The Collection

KEY PLAYERS ON THE SYDNEY COFFEE LOUNGE SCENE

Malcolm J. Turnbull
[ This paper was originally published, in six parts, in TRAD & NOW Magazine]
I suspect that debate over the relative merits, importance and long-term influence of the early Melbourne and Sydney folk scenes has always been coloured by well-entrenched intercity rivalry. More puritanical elements within the southern folk fraternity have maintained loftily that Melbourne had a monopoly on “real folksingers” whereas Sydney offered (and apparently preferred) the folksinger as entertainer. Sydney had stars, folksingers on TV and events like the big U.S.-style 1965 Newport hootenanny. “In Sydney folk seemed to soar like a rocket then after a couple of years went down … like a bomb”, declared Brian Mooney soon after the event.
Predictably the Sydney scene has had its defenders, including the late Don Henderson who, albeit Melbourne born and bred, had little respect for the folk venues there. (“… I never liked Melbourne audiences … never liked singing there … never liked Melbourne as a town”). 

“I never knew there was a Melbourne folk scene then”, confesses second generation Sydney folkie Chris Shaw. While it is indisputable that folksinging attracted substantial audiences to coffee lounge in Melbourne long after it had become passe in Sydney (licensing laws, the relative strength of the local jazz and bohemian enclaves, even differences in the weather, were among factors at play), folklorist Edgar Waters has noted that the northern metropolis eclipsed its sister city in one important regard: early consciousness of the hinterland and interest in home-grown folklore. “There was definitely a pioneering feel about it all … people who were trying to push it that one step further at a time when Australiana was sneered at”, observes Gary Shearston. In hindsight, Sydney also produced some of the most important individual folk artists of the 1960s (Shearston among them) and provided unprecedented media exposure for performers from all over the country per TV outlets like Dave’s Place, Just Folk or Bandstand. This paper looks at contributions made by some key players (performers and others) to the Sydney scene during “the folk years”.
Melbourne-born jazz vocalist Marian Grossman, who moved to Sydney in 1959 following her marriage to fledgling singer-songwriter Don Henderson, has recalled: “If you mentioned folksinging in those days, people looked at you as though you were funny”. In fact there was rather more activity than was immediately apparent. Simultaneous with John Meredith’s pioneering fieldwork, the success of Reedy River, the formation of the Sydney Bush Music Club and Folklore Society, and the launch of Wattle Records, a small but discernible underground folk community was emerging. In the late 1940s, Jeff Way, an electrical engineer, played guitar and banjo in the upstairs room of the New Theatre in Castlereagh Street. The proud possessor of previously unheard records from the Library of Congress or by The Almanac Singers, Way is remembered for his renditions of (then) new and captivating material like ‘The St James Infirmary’, ‘That was News’ and ‘Black, Brown and Blue’. Way taught guitar basics to Chris Kempster and another young enthusiast, Terry Driscoll, who subsequently became a skilled classical instrumentalist largely through listening to Segovia records. The son of teachers who were active in the CPA, Kempster attended Eurekas Youth League camps from an early age, and learned folk dances and international songs, like ‘Peat Bog Soldiers’, from enthusiasts like Brian Loughlin and Peggy Hewett).
The Lincoln coffee lounge was a meeting-place for the inner-city “arty” set as early as 1950. Although never an actual music venue, the Lincoln produced its own roneo’d songbook containing drinking songs, Gershwin’s ‘It Ain’t Necessarily So’ and a parody of ‘The Streets of Laredo’ which included the lines:
In the days of my youth I used to go drinkin’
Twas first to the pub and then to the Lincoln
I thought I had friends but it happened this way,
They weren’t my friends cause they led me astray.

Beth and Reg Schurr were regulars at the Lincoln. With a superior light soprano voice and repertoire comparable to those of popular American balladeer Susan Reed, Mrs Schurr (nee Doran) taught herself guitar and started collecting songs after hearing Burl Ives and Mary O’Hara in concert. Specialising in material from Britain and the Appalachians, she gave her first major public performance at the first Australian Folklore Festival in September 1955. She recorded a couple of 78s for Wattle, most notably a lovely version of ‘Green Bushes’ (learned from the singing of Sally Sloane). TV appearances (TV was then in its infancy) led to her writing, compering and performing on a live-to-air children’s show for Channel 9 (and “for the princely sum of 5 pounds a week”). Her co-star was former child-actor Desmond Tester, who subsequently ran camel tours in the outback. Raising a family ultimately “put paid” to Schurr’s folksinging career, although she would continue to perform occasionally into the 1960s. Wendy Lowenstein credits her with being “a folksinger before her time”; had she debuted during the boom, she might well have been one of the stars of the revival. “Beth’s place in the scene came from an inborn talent”, writes Reg Schurr. “She had a good voice – and could sing in pitch – also learned to play the guitar and developed her own arrangements which were well beyond the usual hillbilly strumming. Bringing up a child scotched that!”. The Schurrs were early friends and patrons of Brian Mooney.
Barbara Lisyak, another Sydney housewife (her husband was a doctor at Ryde), appeared on TV with Beth Schurr and chaired the Australian Folklore Society for a couple of years. She has been credited (along with Jeff Way) with introducing the songs of the early American hootenannies – and the guitar as a folk instrument – to the general Australian public. Lisyak also recorded for Wattle, most notably, the children’s song ‘The Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly’. According to the late Chris Kempster:

In those days the Seaman’s Union used to have dances down in their rooms near Circular Quay and there were great, large numbers, hundreds and hundreds of people … I remember at one dance, everything stopped and out came Jeff Way and Barbara Lisyak, each with a guitar, and Barbara sang ‘O Freedom’ … The way she just stood up and sang it with this beautiful … penetrating voice. That was a magic moment. The whole place was spellbound with Barbara singing.
[Chris Kempster, NLA Interview]

Although she preferred singing international ballads, believing that “genuinely Australian folksongs” were better sung by men, Lisyak popularised a version of the bushranging song ‘Peter Clarke’ and sang for a while (1959-60) with The Rambleers, even appearing with them on The Snowy, an ABC TV celebration of the Snowy River power scheme. Lisyak and Beth Schurr sometimes shared platforms with a third woman singer, Frances Shaw, wife of poet A.D. Hope’s first publisher Rod Shaw. Shaw began performing French folksongs to her own guitar accompaniment in the early 1940s; her repertoire subsequently expanded to encompass Anglo-American ballads from the Cecil Sharp collection and Australian ballads per the Bush Music Club. Black tenor Harold Blair, a winner of the Sun Aria competition, recorded an early collection of aboriginal songs (to piano accompaniment). Mention should also be made of Shirley Abicair, a typist-turned-cabaret artist who became popular in Sydney in the late 1940s and subsequently achieved stardom as a nightclub and TV personality in London. Although her stage act, image and recordings had all the artificial trappings of the 1950s pop scene, Abicair specialised in interpreting folksongs, sometimes accompanying herself on the zither. Her recorded output included versions of ‘The Turtle Dove’, ‘Botany Bay’, ‘Johnny Has Gone for A Soldier’ and ‘The Fox’.
Other pioneer singers included Delia Murphy (an Irish diplomat’s wife), ‘Frank the Yank’ (the first 5-string banjoist to surface in Sydney), Johnny Earls (who went on to work as an anthropologist in Peru), and Bob Elliott, who reportedly “set an unmatched standard of performance of a range of songs from Australian to country blues”. (Obtaining guitars was a problem for early enthusiasts, necessitating “constant searching in hock shops”. Beth Schurr paid two pounds at a sale for her first, Italian-made instrument. Frances Shaw was the proud posessor of an antique Spanish guitar handcrafted in Paris in 1831). The Tavern, near Edgcliff Station, appears to have succeeded the Lincoln as an informal meeting-place for ‘the folk-oriented’, while early TV footage of Sydney’s Beat poetry, painting and improvisational jazz milieux indicates that singer-guitarists were performing at that bohemian mecca, the Royal George Hotel, circa 1959-60.

DON HENDERSON (1937 – 1991), who bought a guitar after hearing recordings of blues singers like Blind Lemon Jefferson and Josh White and spent some time playing  with a Melbourne rock’n’roll ensemble called the Thunderbirds, had recently started composing his own songs. (Woody Guthrie’s  ballad ‘Tom Joad’ was a decisive influence). In an interview for the National Library, Henderson recalled the first time he visited “the watering-hole of the fabled Sydney Push”:

I don’t know what I expected; probably cloaked anarchists priming bombs, smocked artists quaffing absinthe and bereted poets reading their latest works. All I saw, though, was a rowdy Saturday afternoon pub crowd … There was a little bright-eyed bloke with thick horn rimmed glasses, playing some pretty wild Spanish guitar in the corner, but only the people in that particular corner were listening to him. He finished the song and passed the guitar to the big bloke sitting next to him. I recognised that bloke. His face was hard to forget.
[Henderson, A Quiet Century, p.56]p;

The “big bloke” in question, who had once worked on the show circuit with Shana the Snake Lady, and who had “one of the best voices” the Hendersons had ever heard, was Brian Mooney.
    Welsh-born Declan Affley, who first came to Australia as a serviceman with the merchant navy, has also remembered being exposed to the beginnings of local folksinging activity around 1960/61:

On leave in Sydney I was introduced to an old pub where I met Brian Mooney, Bill Berry, Don Ayrton, and later, Martyn Wyndham-Read, and heard them sing. This was where I first heard the general term “folk music”. The “boom” had not yet arrived and the people there knew only the British and American revival.
[Australian Tradition Aug 1969]

Informal Saturday afternoon come-all-ye’s at the Royal George –  were inspirational to Affley, the Hendersons, et al:

The informality of it all, the incredible diversity of the music. Somebody singing 28 verses of ‘Lord Randal’ and a pile of drunks sitting there and listening to it … They saw the likeness of my [Don Henderson’s] music to Jimmie Rodgers because I was like Tex Morton …. Morton had used Jimmie Rodgers as a model. I knew of Jimmie Rodgers but I didn’t know of Woody Guthrie …I found acceptance at the Royal George for these songs … and because I liked the place and because I liked the people, I really started to work hard at them …
    The Royal George was equally divided between anarchists, libertarians and communists … all the people were interested in peace. There was also the beginning of early feminism there, and the beginnings of passive resistance, things like that … and the most horrendous fights I’ve ever seen in my life occurred there. [Don Henderson, NLA Interview]

 “There were always people with guitars” at Push parties, remembers Gary Shearston. Left-wing awareness of folk themes and folkmusic was “rife” there. According to Don Henderson, people like Mooney:

.. were singing songs that I’d never ever heard, you know, and folk became of importance to me and I began to understand what it meant. I found that I could take my songs and sing them there and they sort of accepted them, being interested in this folk music. I then was invited to the Sydney Bush Music Club which I went to. I didn’t know the difference between what they called Australian songs and what Tex Morton was singing. I still thought that ‘The Rain Tumbles Down in July’, from Slim Dusty, was one of the best songs I’d ever heard. They didn’t think so, but they liked some of the others. 

