​When I first went to Cambodia a few years ago (drawn, I have to admit, by the music as much anything), I met a young man there who went by the handle of DJ Oro. Oro was deeply committed to the recovery, restoration and redistribution of the great lost Cambodian music that was horrifically literally killed off during the Pol Pot era. I said to him, O man, you’re like the Khmer ME! And we laughed in fraternity. It’s great meeting kindred spirits like that. It was much the same when I first encountered Eric Isaacson, who runs Mississippi Records, the label that’s just released the new vinyl LP version of Buried Country as just the latest in a long catalogue of amazing releases. Eric had been on the road in Australia with his friend Darren Hanlon, the fine young singer-songwriter from Queensland whose own label Flippin’ Yeah Records is a partner in this BC LP endeavour. I’d gone along to an evening they presented at the Golden Age cinema in Sydney. Eric spoke amusingly about his background, his mostly-musical obsessions and the rationale behind Mississippi, and he showed some of the amazing last films shot by Alan Lomax that he has in his archive. And I thought, again, another one! Mississippi has amassed a truly extraordinary catalogue of exhumed gems (gospel, blues, R&B, hillbilly, street singers, devotional music) that make Greil Marcus’s famous “old, weird America” tag seem totally inadequate. I had a brief chat with Eric at the end of the night, and left it at that. Until a little while later I got an email out of the blue from Darren who was with Eric at his home in Portland, Oregon: They wanted to know if I’d be interested in helping them put together this LP. I said to them, you mean an actual 12” 33.3rpm vinyl LP?! Are you kidding would I be interested?!? I had only one main qualification – that we take this unique opportunity to include some material from my collection that was always perhaps a bit too arcane, a bit too lo-fi, to include on either of the two major-label CD releases. With which they couldn’t have agreed more. And so we proceeded to get the album together, or more to the point, Darren did; it was mostly his baby and an odyssey as he trekked over the four corners of the country tracking down whatever traces of the music he could still find. I mean, who else was gonna do it? I gave Darren all the background, contacts, leads and hunches I could, and off he went and way beyond the call of duty… And it was really only the support and encouragement he got from community and family that made the LP possible. Darren went to the Kimberly to talk to Olive Knight, and to northern NSW to talk to the daughter of Black Allan Barker and the family of Maisie Kelly. In his clapped-out old van, he went and saw Wilga Williams in Canberra, and Bobby McLeod’s daughter Natalie in nearby Nowra. He went and saw ex-Warumpi Band guitarist Sammy Butcher in Papunya. He talked to people in Darwin and people in Tasmania. Out of his own pocket, he flew to Sydney from his home in Melbourne specifically to talk to Marlene Cummins for a couple of days; and he secured the rights to use a portrait of painter/singer Jimmy Pompey by Vincent Namatjira on the front cover, and a painting by Pompey himself on the back cover, as you can see here:

These artworks are stunning, just as the album itself sounds as fresh and sparkling as the day the tracks were cut in the first place; just as Darren’s dedication is total, beyond ego (money doesn’t come into it) and even beyond love, into some form of spiritual quest… which just leaves me feeling humbled…

And so this album is not just yet another dimension to the seemingly unstoppable Buried Country juggernaut but, with the inclusion of rare tracks like the never-before re-released “Give the Coloured Lad a Chance” by Jimmy Little, and the never-ever released cassette demo of the Kooriers’ “Sick of Being Treated Like a Mangy Old Dog,” and complete with its accompanying 36-page booklet, it is a whole other entity in its own right.
​
If you have been in the slightest moved by the previous Buried Country iterations of book/film/CD, or seen our travelling stageshow and enjoyed it, you must investigate this package – because I can safely predict it will take your breath away. 

​You can buy copies from its official distributor Light in the Attic here, or from other fine online retailers like Forced Exposure, Portland’s own Little Axe or, in Australia, Newtown’s Repressed Records. 

… to the Territory where so much music and some of our stars – Warren H. Williams and Leah Flanagan – come from, and so I’m delighted to be able to announce that Buried Country: Live in Concert will be playing opening night at the up-coming 2018 Darwin Festival in August. 

​The show, which is free (!), will be presented at the Darwin Amphitheatre on Thursday, August 9, at 7pm. For more details go here or click through the image above. 

