrong side of the road. He left the road and hit a tree,
and when people from a nearby house picked him up the bones were
sticking through his leg. He can recall persuading somebody to
straighten his leg before it got cold, and a policeman rolling smokes
for him while they waited for the ambulance. When he was put in his
hospital bed, with the leg set and lying there with his eyes closed, he
remembers, too, a nurse saying, "So that's the sheik. He doesn't look
much like a sheik now." Chad opened one eye and replied, "Just hop in
here for a minute, love, and see what you think then."
It was a bad break, and a long time passed before he could work. He
was on sickness benefits for months, then got sick of doing nothing and
drove a tractor for a while with one good leg. The record had sold
exceptionally well, and was still selling; but he had never really
thought of doing another, or of taking his performing career any
further. He thought of the song and record as freak things, and EMI
regarded him as definitely a one-song singer. But after a year or two of
immobility, still unable to do any manual work, he decided to go to
Sydney and have a look around.
It was 1955. Chad was still very shy and didn't have much idea of how
to go about getting established, so progress was slow at first. He got a
couple of jobs singing on the showboat "Kalang", and met Billy Starlight
who stayed at the same boarding house for a while. Billy introduced him
to Kevin King, and he began to get work on shows. Television
broadcasting had not begun then, but Chad appeared with English pop star
Donald Peers on one of the first closed circuit productions to be done
in Australia.
He did his second recording session in 1955; six tracks this time,
including The Shotgun Wedding, Chasin' Sorts in Childers and the
Duckinwilla Dance. They proved that the one-song singer prediction had
been wrong, and the Chad Morgan cult, which still thrives today, was
well under way.
In 1956, Slim Dusty invited Chad to join his show, and that was the
start of his touring days. He learned the kind of stagecraft necessary
to keep country audiences happy in the barnstorming days of the early
road shows. He also gained experience in working the skits, and found
out what it felt like to travel as a celebrity, a public idol. They
didn't live like celebrities in those days, though. At first Chad shared
a caravan with Slim and Joy, and then Slim got a small van for Chad and
Gordon Parsons. The Slim Dusty Show got great houses, not surprisingly
with a line-up like that, but conditions were rough, expenses were high
and it was always a battle to survive.
On that trip Chad met Pam Mitchell, a young country singer from
Lismore, and after he left Slim Dusty in 1957, they were married. They
went back to a friend's farm in his home country for a while, then went
down to Sydney for a few shows with Ted Quigg and Reg Lindsay. After
another few months in Queensland cane-cutting, and the birth of their
first child, they returned to Sydney, and then did a couple of short
tours with Rick and Thel Carey, Kevin King and Nev Nicholls. Back in
Sydney they all decided to take out a show of their own, and the famous
All Star Western Show was born.
They did a two-week trial run, opening at Millthorpe, New South
Wales, and it was so successful they decided on an Australia-wide tour.
They were troubled by bad weather for the run up the coast, and things
didn't look too good for a while; but a night at Gympie in which they
took £200 - a fortune then - proved to be the turning of the tide, and
they never looked back. On the home run at the end of the year they
re-visited a lot of the towns that had been disappointing on the way up,
and packed out every hall.
In a little over a year of wildly successful showing, the All Star
Western Show ran its course. The four major acts shared the show equally
on a cooperative basis, and it was inevitable in the hothouse atmosphere
of a travelling show that this would lead to differences of opinion and
friction. Chad, for instance, proved to be the biggest drawcard on the
tour, and had given notice before the trip started that he intended to
go it alone when he felt he was ready. Rick and Thel, two people, with
the character Ratsack almost making a third, could have felt they were
contributing more in the way of artistic effort than the other partners.
Kevin and Nev, two straight vocalists, were also key acts, and there has
been a suggestion that they handled the lion's share of the offstage
work. In such a situation, sooner or later each partner can come to feel
that the others are not pulling their weight. Tragically, the show broke
up in bitterness, and it was a few years before cordiality returned to
the relationships between the All Star personnel.
Out of the wreck of the All Star Western Show came the Chad Morgan
Show, featuring Rick and Thel, which flourished for most of 1959 and
once again ended in disappointment. In 1960 the new Chad Morgan Show
went out, with Trevor Day and Peter Mollerson in the cast, Pam Morgan
doing the females; and it was a beauty. Sol Moss looked after the
advance work, staging was top class, and the road show business was at
perhaps its highest peak. It was probably the best performing period of
Chad's career, and he has this to say of Trevor Day: "As an artist and a
showman, not only on stage but off the stage as well, thinking of the
show and working for the show, and as a mate, the best bloke I've ever
travelled with." It is a sincere tribute from one great performer to
another, and shows a glimpse of the spirit that helped to make the show
such an outstanding success.
But Sol Moss left them in 1961, after which they had a series of bad
advance men. Also, the bottom fell out of the road show business that
year, as can be seen in other chapters. The show wound up, battered,
broke and penniless, at Mundubbera, Queensland, in 1961. Athol McCoy,
beset with similar problems on his show, decided to make a dash for
Tasmania, and offered Chad a spot. Chad left Pam and the kids in the
caravan at Mundubbera[*] and joined Athol for a sensationally successful
tour of the "Apple Isle", which restored both his finances and his
morale.