    A solid, imposing man, sporting “a burly red beard”, Don Henderson has been described as “a full-time individualist, a craftsman, an all-Australian ‘casual bloke’, a cynic and a romanticist. And, of course, a militant anti-establishment man”. Raised in the stereotypically middle class Melbourne enclaves of Essendon and Moonee Ponds, he trained as a fitter and turner and worked at a range of jobs, most often as a carpenter. He drew on his experience working on the Snowy Mountains hydro-electricity scheme for one of his earliest (and best-known) songs, the up-beat ‘Put a Light in Every Country Window’. A member of the BLF, Henderson worked in Sydney repairing instruments and eventually branched out into making his own guitars. Gary Shearston remembers that his workshop at Woolahra became the focal and meeting point for one sector of the pre-boom Sydney folk scene (Alex Hood subsequently founded his Folk Arts Centre on the same premises), overlapping with parallel sectors like the Push scene and the activities of the Bush Music Club.
    With his marriage over, Henderson spent a couple of years travelling in outback NSW and Queensland (turning up in either Sydney or Brisbane every once in a while), going back:

… to where people were actually singing hillbilly songs as they heard them on the radio, and about subjects they accepted, like faithful dogs and lost loves and things like that. I decided that I could get up with them and sing songs about building dams and union struggle. [A Quiet Century, p.vi-vii]

Henderson made Brisbane his home base in the mid 60s and was active in the early folk scene there, both as a soloist and member of the Union Singers. His vocal ability was limited but he soon earned a national reputation for the quality of his songwriting. Citing the influence of the “libertarians” he had mixed with at the Royal George, he consciously wrote about the Australian labour force, his compositions blending “the hillbilly idiom” he had learned as a youngster and the “American finger-picking technique”. Interestingly, The Push itself tended to respond more readily to multi-faceted songs like ‘It’s On’ and the highly satirical ‘Hooker Rex’ than to the more straightforward, anthemic ‘Put a Light in Every Country Window’ (celebrating the Snowy Mountains achievement).

[These] people were different. Sydney artists and intellectuals, university people. They weren’t interested in labouring Australians making a mark on the world. They were the people who didn’t rush to the first World War. They didn’t want to put Australia on the map. All the dopey blokes who put their ages up, left good jobs to go and fight for Australia under its own flag. They’re working class, that’s working class patriotism. [Henderson, NLA Interview]

“Despite his commitment to the Left”, Craig McGregor once wrote:

Don Henderson’s songs rarely degenerate into mere propaganda. Most of them are not even protest songs, in the strict sense: they are, rather, sardonic commentaries on contemporary Australian life … He can be as zany as Dylan, as straightforward as Pete Seeger. His songs depend more on cumulative effect than vivid imagery; they are plain song, the plain man’s song. The characteristic note is one of understatement, irony, rather than declamation … [McGregor, People Pop and Politics, p.143]      

Mary Travers, of Peter Paul & Mary, once dubbed Henderson an Australian Woody Guthrie.
    Marian Henderson (she retained the surname following the couple’s divorce) indulged her own growing interest in traditional music by taking up the banjo and, subsequently, the guitar, and forming a pioneering folk trio with jazz guitarist/ commercial artist Chris Daw and ex-Rambleer Alex Hood. Charles Higham has claimed that folk song in Sydney got its first “big boost” – courtesy of the trio Daw, Hood & Henderson and the songwriting talents of Don Henderson – during the White Collar festival in 1961. The trio performed at open-air meetings during the Margins and Leave campaign and released two EPs, Oh Pay Me which included an Equal pay song and the Calypso-derived ‘Hooker Rex’, and one for the ALP in support of left-wing Sydney politician Tom Morey  (‘We’re Going to Vote Tom Morey’ was based on ‘Tom Dooley’). They were featured on a regular folksong program sponsored by Sydney City Council on Radio 2KY. Before going their separate ways in 1962, the trio co-founded the Association of Sydney Folksingers.
    Henderson, who had been juggling the trio and vocal work with a number of jazz and dance bands around Sydney, turned increasingly to folkmusic, often playing at charity functions or ladies’ lunches in Vaucluse and Double Bay. At this point (she recalls):

Folksingers were an unknown quantity with a slightly shabby aura because people didn’t understand [them] – something to be recoiled from, then stomped on, then [perhaps] examined more closely.

Henderson would emerge as the Sydney scene’s leading lady during the boom. Hood, who fell in love with traditional bush songs when he saw the first Sydney production of Reedy River (and managed to get himself hired as a cast-member of the show), was a widely-travelled and experienced musician. A member of The Bushwackers, he went on to form his own bush band The Rambleers (which included Chris Kempster, Harry Kay and, at different times, Mark McManus, Laurie Morris, Dennis Kevans and Barbara Lisyak), and earned plaudits from Harry Belafonte and Belafonte’s musical director Milton Okun as a solo performer of Australian material. In 1962 he teamed up with British singer Chuck Quinton, as The Rambling Boys, and they spent several months with a down-at-heels circus troupe before taking off on their own, “singing for their supper” throughout outback NSW. Hood and his wife, Gabrielle, subsequently established the Folk Arts Centre at 90 Queen Street, Woolahra. Modelled after Israel Young’s Folklore Centre in Greenwich Village, the F.A.C. provided educational and leisure facilities and a library, but failed to survive its first year. Hood’s first LP, The First Hundred Years, was released by MFP, in conjunction with a pocket songbook, in 1964.
    The trio Daw, Hood and [Marian] Henderson made one of its last appearances, performing a bracket of union songs and sharing the stage with speakers Edgar Waters, Russel Ward, Maryjean Officer and Peter Hamilton, and artists Beth Schurr, Chris Kempster, Barbara Lisyak, Alan Scott and legendary bush balladeer Duke Tritton, at an “Australian Folkmusic” weekend school organised by the Workers’ Educational Association in July 1962. Tritton, the authentic “darling” of the Sydney Bush Music Club, delighted traditionalists with his own songs, ‘Shearing in a Bar’ and ‘The Goose-necked Spurs’. Reviewing the weekend, the Gumsucker’s Gazette highlighted also several young newcomers, “all with a lot to learn but each markedly different in style and that style their own”: Jean Lewis (misspelled “Louis”) and G. Chearston (sic), in particular,  were both on the brink of bigger things, as a Sydney folk venue network emerged.
    The “coffee shop wave” of the contemporary Australian folk song movement “lapped our shores first in Melbourne and it was not until a year or two later that it washed over Sydney”, notes Edgar Waters. [Music Maker, Sept 1962; Australian, 17 Oct 1964] According to Don Henderson:

… The first coffee lounge where anyone was actually paid to sing was the Marmosa [Mimosa?]. It was in the block between Sussex and Clarence, in King Street. It was run by an old Dutch lady who’d heard singing in cafes in Europe and she engaged Marian [Henderson] as a singer there. The people used to go there after the Royal George finished, and that would be in 1961. [Henderson, NLA Interview]

Around September of that year, Brian Mooney was hired to sing Irish and international songs on Thursday evenings at the Paddington jazz joint the Bird and the Bottle. At this early stage, Mooney – who, of course, was to become one of the major contributors to the Melbourne scene – cited blues greats Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith as key influences on his music. Another early lounge was “a place in Double Bay,  behind the Wheatsheaf Hotel”, where “reefer-jacketed hoons used to drink”: Mooney and Johnny Earls performed there. Folksingers surfaced for a time at a restaurant run by Mexicans at Vaucluse, while Bill Berry performed a number of paid gigs for union members at the Ironworkers Hall A year (or so) later, live folksinging was also featured at the Flying Dutchman, a basement coffee lounge in the city centre, at 55A Elizabeth Street. The best-remembered of the performers there was GARY SHEARTON.  

Shearston was born at Inverell in 1939 and spent his childhood on his grandfather’s farm at Tenterfield, in northern NSW. (He later evoked his rural childhood in the song ‘Shopping on a Saturday’). The family was musical – particularly his mother who played piano at concert parties for army camps in the north during World War II – and the youthful Shearston became interested in performing after hearing country singer Buddy Williams. Forced to move to Sydney with his parents when drought devastated northern NSW in 1950, he left school at age 16 and worked intermittently as a cadet journalist for United Press International. By this time his interest in traditional music (including Australian folksongs) had been aroused. He became friendly with another young bush song enthusiast, Lionel Long, and remembers spending Saturday afternoons learning guitar chords and trading verses of songs at Long’s parents’ home at Rose Bay. Increasingly disillusioned with the seedy side of journalism (the “last straw” was receiving an eyewitness report of the execution of Caryl Chessman), Shearston opted to try his luck as a full-time musician.
    His first professional engagement, at age 19, was inauspicious. Recruited by the manager of a Brisbane pub to go on unannounced and “warm up” the audience for champion whip-cracker Johnny Brady, he “died a death … You couldn’t have gone over worse”. The publican was irate, insisting he would never work again. Brady kindly intervened, demanded the boss “give the kid a break”, and went so far as to introduce the young singer at the start of the second show. Subsequently Shearston was able to eke out a living, occasionally accepting casual work as D.J. at a King’s Cross dance-hall, or as a puppeteer and in the fledgling children’s television industry (The Tintookies for a year and the TCN9 show Name That Tune). Weekends were spent playing punishing schedules at RSL, Leagues and sports clubs and pubs (“there was no such thing as coffee lounges” at that early date) – contending with antiquated PA systems (often only one microphone), inadequate facilities and low pay, and fighting to be heard over the noise of poker-machines .

His repertoire, which initially interspersed calypso, American railroad songs and occasional bush ballads, became more focused as he ordered American imports (Cynthia Gooding, Pete Seeger, Cisco Houston, Woody Guthrie) through Edels’ record store, and began to frequent the singabout evenings convened by the Bush Music Club. Wear-and-tear on his guitar first put him in touch with Les Miller, guitar specialist at Nicholson’s music store. Through Miller (who, with harmonica virtuoso Richard Brooks,  would later provide instrumental support for Shearston in concert and on record), Shearston became acquainted with Don Henderson and the circle of performers (Alex and Gabrielle Hood, Daw, Marian Henderson, Doug Rickard, and so on) who frequented 90 Queen Street, Woolahra. (Shearston’s own home address, a block of flats in Phoebe Street, Balmain, subsequently became another focal point for pioneer folksinging activity in Sydney. Eminent folklorist Dr Edgar Waters lived on the other side of the building while a big flat in the centre housed a passing array of enthusiasts and performers such as Chris Kempster, Jeannie Lewis and Dave de Hugard). By mid-1962, when he appeared at the WEA’s first weekend folkmusic school, Shearston had acquired an extensive Australian songbag and was attracting a following. He later cited a series of folksong presentations with Hayes Gordon’s Ensemble Theatre as a major break-through.
    Shearston would go on to become one of the biggest names on the national scene.
A significant degree of popular acclaim was also attained by LIONEL LONG. Long, indeed, was already one of the most widely-exposed performers of folksong in the country (via radio, TV and records) when his boyhood friend was still struggling to eke out a living as a professional musician. However, he enjoyed little of the respect earned by Shearston. Long’s debut albums Waltzing Matilda (1961) and The Wild Colonial Boy (1962) made him a household name, as did appearances on Sing Sing Sing, Bandstand and his own show Music Time, but they elicited strong condemnation from the folk establishment. His failure adequately to acknowledge the original sources of material he published in his book Australian Bush Songs (1964) also rendered him persona non gratus with the pioneer folksong collectors and scholars.

According to music historian Eric Watson, Long’s first musical love was C&W and it was only at the insistence of Columbia Records that he started to mine traditional material. The son of a skilled violinist, he grew up in the Hunter Valley and worked briefly as a jackeroo before attending Hawkesbury Agricultural College and studying commercial art in Sydney. His folksinging days represented a relatively short part of a lengthy creative career which encompassed film and TV acting (he was in the cast of the series Homicide), painting and film-making. Long himself countered accusations of commerciality as “all self-conscious stuff and garbage”, claiming that he had more first-hand knowledge than most of his critics, having “drunk heartily of outback life, shearing sheds and the open land”. In his view, there was “no excuse … for the lack of interpretation or imaginative presentation or phrasing to any song, particularly a folk song”.

Immediately one of these “purists” earns something from folksongs, he himself becomes “commercial”; so frankly I can see no argument. Call me a folksinger or a balladeer if you like, but privately I regard myself as an individualist.

