Slim Dusty born this day in 1927. He, the archetypal cowboy singer from Australia. Didja even know they had any type of cowboy singers from there, much less archetypal ones, huh? huh?
A TRUE musical prodigy, Dusty's first song was "That's the way the cowboy dies", written at age 10. (For comparision, Mozart did not write his first cowboy song til he was 27, the slacker!) He (Dusty, not Mozart! Please pay attention!) was the first Australian recording artist to receive a "gold record," it for his tragically sad recording "A Pub with No Beer". Almost as sad as "A Pub with no Live Music" if you ask me. Dusty's real name (no, he wasn't given the name Dusty Slim at birth, shock-and-amazement!) was Archetypal--no, I mean David Gordon Kirkpatrick, which has to be some kind of record for the most first names in a full name (four if you look closely). For the first decade of his recording career, Dusty still worked part-time as a ranch hand--a valuable life-lesson for all you iTunes-hot-shot-wannabes out there. (I confess I had a iT-hot-shot-wanna dream at one point in my [cough] musical career. It lasted about 36 hours.)