After a few months in Sydney, during which the Morgans lived at North
Rocks with Eddie Tapp and Paul Lester, they added Larry Mason's whips
and ropes to the bill and took a new Chad Morgan Show through Victoria.
The show ran into problems, not the least of which was that the people
of the Victorian countryside were staying home to watch their new
television sets, and once again the tour ended in disaster.
From 1964 to 1973 Chad toured the showground circuit with Frank
Foster, as Slim Dusty had done for the previous seven years. It was a
much less complex existence than the gamble of one's own road show. Chad
had a Sydney house for base, but most of the time was spent following
the agricultural shows through the states, and meals were rarely regular
throughout this period.
Since he first began touring, Chad has had grave inter-related
problems with self-doubt, health and alcohol. Sensitivity about his
appearance, going right back to the days when the kids tormented him at
school, is part of the problem.[written c1983] Ironically, those teeth
which came in for most of the ribbing are so important to his stage
image that he has them heavily insured and guards them carefully, rather
than having them straightened or removed. Like most of his fellow men,
there is a lot of the frightened little boy in Chad's make-up, under the
brash Morgan bravado, and alcohol has served to lift the pressure on
him.
In 1973 Chad suffered complete nervous breakdown. At that time Chad
had no family ties, and he does not know where or when his breakdown
began, or where he was during a lot of the time. But suddenly one day he
was sitting on a tractor ploughing, on a property near Theodore in
Queensland, and he couldn't figure out what he was doing there. He went
to a house on the property, and said to a man there, "How long have I
been here?" "About six months," said the man. "How did I get here?"
"Buggered if I know. You asked me in the Theodore pub if I had any work,
and I put you on. I thought you were a bit of a strange bloke at times,
but you've been doing a good job. You've ploughed over 2000 acres."
The awakening wasn't the end of the problem, and Chad was to spend
some time in a hospital. He emerged a changed man, and for some time did
not touch a drink. He looked fit for the first time in many years, and
with the very considerable help of John and Di Johns, and Dave and
Geraldine Pincombe, in Melbourne, set about rebuilding the career that
had been sliding downhill along with his personality for a long time
before the ploughing episode. He speaks very warmly of the help and
friendship he had from the Johns family, and says they virtually saved
his life.
The new Chad Morgan never reached a higher spot than in his
performance with the Slim Dusty Show at the Sydney Opera House in 1977.
He got encore after encore from the audience of 2500 in the Concert
Hall, and looked keen, fit and confident. Word went around the industry
that Morgan had found a new lease of life, and he looked set for the
kind of career that his talents fitted him for.
Under the management of the Pincombes, Chad's act took on a new
respectability. With Dave himself, who had left a full-time job in radio
with 3UZ Melbourne, the Chad Morgan Show became a star attraction at
prestigious venues in all states, and commanded top money - quite a
change from battling from town to town for whatever return the hall
shows offered. Word spread around all over Australia that the sheik was
better than ever, and a new wave of Morgan mania swept through the
country as his fans rejoiced for him.
On the way home from a show out of Melbourne his car slipped on ice,
rammed a tree, and he landed in hospital with 44 stitches in his head.
When he came out he had permanent violent headaches, and needed
prescribed drugs continuously to keep them at bay. The effect of the
drugs caused people to believe that he was drinking again, when they saw
him fumble for words and sometimes black out temporarily on stage; and
in fact he did begin to take an occasional drink. The drugs were
incompatible with alcohol, and one drink taken with them was enough to
wreck him completely. He had personal problems at the time, too, and the
whole thing became the usual vicious circle. His health and lifestyle
began to slip, and with it his performance. The best days of the
resurgence were over, for the time being at least.
Not much has changed at the time of writing [1983]. Most of the time
Chad meets his dates and performs well. Occasionally his health and his
problems result in a disastrous performance, and that is the one of
which news always travels like wildfire around the country. But in
reality his biggest problem is his health, not the drink.
One of the problems of the whole sheik phenomenon is that the
character Chad has created - a low, idiotic, illiterate rustic, totally
concerned with sex and grog and quite psychopathic in his pursuit of
them - works better if he appears to live the character out. Indeed, a
big sector of his public fairly demand it of him, and nothing delights
some of his "admirers" more than to see Chad being the sheik in real
life. He is actually a highly intelligent and extremely sensitive
person, and a big part of his problem stems from the conflict of the
roles.
-Eric Watson, 1983.
------------------------ (end of quoted text) ------------------------
[*] It seems the roadshow boom went bust in 1961, as a result both of
the record number of acts touring, and the introduction of television in
regional areas. According to other parts of the same book, Chad's wife
wasn't the only one left stranded without money in remote areas
throughout the length and breadth of the country. It is not hard to see
how someone like Chad could one day wake up to find himself driving a
tractor not far from where he had left his wife minding the kids on that
occasion.