​Possibly a statement is overdue from me regarding the criticisms of Deadly Woman Blues that started cropping up a couple of weeks back. Not until now have I felt equipped to do that though, because I wanted to have some sort of palpable idea or a path to suggest towards making reparation for the misinformation the book has propagated, and apologising for the hurt that this has caused.
            Now a course of action has been decided upon – the book will be withdrawn from sale and pulped, and NewSouth Publishing will post up corrections on its website.
            This post here then is just the start of my own personal processes to amend any online profile of the book that I’m responsible for.
            As public access as something like Spotify is, I’ve just removed the Deadly Woman Blues playlist I’d compiled there, and I have similarly deleted a similar playlist on YouTube. I’m working on amending other outlets like not least of all this website itself.
            To say that I have myself felt distress over these past few weeks would be churlish in the face of that suffered by those women who have been misrepresented by the book. But I am in a state of distress and since I just don’t think I could string a coherent sentence together for any interviews at the minute, I have prepared this statement to go out to media outlets meantime:
 
“I have been devastated to learn that my failure to consult with many of the women in my book Deadly Woman Blues has caused such distress and anguish to them and to their friends and families. The book started life in graphic form and grew into one hundred images across one hundred years. The accompanying text about the women’s lives and work contains factual errors and I take responsibility for these. My publisher is working with these women to correct these mistakes on their website – these will be uploaded next week. I will be personally approaching some of these women, whose music has meant so much to me over decades, to apologise over the coming weeks. I should have followed protocols and consulted and checked and am now reflecting on my processes as a writer so at odds with my hitherto good reputation. Given all this, withdrawing the book from sale is the right decision. I apologise unreservedly to the women for any hurt I have caused.”
 
            NewSouth’s CEO Kathy Bail released a statement the other day announcing the withdrawal of the book, which reads as follows:
 
“NewSouth published Clinton Walker’s Deadly Woman Blues: Black Women and Australian Music in February 2018 and a small number of books have sold since then. We have been made aware that not all the women who appear in the book were consulted about current biographical details and that some entries contain errors of fact. We are deeply sorry for any hurt or distress this has caused the women concerned and apologise to them unreservedly. We will be publishing a list of corrections on the NewSouth Publishing website when confirmed by those parties involved.”
 
            The news is out there now in the media and on the net and so as much as I'd thought, in the interests of balance, I could provide links to the some of the criticism, that’s what all the news is anyway, and it’s not hard to find, so just do a search, there’s plenty of it there.
            At some stage soon, as part of the process at hand, when I have come down a bit and calmed down and can reflect a little more clearly, I will post up a detailed account of myself and of the book.

Real nice first bit of 'print'-media on Deadly Woman Blues from Brisbane's Courier Mail, by Phil Brown:

Today is the official release date of Deadly Woman Blues. It’s only now that I put it that way I realize it’s my first all-new book for five years, since The Wizard of Oz in 2013, which seems like an absolute age ago. The new Buried Country came out in 2015, but as much as its great amount of expansion entailed a great amount of work, it was still built on an existing foundation. And then the latest edition of Highway to Hell came out in 2016. But Deadly Woman Blues – it’s something I’ve been nurturing, on and off, since, well, Buried Country first came out nearly twenty years ago, and so for it to be coming out now, in a form that’s pretty much exactly the way I always envisaged it (credit for which and with great thanks for goes to NewSouth), it’s just such a pleasure, to hold the finished product in my hands, to see it in bookshops, as you can see here, today, at my local Gleeboox at Dulwich Hill:

Deadly Woman Blues is my tenth book, a graphic history of black women in Australian music, the sort of sister-sequel to Buried Country, and I’m even more than usually excited about it because it’s a graphic history, a book I’ve illustrated as well as written, and as such marks my return to the art where I actually started in the first place. I dropped out of art school in Brisbane in the mid-1970s to follow my nose and start writing about music, and it’s really via Deadly Woman Blues that I’ve gotten back to art, and so immensely satisfyingly so that my standard line now is, I hope to end my days painting, picking up where I left off over forty years ago…
 
For more information on the book itself you can check my page on it here, or - and to buy as well - go to NewSouth Books’ page here. That it’s a book about a fairly secret history that will hopefully reveal that history to a broad audience is something else I’m very excited to be doing.
 