Long’s sentiments were endorsed by The Tolmen, an early commercial folk ensemble, who once insisted: “These coffee-shop people are simply jealous of anyone who looks clean and is a success on television”. [Cover-notes, Lionel Long, Songs of a Sunburnt Country (1965); Bulletin, 14 Nov 1964]
    While somewhat slick and marred by orchestration or arrangement (the relentlessly buoyant presence of The Delltones, for instance), in hindsight Lionel Long’s recordings now seem harmless enough, and imbued with rather more honesty and love of the material than the critics have conceded. His output was also more varied than has generally been recognised. In addition to his Australian albums (including Songs of a Sunburnt Country and two volumes of songs glorifying The Bold Bushrangers), he recorded a superior album of shanties (Songs of the Sea) with backing from ex-Kingston Trio member Dave Guard and guitarist Don Andrews; an album of traditional English songs, Long Ago; two records of contemporary folk, Amberwren and Today; and an LP of self-penned bush songs, Walkabout. 
    Like Melbourne’s Denis Gibbons, Long played an important popularising role, bringing Australian folksongs to the general public some years before the folk boom – and the major Sydney venues – got underway.
The Marmosa [Mimosa?], the Bird and the Bottle and the Flying Dutchman notwithstanding, it was not until 1963 that a discernible folk coffee lounge network appeared in Sydney. Far and away the most important of the venues produced by the boom was the Troubadour which served as a focal point for organised folksinging activity in Sydney much as Traynors would do in Melbourne. It was the brainchild of JIM CARTER.

Born at Taree in northern NSW, Carter (1928 – 1976) was a self-made businessman with a background in the rag trade. According to one report, his ancestry was “a wild colonial mixture, with a good dash of Welsh”, and his appearance was “more Spanish than anything”. A tall, thin, sallow-faced and sickly bachelor with a rapidly greying mop of hair, an “almost inaudible” voice, and a liking for flashy cuff-links, striped shirts, corduroy jackets and suits “with a matadorish cut”, Carter was a vegetarian before vegetarianism had become fashionable and carried a constant supply of unshelled peanuts in his coat pockets. (“He looked as though he needed a good feed of meat”, recalls Sean Cullip). He astutely invested 3000 pounds into converting an old dress factory, at 155 New South Head Road in Edgecliff, into the Troubadour. It opened at the beginning of 1963 with visiting American gospel artist, Brother John Sellers, as the first headliner. [Syd Sun-Herald, 27 Sept 1964]
    Sellers was a charismatic figure who attracted audiences with the sheer exuberance of his renditions of traditional spirituals and work songs – plus he had about him the aura of authenticity. He first started singing in public as a four year old in travelling tent shows in the southern states of America, and, by age 15, was lead soloist at the Church of God in Christ in Chicago. While he did not hesitate to inject elements of “showbiz” into his performances, he was able to call upon more than two decades of touring and playing with the likes of Sonny Terry and Big Bill Broonzy. He was also intimately connected to the Greenwich Village folk scene. Sellers toured Australia several times during the 60s. On his initial visit, with the Alvin Ailey Dance troupe, he performed a tribute to blues legend Blind Lemon Jefferson, supported by guitarist Bruce Langhorne and bass-player Les Grinage (both of whom went on to tour and record with Odetta for several years).
Fascinated by Australia, he stayed on in Sydney for nearly a year after the rest of the Ailey troupe had returned home, living in show business digs at King’s Cross, performing, and gathering around him a circle of young disciples who were charmed by his extensive repertoire and his vivacity. For devotees of black music, like the Melbourne blues duo Graham Squance and Ken White, Sellers’ visits were every bit as inspirational as Pete Seeger’s would be to mainstream folk artists.  He had a similar life-changing impact on Gary Shearston who remembers being transfixed when he first saw Sellers perform with the Ailey dance troupe. Indeed, Shearston’s big break came thanks to Sellers. Approached by Carter to open the Troubadour, Sellers agreed to accept the (low) remuneration offered only on condition that “my friend Gary” be engaged also.   
    With Brother John Sellers an exotic international star attraction, and budding local boy Shearston in support, the Troubadour’s prospects looked hopeful. Carter promptly set about milking its potential by assembling a roster of local performers. First off was The Folkway Trio, consisting of guitarist Bill Sanday, banjoist (and multi-instrumentalist) Les Miller, and a girl singer, Sonja Tallis. Formed late in 1962, the ensemble hoped to cash in on the dramatic international success of Peter Paul & Mary. Each of the members was a talented musician in his/her own right but, try as they might, the hoped-for musical magic failed to materialise and the trio parted company after nine months. “We just kept practising for months on end and nothing ever happened, we just didn’t click”, Tallis later remarked. Sanday and Miller remained active on the Sydney folk scene, Miller earning a solid reputation as a backing musician, but it was Tallis who went on to make a major impact on the Sydney scene.

Sonja Tallis was a strikingly pretty 19 year old, rendered mildly exotic by her Norwegian and Greek parentage, her fondness for wearing black, and her avoidance of make-up. According to one press report, she also indulged a liking for fast cars, water-skiing and Bacardi rum. Just starting out in the newspaper business as a copy-girl while studying journalism part-time at Sydney Technical College, she had her sights set on higher things. She had already begun acting with fringe theatre groups and, as folk music became more and more fashionable, she threw in her day job “and took on casual work hoping to find another group or another person to start with again”. A mutual friend (a Kingston Trio devotee) suggested Tallis audition a young advertising cadet, Sean Cullip. Although he had learned piano and ukelele as a child and knew a few guitar chords, Cullip had no previous involvement in the folk scene. He remembers that, at the first meeting at the Prince Edward Theatre (in September 1963), the pair could find only one song they knew in common (the Peter Paul & Mary hit ‘Lemon Tree’). Tallis responded to his voice and enthusiasm however: “We found we both had the same ideas about music; so then we began working on arrangements and numbers”. The duo rehearsed singlemindedly four to five hours a night for nearly four months. Cullip recalls those practice sessions as the most interesting part of the work. “If either one of us found a phrase or a line in the music that we particularly liked, we would work at it again and again”. In the process, he believes they became so “in tune” with the music they were creating that they became “one person”. Their biggest problem – always – was finding songs suited to two voices and palatable to audiences.             
Sean & Sonja made their debut early in 1964, playing one night a week at a folk lounge in Market Street in Sydney’s central business district. “Sean was still working”, Tallis later recalled, “but I was living on that one night’s earnings”. They also tried out (on unpaid come-all-ye nights) at the Troubadour, hoping to impress the management enough to land a paid spot. A Folk meets Jazz evening staged by Suzie Wong’s Chinese Restaurant helped augment the budget as did a few nights at a pizzeria at beachside Newport, although little of the fee was usually left by the time the duo had paid for bus fares, cigarettes and pizza. The gig proved productive, even so. Margaret Kitamura, who heard Sean & Sonja play at the pizzeria, was sufficiently impressed to recommend them to the management of El Toro in Missenden Road, Camperdown. 
    That one night a week at El Toro turned out to be the duo’s big break. Around the same time, Betty Douglas, the coffee-maker at the Troubadour, tackled Jim Carter, and insisted he sit down and listen to the pair. As a result Sean & Sonja were hired (at two pounds a night) and added to Carter’s regular roster. After less than a year performing together, they effectively stole the show when Carter organised a major Town Hall folk concert in August 1964. With Sonja clad in a stunning purple thai-silk shift, they opened the program and mesmerised the audience singing a capella a stark, perfectly harmonised version of the ancient British ballad ‘The Greenwood Sidie’. A number of TV appearances followed, and (via guitarist Andy Sundstrom, with whom Sean shared a colonial cottage in Barker’s Lane for a short period) the offer of a recording contract with the prestigious CBS.
    For Cullip the CBS offer was one of the undoubted highlights of the duo’s career. Where most of the Australian folksingers would be more than happy to record for small, home-grown companies like W&G, East, Crest or Score, CBS was a mainstream, international mega-player. Its folk catalogue alone boasted American greats like Carolyn Hester, Johnny Cash, Bob Dylan, The Brothers Four and Pete Seeger; it was even the local distributor for Warner Bros and Peter Paul & Mary. Up to that point, Gary Shearston had been the only Australian folksinger to make it into the recording “big league”. After releasing a self-composed single on Leedon, ‘The Ballad of Thunderbolt’ b/w ‘The Crayfish Song’ (a variant on the American song ‘Crawdad’ which he learned from Brother John Sellers), and in the wake of his success at the Troubadour and other venues (as well as appearances on national radio and TV shows like Bandstand), Shearston had been recruited by CBS for a series of strong-selling LPs. From 1964-66 he recorded  Folk Songs and Ballads of Australia, Songs of Our Time, Australian Broadside (a response to Pete Seeger’s suggestion that Shearston write his own topical material), The Springtime It Brings on the Shearing, Bolters Bushrangers and Duffers, and Gary Shearston Sings His Songs. Gary Shearston Sings His Songs was withdrawn shortly after release when BHP threatened legal action over the song ‘Old Bulli’, and subsequently reissued without the offending track. Furious at the censorship, Shearston demanded – and got – release from his contract. (The following year, he reprised some of the material on a more commercial-sounding album for Festival, Abreaction, released not long before he left Australia for the USA and Britain). Two CBS singles made the hit parade, the satirical ‘Sydney Town’ (from Australian Broadside) and Shearston’s own ‘Sometime Lovin’’, a poetic pastorale which was covered by Doug Ashdown, Sean & Sonja and Peter Paul & Mary.
    Sean & Sonja’s first album (self-titled) elicited critical hurrahs (albeit amidst claims by Edgar Waters, Craig McGregor, etc, that the duo was unacceptably commercial in its approach), and sold extremely well (10,000 copies in Japan alone). Two others followed: A Very Good Year and Sometime Lovin, all within less than twelve months.
    By the time Sometime Lovin’ was in the record stores, Sean & Sonja were seriously reconsidering their future: Sean was conscripted into the army at the beginning of 1966, and for two years Sonja attempted to re-establish herself as a solo act, then in a duo with actor Tony Bonner and a trio called The Newtones. Neither of these recaptured the old magic, however, and in 1968, Sean & Sonja reunited, playing a mix of folksongs and more commercial light rock and folk-pop material. (They remained a popular act on the club circuit, and in concert and cabaret throughout South-east Asia, finally disbanding 11 years after their first meeting, in 1974). Other folk artists who were fortunate enough to gain recording contracts with CBS were Doug Ashdown, Patsy Biscoe, The Idlers Five and Tina Lawton, while the equally prestigious RCA included in its Australian roster The Twiliters, Shirley Jacobs, The Lincoln Trio, Tina Date and The Kinsfolk.       

Just as Shearston was the undisputed male star of the Sydney folk scene – and the crown jewel of the Carter collection – one woman singer stood head and shoulders above her peers. From mid 1963, MARIAN HENDERSON was featured at the Troubadour three or four nights a week, performing a mix of  British, American and Australian traditional material. A “cool, tall, pale, frail girl in a pony tail” (according to Charles Higham, [Bulletin, 14 Nov 1964]), Henderson was recruited by Pix Magazine to record a series of EPs for its readers in 1964. During the same period, she attracted national attention by appearing weekly with Don Burrows, George Golla, John Sangster, The Green Hill Singers, etc., on the ABC television series Jazz Meets Folk, taped live at the Astor Motor Inn in Wolloomooloo.
    Henderson’s folksinging drew discernibly on her beginnings as a jazz vocalist and her voice and style have been compared more than once to Nina Simone. “She has an indefinable quality that puts her right in world class”, declared Jim Carter. “Even after all this time, I thrill every time Marian sings”. The magazine Music Maker once dubbed her “one of the most complete and compelling artists Australia has produced”:

So many girls think that to be a folk-singer requires that you produce a strangely virginal, high reedy voice. Marian flexes the muscles of her voice through all registers, scorning the need to sound superficially feminine.

   Visiting American jazzman Eddie Condon once suggested that the Henderson’s greatness lay in her inherent sense of rhythm and blues. On one occasion, when Condon and blues legend Jimmy Rushing stopped by the Troubadour, they were so impressed by Henderson’s performance that they stayed there jamming with her until 5 a.m. the next morning. It is a great pity, therefore, that she was distinctly under-recorded: only one album, a handful of EPs, and a few guest appearances. Two EPs each of Australian and international folksongs for Pix, and a contribution to the RCA album Folk Concert on Campus, preserve her distinctive versions of  perennials like ‘Old Joe Clark’, ‘Peter Clarke’, ‘Kumbaya’, and an intensely moving ‘Black is the Colour’. Henderson can also be heard on the albums The Restless Years and Old Botany Bay. Her most representative recording was the album Cameo (1970), for which she drew on the services of Doug Ashdown and several backing musicians. The excellent album mixes traditional material (‘Bald Mountain’, ‘Convict Maid’) and contemporary songs by Sandy Denny, Ashdown, even Cole Porter. Leonard Cohen’s ‘Stranger Song’ had particular significance for her:

I very seldom sang love songs. I was pretty cynical, even then, about the male-female relationship. ‘Stranger’ meant a lot to me. I used to spit it out.

    Cameo is one of the best LPs of the era.  Music Maker judged it “impeccable … way above what is usually done in Australia”. Interestingly, the singer herself has little affection for the album. She believes it was fundamentally flawed by the speed with which it was recorded and “should never have been released”. She is much happier with the authoritative rendition of ‘Norfolk Whalers’ which she contributed to Harry Robertson’s album Whale Chasing Man (1971). With superb support from Richard Brooks on harmonica, ‘Norfolk Whalers’ is Marian Henderson’s greatest single recorded performance. (From the vantage of 30-plus years, she recently confessed her satisfaction with “what that lady did” with the song).         
    “I was an excruciatingly shy kid from a very conservative Melbourne background”, notes Henderson. “Folkmusic opened a door for me. It did a lot to bring me out as a person with some musical talent [who] didn’t know what to do with it”. Enamoured, on the one hand, with Odetta or jazz singers Bessie Smith and Ella Fitzgerald (and, much later, Joni Mitchell), she was also smitten, early on, by the treasure-trove of Australian folksong and the light the songs shed on the collective Australian experience. She refused to concede that most bush ballads were unsuited to women singers:

I used reverse psychology. I saw it as telling a story. When you’re telling a story, does it really matter if you’re female? I felt rather proud of the fact that there was this marvellous selection of songs.

    Henderson augmented work at the Troubadour and elsewhere with frequent TV appearances, English-language radio programs for broadcast overseas, and Arts Council tours of the Pacific and Australia’s far north with the Ray Price Quintet or Don Burrows. The ABC film The Restless Years led to an appearance at the Dublin Festival and a tour of Ireland with Declan Affley, Peter O’Shaughnessy and Clare Dunn. In hindsight, she regards her one-woman tours of remote schools as the most rewarding of all her 1960s experiences. Although the tours were “incredibly exhausting”, involving driving vast distances and relying on her own ingenuity (or luck) when she developed car trouble in places like Lightning Ridge:
I learned that if I didn’t overcome tiredness and didn’t enjoy it, there was no point my being there … I played for aboriginal kids who had never seen a live performer … They didn’t know whether to clap, they would giggle and look at their feet. [To reach them] I had to instantly learn to overcome incredibe shyness and treat the audience like an extended family.

Gary Shearston, Sean & Sonja and Marian Henderson were Jim Carter’s most consistent drawcards. Other performers identified as part of the Carter stable, at one time or another, were Tony Morrison, a gifted flamenco guitarist, Tina Date, Jean Lewis, The Green Hill Singers, Leonard Teale, Declan Affley, guitarist Sebastian Jorgensen, The Liberty Singers, Paul Marks and Margaret Kitamura. Chuck Quinton arrived in Sydney, as if out of nowhere, in mid 1962, with a wealth of English songs like Ewan MacColl’s ‘Dirty Old Town’, which he taught to Gary Shearston. (He teamed up with Alex Hood, as The Rambling Boys, for a time). Leonard Teale, an eminent Sydney actor who had been drawn to bush songs during the 1950s, appeared periodically at the Troubadour reciting yarns and ballads. He went so far as to take singing lessons from Paul Williams, a leading voice teacher, and teamed up with guitar and balalaika maestro ANDY SUNSTROM.
    Born and raised in Denmark, Sundstrom drew on a colourful musical apprenticeship, having busked with a friend, two guitars and a balalaika, through Germany, Italy, France and Spain. He travelled out to Australia on board a 38-foot ketch Sarong, and made a number of instrumental recordings for CBS before teaming up with Teale. The pair  recorded two albums of home-grown material, Songs of the Sundowners and Travelling Down the Castlereagh, and even enjoyed a minor chart success (in Tasmania) with the single ‘Bound for Hobart Town’, promoted to tie in with the annual Sydney-Hobart Yacht race. (Sundstrom was a crew-member when the schooner Astor made the Sydney-Hobart run). The Liberty Singers, consisting of guitarists Brian Godden and Bix Bryant and a singing ballet-dancer Irene Whitehead, attempted to tap into the Sean & Sonja market. Resolutely opposed to scruffy folksingers who “hide behind a ‘front’ of beards and general unconformity”, the trio released a single, the sea shanty ‘Lay me Down Dead’, and performed on the soundtrack of a documentary film Road to the West before disbanding in mid 1965. Godden subsequently filled a vacancy in The Green Hill Singers. 
THE GREEN HILL SINGERS were three Melbourne boys who enjoyed their “15 minutes of fame” in Sydney during the boom: unashamedly commercial, consciously non-political and unaffected by division among their peers over ethnic vs popular folk. “I make no apologies for the fact we tried to copy The Kingston Trio, with the ivy-league shirts and the whole thing”, remembers group leader John McMillan. “As far as we were concerned, we wanted to just make music … The beauty of  it was working alongside the Marian Hendersons, the Declan Affleys and the Danny Spooners”. McMillan, his brother Alec and schoolfriend John Jenkinson had earlier enjoyed minor success, as The Vedetts, appearing every Sunday night on Dick Cranbourn’s 3UZ Radio show. Early in 1964 the McMillans teamed up with bass-player Chris Bonett and “it just all clicked. Chris was the talent we had to have to form a trio as we wanted it”. As The Green Hill Singers, the boys played on In Melbourne Tonight (IMT) and had the distinction of succeeding The Seekers as resident group at the Treble Clef in South Yarra. Winning Everybody’s Magazine’s ‘Big New Sound of 1964’ talent quest gained the trio a recording contract with HMV and a season supporting Shirley Bassey at the Palais in Melbourne and Chequers in Sydney. A single ‘Big Land’, a catchy celebration of the outback penned by Bonett, received substantial airplay, and the boys threw up their day jobs and moved to Sydney to appear regularly on the ABC TV series Jazz Meets Folk.
    Throughout 1965 The Green Hill Singers teamed work in the folk clubs (including the Carter venues) with gigs at RSL and Leagues clubs and appearances on Bobby Limb’s Sound of Music and Dave Allen’s Tonight Show. For a while, they were flown down every Friday to play on Noel Ferrier’s IMT, and at mid-year they recorded an LP for Festival, The Folk Sounds of The Green Hill Singers. John McMillan remembers the trio’s excitement when Dave Guard was called in to provide instrumental support on several cuts: “Am I dreaming here? This is the man I went to see in concert [i.e. with The Kingston Trio]. He’s sitting here in the studio playing 12 string guitar and banjo”. An even bigger thrill was meeting Peter Paul & Mary “at Gary Shearston’s house, and having Paul Stookey walk in, sit down and play guitar with me”.

Interestingly, Guard’s interest in the trio heralded a decisive personnel change. In the middle of recording the LP, he ‘head-hunted’ Bonett to appear in his own (Guard’s) group on the TV series Dave’s Place. Brian Godden was brought in to fill Bonett’s place and finish the album (which “sank without trace”). McMillan believes The Green Hill Singers was never quite the same without the versatile Bonett, and the trio disbanded, due to lack of work, in November 1965. (The McMillans played occasional m.o.r. gigs at restaurants for a couple of years. Godden subsequently toured extensively as backing instrumentalist for Alex Hood).   
    Also born and raised in Melbourne (her mother was noted sculptor Anita Aarons), TINA DATE studied piano at the Melbourne conservatorium, and was an early player on the Victorian folk scene (at Emerald Hill, most notably). She was offered  a paid spot at the Troubadour while on a visit to Sydney in 1963, and she subsequently settled there, combining folksinging with acting and modelling engagements. (Sean Cullip remembers being amazed that her guitar playing was not impeded by her 2 inch fingernails). Date appeared in the stage show ‘By Royal Command’, a verse and song anthology about the British monarchy, in 1965, and in the same year she joined Sean & Sonja and Danny Spooner in an avant-garde presentation ‘Bill meets Bob’, which paid tribute to both William Shakespeare and Bob Dylan. Date reprised her renditions of Elizabethan laments like ‘How Should I My True Love Know’, ‘Tomorrow is St Valentine’s Day’, and ‘It Fell on a Summer Day’, along with more recent compositions like Dylan’s ‘Tomorrow is a Long Time’ and Andy Sundstrom’s setting of Dylan Thomas’ ‘Polly Garter’s Song’, on her debut LP for RCA, A Single Girl. No sooner had it been released than she headed off overseas to visit her mother in Canada and to take on a job with the United Nations in New York. Judy Collins, with whom Date had become friendly during Collins’ time in Australia with the Pan-Pacific Tour, introduced her to the fabled Greenwich Village folk scene. Brother John Sellers invited her up out of the audience one night at Gerde’s Folk City and this led to a two-week stint at the legendary club as well as two weeks standing-in for ailing blues singer Judy Roderick at the Gaslight Cafe. In the process, she became romantically involved with Phil Ochs. Ochs’ biographer Marc Elliot identifies Date as the great love of the gifted but deeply troubled singer-songwriter’s life. On her return to Australia, Date married and retired to the country to raise her children. 

Jean (Jeannie) Lewis was initiated into the Sydney folk scene as a teenager, jamming in the back room of the Royal George with Johnny Earls and harmonica virtuoso Shane Duckham. “I was always interested in music”, she recalls, citing the early impact of the New Theatre and Reedy River. (Lewis’ mother constructed a lagerphone for her to play when her primary school staged a modest revival of the show). Paul Robeson’s voice and Pete Seeger’s renditions of Spanish Civil War Songs were other key influences. (“I was always political”). From the start, she strongly disliked hearing her powerful soprano voice compared to Joan Baez; as far as she was concerned, the vocal styles of the great black bluesmen were infinitely more interesting. She began folksinging in public as a first year Arts student at the University of Sydney in 1962 and ultimately became so involved in music and campus activism that it took her five years to complete her B.A.
    Lewis recalls that most of her early performances were at demonstrations. On one such occasion, her guitar (hand-made by Don Henderson) was smashed by police outside the American Embassy. According to a contemporary report, “she leaped to notoriety on Commemoration Day [1964], when she was last seen battering a policeman with a guitar through the bars of a Black Maria”. She sang for a year or so as a member of The Radiation Quartet, an intensely political ensemble which included Mike Leyden, Chris Kempster and Mark Gregory. The quartet appeared along with singers Chris Shaw, Dick Hackett and Graeme Turner on two untitled EPs on the Mutual label, commissioned by the NSW Teachers’ Federation and offering listeners early versions of Leyden songs like ‘A Time to be Singing’, ‘Chessboard of Vietnam’, ‘Sweet Song for Katie’ and ‘Weevils in the Flour’. (The last two songs, settings of poems by Dorothy Hewett, eventually reached a wider public per Gary Shearston). Lewis combined work as the baby of the Carter stable with membership of the York Gospel Singers, a heterogenous instrumental and vocal line-up which united Chris Daw, Alison McCallum, Viv Cargher, Adrian Forward, Bob Montgomery and John Bates. The group’s finest hour was supporting Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee at the Sydney Town Hall.

Jeannie Lewis’ repertoire was always wide-ranging, teaming protest material with traditional Australian and Irish ballads and blues (her first love). As the decade progressed, she immersed herself more and more in jazz, cabaret, musical theatre and South American political song. She recalls a five week trip to Chile and singing at the three day ‘Cancion Protesta’ with 52 other international artists (among them Barbara Dane, MacColl & Seeger and Sandra Kerr) as the undoubted highlight of her early career. (Lewis formed the band Gypsy Train in 1970 and recorded three innovative and well-received albums in the 1970s: Free Fall through Featherless Flight, Looking Backwards to Tomorrow and Tears of Steel and the Clowning Calaveras. She continues to perform, more than  four decades after her debut, in 2005)
    Born at Cardiff in 1939, of Irish ancestry, Declan Affley received his initial musical training at the Royal Welsh College of Music before joining the British Merchant Navy. He settled in Australia in 1960 and came into contact with the emergent folk scene in Sydney courtesy of the Royal George and other “pubs and low dives”. Acquiring a repertoire of Irish rebel and Australian songs along the way, he eventually “gave up the sea” and became a regular at the Troubadour and other Sydney venues. During a couple of years spent in Melbourne, he appeared frequently at Traynors and the recently-established folk-meets at the Union hotel. He recorded and released two solo albums during the period under review, Rake and Rambling Man on Score in 1968 (which preserves Affley’s immaculate renditions of ‘Carrickfergus’ and ‘Jim Jones’ and his unmatched version of Don Henderson’s title song), and The Day the Pub Burnt Down for Festival in 1971.
Affley also appeared on the compilation Folk Concert on Campus (1965) and on the recordings he made as a member of The Wild Colonial Boys. Credited with having one of the best singing voices ever to grace the Australian folk scene, he has been described as “representative of the great contribution which expatriate Irish, Welsh, English and Scottish singers and musicians have made to folk music in Australia”. (Affley died suddenly – and far too early – in 1985)[Companion to Australian Folklore, p.11-12].

Paul Marks had established himself as a major and influential blues and folk artist in Melbourne before relocating to Sydney in 1963, where he appeared at coffee lounges, all the major concerts and on TV. He was a died-in-the wool traditionalist. Interviewed for the Bulletin during his time in Sydney, he confessed to feeling at odds with the proliferation of protest songs. In his view, folkmusic was “essentially poetic and romantic … I see the song when I am singing it. I’m tremendously influenced by Dylan Thomas … the songs I sing give me a feeling of fantasy … sometimes when I sing I can close my eyes and see the crotchets and quavers in coloured shapes floating about in front of my eyes …”[Bulletin, 14 Nov 1964.] A bracket, taped at the University of Sydney in 1964 and released on the RCA compilation Folk Concert on Campus, underlined his affinity with traditional English material, particularly light and whimsical songs like ‘Widdecombe Fair’ and ‘Sipping Cider through a Straw’. According to Edgar Waters, Marks rendered English traditional songs with “some of the rhythmic freedom, and some of the delicate and musically meaningful melodic decoration and variation that are so often heard from good English country singers. But, alas, all too seldom from singers of the folksong revival”. [Australian, 5 June, 1965]
Margaret Kitamura grew up on a cattle station so remote that her early musical experiences were confined to listening to the family’s antique gramophone and selection of Melba and Gilbert & Sullivan 78s, or picking up occasional songs from the station-hands. She was well into her teens before she first heard the radio or popular music. Kitamura started singing to student audiences at El Toro in Sydney before moving north, where she was a regular at the Brisbane Folk Centre. Her repertoire evolved from Child Ballads (a la Baez) to political and topical songs (by Don Henderson, et al), delivered in a piercing soprano which tended to waver dangerously off-key when she was nervous (viz, her rendering of ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ on Australian Folk Festival) but made her songs compelling listening when she was in top form. Tasmanian singer Ian Clarke cites hearing Kitamura’s distinctive version of Sydney Carter’s anti-war lullaby ‘The Crow on the Cradle’ as an influence on his own decision to become a performer. Sean Cullip remembers Kitamura with affection as a vibrant, striking and extremely witty woman, given to wearing white make-up and (Dietrich-like) a man’s tuxedo, with a rose at the lapel. According to the late Stan Arthur, she lost her voice in later years, left Australia, and found work with a drive-in church in the United States.   
     Jim Carter once insisted (rather ingenuously) that making a success of the Troubadour represented the height of his ambition and that only the existence of a power vacuum at the top of the industry impelled him to branch out. (He described his own musical tastes as “eclectic” – so long as it was “done well and the material [was] good”). Early in 1964 he co-leased the Copperfield at Newtown. Described colourfully by the Bulletin as “a kinky, Dickensian roost tucked behind Central Railway”, the Copperfield was somewhat grander in conception than the Troubadour, offering wining and dining “in mature comfort for around 30/- a head while enjoying the music”. A small gallery catered for the “young-in-pocket” who preferred to outlay 6/- “for entertainment only”. In September 1964, Carter bought into a third venue, the Last Straw. “A chi chi barn complete with straw-decorated loft”, on Military Road in conservative Neutral Bay, the Last Straw was (reportedly) a little forbidding in appearance:

Thick straw blinds cover the windows, and only a glimmer of light shows through. Inside, blackened beams, a smithy’s apron hanging at the entrance to the kitchen, old bits and pieces of brass and, pride and delight of the showman side of Jim’s nature, synthetic cobwebs, create a ‘folky’ atmosphere … [W]aitresses [serve] cups of coffee (1/6) … and the listeners, moving up along the rough benches which [flank] long trestle tables, [settle] down to 40 minutes complete absorption.
[Woman’s Day, 1 Feb 1965]

    According to Carter, business at the the three venues (and later the Folk Terrace, as well) – while steady – enabled him to make only a “fairly modest” living, hardly the fortune he was rumoured to be raking in. The clubs attracted big crowds but (he noted) seating capacity at each was small. The artists were paid cash in hand at the end of each week – “enough to pay the rent and exist on”, remembers Gary Shearston. “On occasion, different people used to swan about in the kitchen down at the Troubadour and you could actually get a plate of food if you were dead lucky”.Carter sometimes found himself short of funds to cover the rent and pay the performers, and he was bailed out more than once by a generous business acquaintance who admired what the clubs were doing. Adelaide trio The Wesley Three were among the performers who never received payment for appearing at the Katoomba Jazz Festival, a Carter production which failed completely when the whole area was enveloped by fog. (“Acoustically it was wonderful but you couldn’t see anything but a few lights twinkling through the fog”).  Sean Cullip remembers being annoyed when (on several occasions) Carter underpaid him and then neglected his promise to make up the balance later. Plus – the performers frequently found their nightly fee hard-earned. Carter tended to maximise their services by paying aspiring singer Mike Eves petrol money to shuttle them from one venue to another over the course of an evening – a procedure lnown as “the milk run”. John McMillan (of The Green Hill Singers) claims that “the milk run” was actually fairly standard practice within the Sydney entertainment industry:          

Sydney had a reputation. If you wanted to do a strip club night and you went to, say, a dozen strip clubs, you’d see the same acts at each club … In the folk clubs, you’d go from Rushcutters’ Bay to Newtown to Neutral Bay  … and probably end up out at Hornsby! … We were so green it wasn’t funny … We went with the flow.

“We certainly earned our money”, maintains Jeannie Lewis, conceding that the system was all most of the younger artists were used to.  Lewis’ recollections of playing the Carter network are a little hazy 35 years on, although she remembers “hating” the Copperfield because playing there meant having to compete with people having dinner. For young interstate artists, used to the relatively democratic philosophy of Traynors, etc., working for Carter was an eye-opener. Peter Dickie, who once shared the bill in Sydney with Sean & Sonja, remembers being awed by the schedule; clearly this was the “big time”. Lynne St John is less charitable, insisting that, from the point of view of the performer, “Sydney was not up to Melbourne”. Being taxi’d back and forth between the Last Straw and the Troubadour was exhausting and poorly paid. Danny Spooner, who made his debut when Declan Affley invited him up from the floor one night at the Troubadour (circa 1963), and who subsequently played both the Copperfield and the Last Straw, remembers that the rates offered by Carter and other Sydney promoters – rates which the the artists were prepared to accept – infuriated country singer Tex Morton, who wrote ‘Burn another Folksinger’ by way of protest.  

Two artists came into open conflict with Carter over money; Don Henderson in the lead-up to the Troubadour, and Alex Hood when  the club was at its height. Aware that “the folk thing was coming” and that there was a need to protect potential coffee lounge singers from exploitation, they both helped found the Association of Sydney Folksingers. Realistically, the Association recognised that paying full Union rates to performers could well send folk clubs to the wall; nonetheless it was keen to ensure a degree of fair play. Henderson has recalled:
I was voted the delegate to go and talk to [Carter] … and he told me to get fucked. And I said “You can get fucked because no-one will ever work in your fucking club. It won’t even open”. He said “we’ll see”, and the first [sic] person he signed up was my wife. We were estranged by then, of course.
Hood remembers:
I had a falling out with Jim Carter … over money … he was paying what he thought he could get away with to various performers. And the thing was really going very well. I subsequently found out, or I was told, that the whole thing had been set up with “funny money” … That’s what I heard … The other artists wouldn’t support me in what I was trying to do because they were afraid they were going to lose work. It’s the old thing. Here’s me trying to be altruistic and stand up for people like Declan Affley who were getting ripped off. 
    We finally had a meeting with Actors’ Equity and we had to have a compromise … I didn’t get the complete amount of the back money that was legally owing to me, but we arranged a compromise deal … Jim paid this amount.
[Alex Hood, NLA Interview]
    Carter was Sydney’s first and most successful folk entrepreneur, the “nearest thing to a mastermind” in the industry. He was by no means alone. In his analysis of ‘The Folk People’ for the Bulletin, Charles Higham cited as Carter’s main competitors “a man called Murphy” and 18 year old Michael Darby. Murphy, who ran Binky’s Burgers at the Central Station end of Elizabeth Street, opened the Gas Lash in the building next door in August 1964. Decorated with Martin Sharp’s “snaggle-toothed fauna” and featuring a “natural earth floor” and thatched ceiling, the Gas Lash offered a mix of folk (ethnic and otherwise), jazz and Victoriana. It failed to survive beyond a couple of months; by the end of the year it was advertising in Oz Magazine and elsewhere as the Gas Lash discotheque.  
    Darby, son of a famous radio personality-turned-politician, established the Folk Attick in a Kings Cross tenement early in 1964. (Calypso and blues specialist Jan de Zwaan got his start there. Other artists included Shane Duckham, Peter Parkhill and Bob Hudson). Charles Higham described the venue as
… tall, ancient, and dark, lit only by the ultra-violet glow bathing the singers and thin, guttering candles in wine-bottles, most of the customers crouched furtively on stairs out of earshot of the performers but silent just the same, and a singer in each room, surrounded by bodies, crammed solid.
Within months of opening the Kings Cross club,  Darby had established Folk Atticks at Surfers Paradise and in Melbourne. “Most of my customers are in the low income or no income brackets”, he recognised.
They’re school-kids, or young students, who want a night’s entertaiment for five bob. I can get 700 in at a squeeze. I pay some of my singers 45 pound a week. As well as singers in each room, I’ve got one out on the terrace for soft songs – no microphone, no neighbors’ complaints, get it? I serve percolated coffee, lots of people come and help in the kitchen. [Bulletin, 14 Nov 1964] 
    Darby’s dalliance with the folk scene did not last long. Jim Carter took over the Folk Attick early in 1965, and renamed it the Folk Terrace. Other venues which emerged between 1963 and 1966 included The Folksinger, which succeeded The Flying Dutchman in Elizabeth Street (and which headlined Gary Shearston). Chuck Quinton, playing English songs and blues, accompanying himself on 6 and 12 string guitars, was resident performer at the Fountain in Pitt Street, while Margaret Kitamura (and subsequently Sean & Sonja, The Sowers, Bob Reynolds and Greg Butler) were prominent at El Toro. (El Toro was listed as offering folksinging on Saturdays as late as August 1966). English-born blues singer, harmonica player and guitarist Shane Duckham was the first folksinger to perform at Maxim’s, a “very bohemian” coffee lounge at Palm Beach which attracted “kids with no shoes, torn jeans and sunglasses”. (Duckham first started playing at the Barrelhouse and Blues Club in London, in a group with Alex Korner and Cyril Davis. After emigrating to Australia, to join his parents, he became involved in the Perth folk scene before “taking the plunge” in Sydney, where he worked for a time with Dutch Tilders, played in the group The Offbeats, and performed solo at the Folk Attick and the Troubadour). Danny Spooner, who also played there for a time, remembers that Maxim’s inspired Larry King, a left-handed guitarist from Tasmania, to write a song (to the tune of ‘Little Boxes’), which included the sentiment: “See the beatniks down at Maxim’s – all individuals, all look the same”.
    A couple of  local hopefuls, calling themselves Frances & John, persuaded the owner of the Black Poodle in Chatswood to hire them on Friday and Saturday nights in the second half of 1965. (Frances and John also played intermittently at El Toro). The Greenwich Village, in Anzac Parade, Kensington, offered live poetry-readings, quietly emphasised the performance of Australian material, actively encouraged audience-members to take the stage, and boasted the talents of Bob Reynolds, a Canadian singer-guitarist who spent a year or so in Sydney before resuming his travels to South Africa, and Declan Affley. The Castaways at Crow’s Nest teamed such big names as Hood, Henderson and Shearston with Larry King, the New World Trio, and interstate acts like The Twiliters, The Wesley Three and Irene Petrie.It also gave impetus to the careers of The Lincoln Trio and The Kinsfolk, two of the best of the transient Seekers/ Kingston Trio/ PP&M-derived ensembles which were an inevitable by-product of the folk boom.
    Led by trainee business executive Brian Tonkin (the other members were Sean Flanagan and Gary Pearson), The Lincoln Trio unselfconsciously created a U.S. collegiate-style singing act, complete with matching icecream jackets, and specialising in upbeat arrangements of old favourites like ‘O’Reilly’s Daughter’, ‘Queensland Drover’ and ‘Midnight Special’. The trio recorded a single for RCA (‘Wimoweh’ b/w ‘Go Lassie Go’) before disbanding when Tonkin’s firm sent him overseas. The Kinsfolk was a family act (formed after its members saw Peter Paul & Mary at the Sydney Stadium in 1964), grounded in church and gospel music. Work in Sydney coffee lounges (they also appeared regularly at the Copperfield) led to appearances on national TV shows like Bobby Limb’s Sound of Music, tapping into the lucrative middle-of-the-road Twiliters/ Wesley Three market. Marion Begbie, an infant teacher, featured on vocals, celeste and recorders; brothers Richard (a theology student) and Ross (a teacher) played guitars and banjo and another brother Tim (a university student) sang and played bass. Although their influences were readily apparent in performance, arrangement and choice of material, The Kinsfolk were skilled and well-trained professional musicians, as evidenced by two creditable LPs they recorded for RCA, Ain’t That News (1968) and For Tomorrow (1970).

Among the artists who appeared at the Pigalle, a tiny venue which functioned for a couple of years (1965-66) in Church Street, Paramatta, were Danny Spooner, Doug Ashdown, Margret Roadknight, and newcomer Mike McClellan. Spooner was then combining solo singing with membership of a bluegrass band called the Warrenbungle Mountain Ramblers! (Another member of the group was dobro-player Gary Greenwood). Ashdown, a leading performer on the Adelaide scene, debuted at the Carter clubs and the Pigalle just as folk-rock was making its presence felt.  He cites Sydney and the new Dylan as the impetus for his “going professional”:  “I was sitting in a sleazy hotel in King’s Cross with Phil Sawyer when I heard ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ on the radio and I said ‘That’s it’”.   
    Roadknight, who had become friendly with Prof Alex Bradford and other cast-members of the American folk-pageant Black Nativity during its Melbourne season, had acted on their suggestion that she join them in Sydney and try her lack within that city’s folk-club network. Bradford’s well-meant attempt to negotiate a ‘good deal’ for her with Jim Carter (10 pounds an appearance) backfired and resulted in her being barred from (paid) performing at any of the Carter venues. Accordingly, Roadknight spent a rather lean ten months in Sydney before returning to Melbourne (and Traynors, etc) at the end of 1965. She remembers that her stay coincided with the first series of a now-legendary satirical TV show; at 6’4” and fond of wearing flowing capes and big black hats, Roadknight found herself, not infrequently, pointed out by Sydneysiders as Mavis Bramston. 
    McClellan (b. 1945) was a young teacher, recently graduated from Armidale Teachers’ College where he had learned guitar while singing pop tunes with the college band. Occasional trips to Sydney, and Peter Paul & Mary’s renditions of Dylan songs, had alerted him to the folk boom:
Shearston was building a reputation. Jim Carter was building audiences … I looked in on the periphery … Paul Marks was pivotal for me. His singing of traditional blues songs by Big Bill Broonzy, etc., blew me away. The guitar really got me and the interplay between voice and guitar. Marks was not only a very convincing singer, with a lovely voice and great phrasing. A lot of singers were trying to do that stuff. Others were often pretty inept. [He] had the sense of feel about the blues that gave them life and vitality.
    On crutches after a football injury, McClellan made his folksinging debut on an Open night at the Troubadour. (“I remember the difficulty of negotiating the stairs to go down. It took a fair bit of courage, struggling with the guitar as well”). Performing at the Last Straw and the Pigalle soon convinced the young enthusiast that his first musical love  – much as he loved the form – was not his true metier.
I came into this environment … with a fairly naive assumption that I could actually do the blues … Looking back, it’s somewhat embarrassing … Vocally I was clearly unsuited … a middle-class white boy trying to sing the blues. I’d absorbed the technicalities … But I realised I had not absorbed the history of the music  … Graham Lowndes walked in one night and I realised I didn’t have the voice for it at all.
    McClellan played for a while with Lowndes and Derek Robinson as the respected Currency Blues Band (“Gary Shearston gave us our name. He said we were pioneers”) but, as a soloist, he was moving increasingly into writing and performing his own songs. Records by American guitarist Doc Watson and, in particular, balladeer Tom Rush, were his chief influences:
The Circle Game LP was pivotal. It had the first recorded versions of songs by Jackson Browne, James Taylor and Joni Mitchell … I suddenly started to find that the things I was interested in weren’t getting much [airplay] … Not much was happening in singer-songwriting here. Even Shearston was still mainly a traditionalist … I was never accepted by the traditionalist folkmusic movement, and the folkmusic movement in general. A lot of people said I was too slick. There was always that element of cautious approach to what I was doing.   
    McClellan would give up teaching for full-time music after winning a heat of the TV quest New Faces and taking up the offer of regular work on the variety program Sound of Music (to the dismay of some in the folk establishment). His first LP, Mike McClellan, released on Col Joye’s ATA label in 1972, heralded his arrival as one of the country’s leading (and enduring) singer-composers.
    Also featured at the Pigalle in 1965-6 were the John Gordon Trio, Brisbane-ite Shayna Karlin (nee Bracegirdle), visiting Irish group The Leprechauns, Vicki Reiner, The Green Hill Singers, Bob Reynolds and Alex Hood. The Leprechauns (Sean, Liam and Mick) were former skiffle and modern jazz musicians who had reverted to folksinging and acquired a solid reputation in their native Belfast before spending several months in Sydney. Hood is credited with having persuaded the Pigalle’s co-owner Frank French to stage folksinging – and with organising the performing rosters there. French, a former jazz enthusiast (“a big band man at heart”), would continue to host informal folk-meets at his home on Sydney’s outskirts after the Pigalle closed. Arguably the most influential Sydney promoter/organiser after Jim Carter, French would re-emerge later in the decade and reactivate PACT Folk as a platform for the new breed of singer-songwriter.
    As for Jim Carter himself: – his involvement in folkmusic failed to survive much beyond the boom. Yet while he is remembered sardonically by some of the performers of the era, others recall him with considerable warmth. Writing at the time, Edgar Waters observed that singers and audiences alike were in the debt of Carter, et al, for having taken a gamble on folkmusic.
Jim Carter and his fellows have been paid, of course, in hard work by the singers and in hard cash by the audiences. But … it is realised that they helped to stimulate interest in folk-song and helped to improve the quality of the singing, at the same time as they helped themselves to an honest quid … I, for one, am prepared to give them a word of thanks as well as an occasional five bob.
[Australian, 20 Feb 1965]
Don Henderson – notwithstanding their early stand-off over pay-rates – later paid tribute to Carter as “a terrific bloke, a fair man and a unionist … He knew the situation. Probably when it came that he could pay, he paid”. On principle, Carter never formally employed Henderson, but he did give him carte blanche to use the Troubadour at any time as a “permanent platform” for his new songs.[NLA Interview] “Jim Carter was very fluid provided people presented themselves well [and there was] a certain amount of decorum”, maintains Marian Henderson. “He was always fair with me. Jim was our Father Christmas”. Gary Shearston, in particular, has always disputed claims that Carter was, first and foremost, an opportunistic businessman. Maintaining that a lot of patrons took advantage of the size and informality of the Troubadour “by not paying”, Shearston once insisted: “I’ve been in with Jim Carter … from the start and I know he was interested in folk music years before the boom started”. More recently, Shearston has elaborated:
I have heard on occasions – and it makes me very annoyed when I do hear it … some “slagging” of Jim Carter and his role in the whole thing. Jim Carter, before he opened that club, had probably the best private collection of folkmusic records, and blues, in Sydney. He had been a lover of the music for years before he even thought about opening the club. Before he opened the club he went to … London to see Les Cousins and all the folk clubs in England, to get the feel of them, the ambience, to see the way it went, you know … and came back to Sydney and all he could afford was that tiny little shoe-box called the Troubadour in New South Head Road … set it up and then came up and knocked on the door to see if John Sellers would open the club for him ….
    Jim, actually, in that tiny little place, virtually supported about ten performers over a period of about two-and-a-half years … at some considerable struggle for himself  … Marian, Alex, myself, Tony Morrrison … Chuck [Quinton], Martin Wyndham-Read, Brian Mooney, Tina Date, Lenore Somerset whenever she came up from Melbourne, Paul Marks … and then all the Johnny-and-Jill-come-latelies … It was as a result of that that we ended up doing the Just Folk program on Channel 7, which was supposed to have run for 13 episodes and ending up running for 26 … He spawned a lot of good things – he was the instigator of the Newport Folk Festival … copying the name and all that, but nevertheless that was a great event in Sydney … [in that] bloody great circus marquee down there ….
[Gary Shearston, NLA Interview]

The Troubadour is still remembered with affection by public and performers – particularly the upstairs room where the singers congregated between sets. “The Troubadour was always packed with audiences who wanted to hear the music”, remembers Sean Cullip, “Smoke-filled, silent rooms, full of the smell of indifferent coffee  … [bringing together] very talented people singing the most wonderful music and enjoying it enormously”. Like Traynors in Melbourne it attracted overseas celebrities, among them Eartha Kitt, Dame Margot Fonteyn & Rudolph Nureyev, Rita Streich, Theo Bikel, Israeli singer Batya, and Nina & Frederik. Peter Yarrow (of Peter Paul & Mary) once gave an impromptu three-hour recital there. “It was a wonderful time”, reminisces Alex Hood:

Seven nights a week and packed all the time. Upstairs. Downstairs. Going all the bloody time. The singing never stopped. You got the idea that suddenly people liked you. They liked what you were doing … I’m sure it started a lot of people off that continued with it [Alex Hood, NLA Interview]

    Apart from the venues, which provided a performing platform for the cream of Sydney’s folksingers (and visiting interstate headliners), Carter mounted several major concerts, two of them at the Town Hall in 1964 with the second so well-attended that an estimated 1000 customers were turned away. His best-remembered – and most ambitious – undertaking was the Folk Festival at Sydney’s Newport Beach, produced in partnership with Brian Nebenzahl, managing director of Playbill Inc., in January 1965.

The festival was the high point in Carter’s dominance of the Sydney scene and – in retrospect – the highpoint of the boom in NSW. The beach site was chosen because of its popularity with summer vacationers and because its name evoked immediate associations with the annual Rhode Island extravaganzas at which the American folk pantheon gathered. Black and green posters featuring Adelaide songstress Tina Lawton were pasted up all over Sydney, and Carter and Nebenzahl shrewdly leased the Elizabethan Trust’s giant tent theatre and erected it on the oval at Newport. Capable of seating 2000 people, the tent was reportedly packed to capacity at each of five concerts. Loudspeakers relayed proceedings to hundreds more would-be patrons outside. The Workers Educational Association buildings nearby provided space for seminars, discussions and film-screenings, and accommodation for interstate performers. “Not just from Sydney, but from … all points west and north, singers and audiences came with bedding rolls, sleeping bags, and prized guitars ..”, reported one Sydney journalist.
     Citing the enormous success of Newport, Carter successfully tendered to stage the annual Moomba folk music concert in Melbourne, somewhat to the dismay of that city’s folk establishment. He also expanded his coffee lounge empire to encompass Darby’s Folk Attick, revamped it as the Folk Terrace, and thereby provided his roster of regulars (Shearston, Date, Marks, Henderson, Lewis, etc) with another performing outlet.
The ‘Carter family’ gained enviable exposure during 1965 on the TV programs Bandstand; Just Folk, hosted by Shearston; Leonard Teale’s Folk-Moot; and Dave’s Place, hosted by ex-Kingston Trio member, Dave Guard, who had settled in Australia in 1962. Dave’s Place was an ambitious meld of folk and jazz, set in an imaginary teahouse somewhere remote in the Pacific. Veteran vaudeville star Queenie Paul appeared weekly as chief tea-lady Priscilla, and a trio comprised of Guard, Chris Bonett and Norma Stoneman / Kerrilee Male opened each show. Interestingly, the trio discarded the customary acoustic accompaniment for electric instruments (in Guard’s case a Melnik ZJM guitar), and a repertoire of country/folk, R&B and gospel. (Guard appears to have been strongly influenced by The Staple Singers at this point). Drummer Len Young and jazzmen Don Burrows and the Col Nolan Trio provided instrumental support. Highlights of Dave’s Place included Nina & Frederik performing the Israeli hora ‘Eretz Zavat Chalav’, Judy Henske singing ‘Charlotte Town’, Kitamura rendering ‘Mary Anne’, Kevin Butcher’s ‘Brisbane Ladies’, Scottish singer Lesley Hale’s ‘Still I Love Him’, ‘Singing Bird’ by Wyndham-Read & Mooney, Marian Henderson’s ‘Euabalong Ball’, Irene Petrie’s ‘Coal Tattoo’, ‘Sometime Lovin’’ by Shearston, ‘Ella Speed’ by The Twiliters, McGhee & Terry’s ‘Pick a Bale of Cotton’,  and Guard dueting ‘The Frozen Logger’ with Margret Roadknight. (Roadknight appeared as a singing waitress, garbed in an English parlourmaid outfit). [See Ken Bradshaw’s excellent on-line articles on ‘Dave’s Place’].
     However this peak of activity was of very brief duration. By the last quarter of 1965, Music Maker’s Stuart Gordon was alerting readers of his ‘Like Folk’ column that “commercially speaking, the Sydney folk scene appears to be in the midst of a depression”.The plug was pulled on Just Folk; the Last Straw closed (re-opening as a discotheque), and Brian Nebenzahl announced that the proposed 1966 Folk Festival at Newport would not be going ahead. A tour by U.S. bluegrass stars, The New Lost City Ramblers, proved such a bust financially that promoter Harry M. Miller wryly hosted a ‘Let’s Forget about Folkmusic’ party.  Coffee lounge operators, in general, declared that business was “declining to nothing”. Undoubtedly overseas musical trends (i.e. the emergence of folk-rock) were echoing resoundingly in Australia, and the mass audience was restless for newer diversions. Insiders conceded, as well, that the market may well have been saturated, a case of “too much folkmusic, too soon”. Gary Shearston did not mince words, insisting that the decline had been hastened by the “usual gluttonous appetites” of “commercial interests”. (Shearston would spend two decades in Europe, enjoying an international hit with his rendition of Cole Porter’s ‘I Get a Kick Out of You’. For the past 15 years he has worked as clergyman in rural NSW parishes. He remains active musically and, in 2005, is preparing a new CD).
    Concerns about exploitation of the artist by some coffee lounge entrepreneurs had underpinned the foundation of PACT Folk at mid-year. (Jenny McCallum, former manager of the Troubadour, was a key player in its establishment). Despite grumbling that they had become overly commercial (i.e. too well-known), Leonard Teale insisted that Sean & Sonja be invited to participate in the new venue. PACT Folk operated out of the old corn exchange building at the corner of Sussex and Market Streets, Pyrmont, and opened on 15 May 1965 with the line-up of Tina Lawton, Jan de Zwaan, Sean & Sonja, Brisbane singer Ros Corven, Canberra artist Malcolm Wilde, and Teale & Sundstrom. The organisation adopted the name the Limejuice Tub for its regular activities. Directory listings in Australian Tradition and elsewhere indicate that the Limejuice Tub developed a life of its own, outlasting its parent organisation by several years. It finally closed early in 1970. (Sean Cullip remembers celebrating his 21st birthday there with a bottle of Veuve Cliquot).          

 By the beginning of 1967, the folk boom was a thing of the past in Sydney; so much so that the Limejuice Tub and a more recent arrival on the scene, the Sydney Folk Song Club (which met in an upstairs room at the Hotel Elizabeth), were being cited as the only two major venues left. The Bush Music Club continued to meet regularly, seemingly untouched by the ups-and-downs of popular taste, but the major folk coffee lounges were gone – including the Troubadour, El Toro, the Folk Terrace and the Pigalle.
Once Jim Carter had withdrawn from the Copperfield, the management hired Alex Hood to “hold court” and co-ordinate rosters which featured Kevin Butcher (a former commercial artist with a superior tenor voice), Emma Hanna, Marian Henderson, The Kinsfolk and a very popular Perth trio The Twiliters. Significantly the club was keen to play up its resemblance to “a Victorian era English inn”. Hood was ending a turbulent marriage at the time. Opening his guitar-case on stage one evening, he found the instrument smashed to pieces – a parting gift. (The patrons assumed it was all part of the act and laughed uproariously). 
The Copperfield, too, would fold by mid-year. The dearth of performing outlets was not lost on Music Maker columnist Stuart Gordon who compared the local state-of-play with the rather more healthy situation in Melbourne. Citing the Port Phillip Festival, a scheduled festival at rural Wangaratta, and the persistence of the magazine Australian Tradition, Gordon wrote: “Rivalry between [the two cities] is always keen, no matter at what level or subject … but we Sydneysiders might as well concede to the southern city on the river that its folk scene has by far the healthier outlook”.
    The move from coffee lounge to pub, which started in Sydney, would be characteristic of the Australian folk scene in general, reflecting a fundamental shift away from U.S.-influenced singing and playing to hard-and-fast concentration on British and Irish music. 

What became the Sydney Folk Song Club originated in informal gatherings of a number of expatriate Englishmen, on Friday evenings, at the Mercantile Hotel under the Harbour Bridge. “I really liked it there”, recalls Dave de Hugard. “It wasn’t a club but an assembly of people with a common love, all enjoying songs and tunes”. Within weeks the gathering shifted to the larger Vanity Fair Hotel in King’s Cross (still “a loosely-organised evening”) and from there to the Hotel Elizabeth (where it would continue well into the 70s). Reportedly formed “to fill the gap between the coffee bars and the Bush Music Club”, the SFSC appears to have been the initiative of multi-instrumentalist Mike Ball. Regular performers included Ball, de Hugard, Carol & Mike Wilkinson and Chris Kempster. Declan Affley, Marian Henderson, Mark Gregory, Jeannie Lewis, Mike McClellan and Alex Hood made frequent guest appearances. (Hood recently notched up fifty years as part of the backbone of the Australian revbival. In 2005 he and wife Annette continue to tour Australia with their highly successful folklore for schools program).
     The “shift towards the Anglo-Celtic” also became more and more apparent at the Limejuice Tub which, by late 1967 (according to Australian Tradition), was being “run solely by [expatriate Englishman] Mike Eves … in the most uncongenial surroundings imaginable”. In due course, the club moved from the Corn Exchange to the nearby Maitland and Morpeth Hotel, where regulars included Peter Parkhill and Colin Dryden. Visiting Melbourne journalist/singer  Mick Counihan waxed enthusiastic about the strong emphasis at both clubs on unaccompanied singing, and the general absence of “the sort of superficial hotch-potch PP&M – Judy Collins – Pete Seeger – Joan Baez repertoire which was the staple of so many singers of the folk-boom period”. In Counihan’s opinion, Sydney performers were belatedly acquiring an awareness of the difficulties involved in singing folksongs. With admirable foresight, however, he cautioned that:

… while the emphasis on British songs in Melbourne and Sydney is a gigantic step forward in terms of the growing maturity of the revival here, there is the possibility of a new orthodoxy replacing the old pop-folk one.
[Go-Set, 25 Jan 1967]    

    Hotel folk-meets were at the centre of the Sydney scene from 1967 throughout the period under review (and beyond). John Huie’s Wine bar in George Street hosted Thursday folk nights for a few months while Limejuice Tub regulars met for a time at the Bognor Hotel, three doors from the corner of Castlereagh and Elizabeth Streets. Other clubs functioned out of the Edinburgh Castle (led by Warren Fahey) and the Boars’ Head, and an Irish Musicians Group met for a while at the Hotel Elizabeth. Occasional folk evenings were also convened at the Mercantile, Hero of Waterloo and Hollywood hotels. Dick’s Hotel at Balmain was a popular gathering-place for folkies on Saturday afternoons circa 1970, while during the same period, folkmusic (performed by Colin Dryden, John Francis, Declan Affley and Martin Van-Herk) emanated from the recently renovated cellars of the old Royal George in Sussex Street. The Town Crier Folk Club, founded by Derrick Chetwyn and Trevor Sutton with the backing of the NSW Folk Federation, met on Thursday nights (from April 1971) at the Town Hall hotel in Balmain. According to a contemporary report:

The Town Crier goes like a party. In a big back bar with the spirits high and the music REAL … The audiences are REAL too. Cross-section audiences. Like Balmain itself. Several strata. Old men on benches. Young chicks with babies and nowhere to go except Balmain. It’s all there. Even container-truck drivers, the hated few of the noise and exhaust, occasionally blow in, breathe in, drink in, and sing … There’s a hard-core following of sixty regulars. They range in age from around 18 to around 60. No generation gaps in traditional music … 

    Meanwhile, occasional efforts (usually shortlived) were made to rekindle the coffee lounge ambience. Beekers at Manly, the brainchild of a multicultural trio (an American, a Scotsman and an Englishman), briefly offered a mix of jazz and folk at weekends. Folksinging was also advertised for a time at Ferdinand’s at Collaroy, at the Workshop in William Street (on Thursday nights), and at The Web in Smith Street, Parramatta. A group calling itself the Folk Arts Co-operative ran The Shack in Waterloo Road, Narrabeen, at weekends from 1970-73, reportedly catering “for all tastes” with “a balanced format of traditional and contemporary music”. Peter Phelps and Reg Burns were resident artists at Friday and Sunday folk evenings at the Quintette Coffee Shop, a cellar in South Terrace, Bankstown, while Greg Quill was resident artist at ‘Googaloo’ in King Street in the CBD. ‘Rentace’, a “suitably dark little clubroom-cum-coffee lounge place”, was founded by young Fourth Internationalists, and offered a program of films, talks, recorded music and live folksongs. (A successor, the ‘Third World’ in Goulburn Street, advertised itself as “the only revolutionary folk club in Sydney”). A trio consisting of Robert Miller (guitar), Adrienne Bartlett (vocals) and Ian Foster (tea-chest bass) held court performing folk hits and light pop songs on Friday evenings, throughout 1970, at the Jersey Coffee Lounge in fashionable West Pymble.

 Only one venue appears to have challenged the dominance of the pubs, however. This was the revitalised PACT Folk.
In marked contrast to the intensely traditionalist orientation of the emergent pub clubs (and, of course, the BMC), it actively promoted itself as a showcase for contemporary music. Weekly (Saturday night) concerts were organised and presented, from early 1969, by Frank French, former owner of the Pigalle – first at the co-operative’s old Sussex Street premises (rather hazardous on rainy nights because of a leaking roof), then in the cellar of the YWCA in Liverpool Street. (“You had to go down many flights of stairs or in a lift”). French also initiated weekly (Thursday) evening workshops “at which the amateur finds himself in constructive discussion with the audience and other artists”. According to French (in Music Maker, Feb 1970), the venue “did not take off too well at first”:

Folk had been in the doldrums … and, basically, singers were still singing their old repertoire. We had a few discussions and then decided that we would switch from traditional folk by evolving a policy that would still allow the presentation of some traditional, but our major direction would be to attempt to organise classes in contemporary folk. Singers suddenly found that if they sang their own songs they were received better. All of a sudden people started to sit up and take notice, this was what put us back on the market again … [The] teenager of today … must have something to think about and is looking for something with a bit more body than the old style of folk singing … PACT Folk has become a sounding board for both singers and material, as the audience on an ordinary Saturday night is a very representative cross-section of involved Australians. If a singer goes on with one of her own songs and gets an 80% affirmative reaction, you can say she is on the right direction.

Artists closely associated with the venue in its early years included singers Kathie Fisher, Marian Henderson, Doug Ashdown and Mike McClellan, comedian Graham Bond, satirist Bernard Bolan, and an innovative folk-rock band Moonstone (fronted by former rock’n’roll singer Ray Brown) In addition to its regular nights, PACT Folk mounted a number of successful concerts, including a Sunday series at the Avalon Peninsula Playhouse.

More than any other venue of the period – and under French’s direction – PACT Folk (according to Pattison & Mulhallen, Australian Music Directory, 1982, p.105):

… encouraged the blossoming of Australian singer-songwriters, contemporary folk artists and acoustic musicians in general … it is to Frank French that many … [subsequently] prominent musicians owe a large part of their careers. The list is long and includes Mike McClellan, Doug Ashdown, Marian Henderson, Don Henderson, Graham Lowndes, Margret Roadknight, Jeannie Lewis, Bob Hudson, Al Head, Bernard Bolan, the East Neasden Spasm Band … Al Ward … John J. Francis, Terry Hannagan … and Richard Clapton.  

    “The music was just brilliant”, remembers Tasmanian singer Beth Sowter who spent a few months in Sydney in 1969, playing at PACT Folk (and elsewhere) in the group The Famous Cottonwood Patch. (Gary Greenwood was also a member). Sowter recalls French with particular warmth. At a time when the group was usually taking home a pittance from other gigs, “Frank would give us $10 because he knew we were starving … I have a soft spot for him. He looked after us” Marian Henderson concurs:

People went to stay overnight at Frank’s house when they had nowhere else to go … His day job was as a foreman in a plastics factory, which probably contributed to his death. He should have had a long life … Frank took over from Jimmy Carter though there were years in between. He was a bit of a fairy godfather. He organised a lot of work for a lot of people. Big folk festivals, concerts that were very very diverse. Without being pushy and taking any money for it, he would promote the people who worked for him as much as he could .

    French had an advantage over businessmen like Jim Carter: “He didn’t have to live off it”, notes Mike McClellan. “He wasn’t an entrepreneur. He had a second career … He got involved in the music because he loved it and he loved the people. He was like a magnet … prepared to welcome new talent when it came in”. “A wonderful, wonderful man. I have the fondest memories of him”, states Doug Ashdown.

 The outreach of the folk coffee lounges (and pub folk clubs) was augmented by periodic large-scale concerts and festivals. I have already noted the crowd-drawing Town Hall concerts staged by Jim Carter, and Carter’s hugely successful Newport extravaganza. Among other notable events were a hootenanny at Anzac House in May 1963, presented by the Folk Song Society of Sydney. Gary Shearston cites as significant a series of concerts mounted at Sydney University’s Union Theatre in conjunction with Charles Perkins’ Freedom Rides; highlights of other Union Theatre concerts (organised by the University’s Folk Song Society) were preserved by RCA as the LP Folk Concert on Campus. (Performers at these concerts included British singer traditional Roy Waterson and aboriginal rhythm’n’blues player Alan Moarywaalla. Moarywaalla, aka Alan Barker, hailed from Western Australia and had been a regular at the Royal George). The university Society was founded by Sylvia Haneman in 1963. Its membership rose to 300 within its first year as students flocked to sample regular singabouts, lunchtime meetings and a camp at which participants acquainted themselves with Australian aboriginal music. Society alumni included Lewis, Graeme Turner, Chris Kempster (pioneer of the Bush Music Club and The Bushwhackers who completed a Science degree as a mature-age student during the folk years, and was an early enthusiast for emerging U.S. song-poet Bob Dylan) and Chris Shaw.
    Involved in the Bush Music Club and Folklore Society milieu from childhood (through her parents Frances and Rod), Chris Shaw learned her first guitar chords from another young schoolgirl, Shayna Bracegirdle, while on holiday with the Bracegirdle family in Brisbane. She later acquired a hand-made instrument from Don Henderson. Like her mother, her repertoire was primarily Anglo-American ballads and international folksongs. (She remembers forgetting the lyrics of the Yiddish love song ‘Margaritkes’ during her one appearance at the Troubadour and being prompted by Frances from the sidelines). Shaw was a popular singer of the “sweet young thing” ilk, appearing at concerts and on TV shows like Dave Allen’s Tonight throughout the boom. She also appeared, along with The Radiation Quartet, Dick Hackett and Graeme Turner on a couple of topical recordings for the NSW Teachers’ Federation. Shaw largely eschewed folksinging after completing her degree, in favour of work in theatre   
    In 1967 enthusiasts at both the Universities of Sydney and New South Wales co-operated in hosting the first national Intervarsity Folk Festival, billeting participants from all around the country, and convening a series of workshops and concerts over a ten day period. Other significant initiatives included a folk night at Granville in 1965 (advertised as the first such presentation in Sydney’s industrial west. It attracted regulars from the Pigalle and featured Sean & Sonja, Danny Spooner, Jan de Zwaan, The Norfolk Singers, Vicki Reiner and The Lincoln Trio. The recently-formed PACT Co-operative initiated a similar concert at the Chatswood Town Hall in August 1965, as part of the North Side Arts Festival. In October 1967 (notwithstanding reported rifts between the two organisations) The Limejuice Tub and the Sydney Folksong Society combined with the Bush Music Club to stage a three day festival.  Its aim was “to create greater awareness of folkmusic proper in Sydney”.
     Most successful was the Port Jackson Folk Festival, i.e. the Fourth National Folk Festival, held over the Australia Day Long weekend in 1970, and a “tremendous box office success”. According to Go-Set [4 Feb 1970]:

From the ages of ten to 50 they came in … beads and singlets, suits and ties, on motorbikes, in old jalopies, by train, by airplane and by foot – 5000 avid folk followers from the far corners of the country.

Advertised as commemorating the bicentenary of Captain James Cook’s discovery of Eastern Australia, the PJFF set an important precedent by channelling some of its profits into promoting further collection of folklore in NSW. Nearly 20 workshops included demonstrations and talks on Instrument making, Whaling songs, the Blues, Bluegrass, Oral Humour, Magic & Superstition, Folk dancing, even puppeteering. Two evening concerts were devoted to Australian and contemporary song and British and American music respectively.
    A major (and revitalising) innovation which paralleled the staging of the PJFF was the formation of the NSW Folk Federation, set up with the aim of affiliating all folk-oriented clubs and organisations throughout the state. By December 1970, 12 organisations had joined the Federation and membership stood at 300. Mike Eves served as inaugural chairman with Bernard Bolan treasurer and Warren Fahey in charge of public relations. The Federation promptly made its presence felt in a tangible way by mounting a public symposium, ‘Where Are We Going’, and sponsoring concerts at the Conservatorium of Music and the Science theatre at the University of NSW; presenting American artists Mike & Alice Seeger at the University of Sydney’s Wallace Theatre; and staging two Christmas come-all-ye’s at the Scots Church Assembly Hall (utilising the talents of Declan Affley, Warren Fahey, John Francis, Jamie Carlin, Roger Montgmery and Marian Henderson).

Sources:
Apart from publications, etc. cited in the text, my main sources have been:
 1. National Library of Australia (NLA) Oral History Interviews with Chris Kempster (TRC 2690/30-31 1992), Don Henderson (TRC 2581/14-16, 1989), Gary Shearston (TRC 2590/40, 1992) and Alex Hood (TRC 2608/35, 1994; TRC 3515, 1996/9);

2the magazines Australian Tradition & Music Maker 1964-70;  and
  3. personal interviews and correspondence with Beth & Reg Schurr, Brian Mooney, Mark Gregory, Chris Shaw, Marian Henderson, Brian Nebenzahl, Gary Shearston, Sean Cullip, Danny Spooner, Ken White, Cris Larner, Jeannie Lewis, Stan Arthur, Peter Wesley-Smith, John McMillan, Peter Dickie, Lynne St John, Ian Clarke, Mike McClellan, Margret RoadKnight, Ken Bradshaw, Dave de Hugard, Bernard Bolan, Beth Sowter & Doug Ashdown.

In March 1969, I established the Edinburgh Folk Club at the Edinburgh Hotel on Pitt Street. It was hugely successful – probably because it was 50 cents admission (which went to the performers). It had a traditional music-only policy. I am grateful to Michael Breen for giving this rare document to me – I read it in horror!