======================================================================
I hope someone brings out an updated volume of that book, as Country
Music in Australia has undergone quite a renaissance over the last
decade, and there are a whole stack of new faces that most Aussies don't
even know about from being under the misconception that Aussie Country
Music breathed its last gasp ages ago. Kasey Chambers, recently 'Queen
of Pop', is an example of one who has recently made it across from
Country to mainstream, without needing to sacrifice her grassroots style
along the way.
R.M. O'Donnell
"Neville Duguid" <nevi...@bigpond.net.au> wrote in message
news:1fx4uu2.uu627o1viymf4N%
I have only seen Chad perform live once, at Yackandandah about 1972. He
certainly looked a little worse for wear from the booze then.
Chad's own children have described him as being much like the boozing
womanising characters he portrays in his songs.
He has always been a unique performer, certainly nothing Americanised about
him , unlike some other country singers.
RMOD
Neville Duguid
> "Neville Duguid" <nevi...@bigpond.net.au> wrote in message
> news:1fx4uu2.uu627o1viymf4N%
>
> I have only seen Chad perform live once, at Yackandandah about 1972.
That's gotta be in Victoria, right? ;-)
> He certainly looked a little worse for wear from the booze then.
> Chad's own children have described him as being much like the boozing
> womanising characters he portrays in his songs.
It's sometimes necessary to read 'between the lines' in interpreting
potted biographies like that. Particularly of a close-knit community
like the Oz Country Music scene where the artists all tended to know
each other. I would say it was a fairly 'frank' biography, provided you
realize that it is most likely couched in a tongue-in-cheek language in
places. When you have tight-knit fraternities like that, it's a bit
like being a professional in any other industry in Australia - they tend
to close ranks against outsiders who might be getting too nosey. Unlike
America where every community is big enough to be depersonalised, and
any personal confidence is considered fair game for selling to the
scandal sheets when you're short of a buck.
I hope we don't have to go all the way down that road ourselves, any
further than we already have.
Another thing about that book is that its publication was assisted by
the Australia Council. A worthy effort to promote Oz talent in many
respects, but probably either politicised or ideologically biassed in
its selection criteria. Note the three opening paragraphs tacked on at
the beginning prior to where the real biography begins, make literary
comparisons with an 'academically recognized' Australian author. Not
really appropriate to a C&W form guide imv, but probably a result of the
author trying to impress the selection panel that he was capable of
delivering a serious analysis of cultural relevance or somesuch,
possibly highlighted in his funding proposal.
> He has always been a unique performer, certainly nothing Americanised about
> him , unlike some other country singers.
As the article points out, Chad was just a 16-year-old kid teaching
himself to play on a borrowed guitar at the time he wrote his signature
song (even though it didn't become well known until he was older). It is
almost 'musical graffiti' in its stick-it-to-'em defiance of social
nicities which were still being upheld across the board in public at
that stage. If America had been nuked by the Russians, and baby-boomers
had no rock'n'roll to take as inspiration, Chad would have been about
all they had for inspiring 'rebelliousness' in their music here in
Australia. It would have been interesting to discover how far Australia
could have gone towards filling that niche and developing its own
'youth' culture stripped of sources of inspiration from overseas. There
were plenty of contemporary young Australian musicians inspired by
rock'n'roll, like Johnny O'Keefe, for example. Just think - without
rock'n'roll, JOK and others might have ended up sounding more like Chad
Morgan than Chuck Berry! ;-)
R.M. O'Donnell
> R.M. O'Donnell <rmod@bigpond*remove*.com> wrote:
>
> > "Neville Duguid" <nevi...@bigpond.net.au> wrote in message
> > news:1fx4uu2.uu627o1viymf4N%
> >
> > I have only seen Chad perform live once, at Yackandandah about 1972.
>
> That's gotta be in Victoria, right? ;-)
>
Kergunya,Tallangatta etc. in the foothill country of NE Vic. Mts.
Burrambogie & Mittamatite being some of the high points.
>
> > He has always been a unique performer, certainly nothing Americanised
about
> > him , unlike some other country singers.
>
> As the article points out, Chad was just a 16-year-old kid teaching
> himself to play on a borrowed guitar at the time he wrote his signature
> song (even though it didn't become well known until he was older). It is
> almost 'musical graffiti' in its stick-it-to-'em defiance of social
> nicities which were still being upheld across the board in public at
> that stage. If America had been nuked by the Russians, and baby-boomers
> had no rock'n'roll to take as inspiration, Chad would have been about
> all they had for inspiring 'rebelliousness' in their music here in
> Australia. It would have been interesting to discover how far Australia
> could have gone towards filling that niche and developing its own
> 'youth' culture stripped of sources of inspiration from overseas. There
> were plenty of contemporary young Australian musicians inspired by
> rock'n'roll, like Johnny O'Keefe, for example. Just think - without
> rock'n'roll, JOK and others might have ended up sounding more like Chad
> Morgan than Chuck Berry! ;-)
Chad is certainly his own man, more full of humour than other Aussie
performers & he sure has the face for it. A songwriter with a real Aussie
spirit & what I would see as a true-blue type of character, perhaps showing
some of the worst side of that character on occaisions.
RMOD