The book has gotten out of the blocks with a first nice little notice in Books + Publishing, which is reproduced below.
 
It will be launched with a clutch of events in Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne with thanks due, again, to the lovely folks at NewSouth. Those events are:

• On February 21 in Sydney, I’ll be ‘In Conversation’ with the lovely Natalie Ahmat at Gleeboox in Glebe, for bookings go here
• On March 9 in Brisbane, I’ll be ‘In Conversation’ with the lovely Alathea Beetson at the Avid Reader in the West End, for bookings go here
• And on March 19 in Melbourne, though it’s not quite as yet confirmed, I’ll probably be at Readings in St.Kilda, but stay tuned for final details on that one
• And for people in Sydney, tomorrow, February 2, you can tune into ABC Radio Sydney at 11am to hear me chatting on Focus with the lovely Cassie McCullagh; you can stream it live on-line here

Stay tuned for more to come.

Buried Country is about to be born again again, with the imminent release of a vinyl LP through a co-pro between Mississippi Records and Flippin’ Yeah Records, the former an amazing archival specialist coming out of Portland, Oregon, the latter the label run by Australia’s own Gympie Songster, Darren Hanlon. Darren has been a friend of Buried Country for a long time, and this album is really his baby, as he has coursed all over Australia in pursuit of producing it, making more friends and connections, as he is wont to do (pictured above with 'Salty', who he met in the Kimberley). The album will be released very soon, and it brings so much more to the table, featuring tracks never before re-/released and with lavish packaging including more rare photos, original artworks and extensive liner notes. The tracklisting is as follows (and the test-pressing sounds stunning):

SIDE ONE
1/ BLACK ALLAN BARKER Take Me Back
2/ GALARRWUY YUNUPINGU Gurindji Blues
3/ WARUMPI BAND Jailanguru Pakarnu
4/ KANKAWA NIAGARA Yanany Baliba
5/ KOORIERS Sick of Being Treated Like a Low-Down Mangy Dog
 
SIDE TWO
1/ JIMMY LITTLE Give the Coloured Lad a Chance
2/ BROWN BROTHERS Black and White Cat
3/ DOUGIE YOUNG Cut a Rug
4/ MAISIE KELLY My Home in the Valley
5/ COUNTRY OUTCASTS Streets of Old Fitzroy
6/ BOBBY McLEOD The Resurrection 

​I came to know Darren via Buried Country sooner than his own music. But by now I’ve come to love his stuff too. The Gympie Songster showed up at the 2015 launch of the new edition of Buried Country in Sydney, after he’d been on the road in search of the ghost of Dougie Young, and then when I bumped into him again at an event at the Golden Age Cinema where Eric Isaacson of Mississippi Records of Portland, Oregon, gave a talk and showed some films, well, what happened from there, to cut a long story short, was that we all got together to get together the vinyl LP edition of Buried Country to come out as a co-pro through Mississippi and Darren’s own Flippin’ Yeah label… and so basically after giving Darren a few leads, I just had to sit back and watch him scour all over the country in pursuit of doing the major right thing by this project. He is truly a modern-day troubadour, who just gets around in his shonky old van singing for his supper and enjoying whatever adventures come his way. He has gone way beyond the call of duty to ensure that the new Buried Country LP is not just another, further iteration of the BC brand-cum-juggernaut, but a virtual whole new entity in its own right. To be listening lately to the test-pressing (remember them?!) has just taken my breath away all over again. So, with the artwork currently in production – and that will be something special in itself too, which I’ll save for a surprise upon release – we can now only await the album dropping sometime early in the new year.

​Meantime Darren is on the road, as ever, and launching his twelfth annual Christmas show tour. You can read his account of some of his recent adventures on this road here, and get details on the tour dates here, which features special guest the Space Lady direct from San Francisco, and buy tix for the Sydney show here.
 
And so when Darren called and asked if I would deliver the short Christmas address at the Sydney show, I couldn’t have been more flattered. I mean, these are significant shoes I’m being asked to step into, having been previously filled by the likes of Bob Hawke and the late Bob Ellis. I am filled with ambivalence generally about Xmas as it is, but I am willing to take on the challenge and look forward to doing so and I hope to see plenty of revelers there.
 
If nothing else you certainly wouldn’t want to miss this likely once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see the incredible Space Lady, check her out here: