| Larry Schwartz |
| At home in inner suburbia; on planes, trains and buses, Jimmy Little closes his eyes and drifts into the past. “I can let my mind go back home,” he says. “Whenever I want to; at any interval in my meditation. I am in touch constantly with the peace and tranquillity of the land.” Little, the eldest of seven children, was raised among his mother’s people, the Yorta Yorta, at the Cummeragunja mission on the Murray River. In his mind’s eye, he sees riverboats easing past; the punt that ferried people and vehicles to a township across the water. “The fruit-picking days. The hunting. The peace and tranquillity of rural Australia is still very strong in my mind.” He’d visit his father’s family at Wallaga Lake, on the New South Wales south coast. “Commuting back and forth in the seasonal work that dad would take up gave me a chance to grow up not only on the lazy, peaceful Murray River but also at the roaring, coastal seas.” The Wallaga Lake Aboriginal community had an all-male gum leaf band with 30 or more members. “They had a big bass drum,” Little says. “The only conventional instrument. All the gum leaf players would play in harmony. There were all sorts of wonderful, complementary sounds in our indigenous and contemporary songs. So growing up with that right in my home, it didn’t seem unnatural to follow suit in my career musically.” Forty years after he arrived in Sydney determined to make a career in showbusiness, Little still speaks with a soft, even voice that somehow seems to reflect the pace of that earlier time and place. Now 62, James Oswald “Jimmy” Little is hailed as “the first and for many years only Aboriginal star on the Australian music scene”. He has remained a quiet presence in Australian music and film through the decades. Thirty-six years after he reached third spot on the national charts with a song called Royal Telephone, Little is set to reach out to another generation. “I knew Jimmy’s songs from when I was a small boy,” Karma Country’s Brendan Gallagher has written in liner notes for a new album he has produced. Gallagher was impressed by the grace and style in Little’s music when he encountered him performing at an inner-Sydney venue a few years back. “I was instantly drawn to a table in front of the stage by one of the most beautiful voices I’d ever heard … All I could think of was getting that voice on tape.” Gallagher initiated Messenger, a project that echoes the preoccupations of a mid-’60s album, New Songs From Jimmy, in which Little interpreted originals by such emerging writers as Barry Gibb, Gary Shearston and Lorna Barry. “We’re very much alike,” Little says of the younger musician. “He likes a lot of the same things in music that I like. He’s a multi-instrumentalist and he’s got this wonderful ear for sound and color and pitch. He was so patient with me and so understanding that we struck up a great friendship.” Gallagher saw the virtue in broadening the veteran songster’s repertoire by having him sing songs by the likes of the Cruel Sea, the Church, Ed Kuepper, Paul Kelly, the Reels, Crowded House, the Go-Betweens, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, the Sunnyboys and the Jackson Code. Little had loved the Warumpi Band’s Black Fella/ White Fella; it articulates the merit of men, women and children, regardless of race. It reminds him of a song written by his vaudeville performer father called Give The Colored Lad A Chance. “I couldn’t wait to see them and congratulate them at one of the Sydney venues,” he says. “But I didn’t think then about recording it.” Although often associated with the country-rock of his early work, Little recorded a reggae single, Beautiful Woman, in 1983. Marj, his wife of 40 years and, he says, his “greatest fan and greatest critic”, had taken an immediate liking to that song. But she was wary of the new album. “I’d walk in and say, ‘I’ve got these new songs I want to sing.’ And she was kind of … Is that you?” But Marj has come around. Little has crossed the generational divide and made very much his own songs with which he was not familiar. “The songs speak about love,” he says, “and that’s something that I relate to. I believe a song comes from the heart. It’s about the heartbreak and about the heart-mending and I like to be the interpreter, the presenter, in getting a message through to the people.” He has studied each of the songs closely and explains the lyrics. “I’m singing the heart-rending sadness of two people wanting to find their place in life,” he says of the Cruel Sea’s Down Below, “and one is looking at the other, giving in to life and no longer wanting to survive the trauma of living. “So one person says to the other, If you’re going to give up your life, I want to be with you. I want to be with you in the life after (death). So fall with me down below …” He sees a common theme in the 11 tracks on the album. “They all have this deep yearning of love and trust and wanting to be together.” I saw him on stage at a country music festival in Kyneton a few years back. He was singing a sad song, Blue Eyes Cryin’ In The Rain. But he’d given it a twist, substituting the color brown for blue. “You remember that?” he says, laughing, as one who has been found out in some gentle mischief. “There are other colors. Sometimes when I’m with the right crowd, I sing red eyes, green eyes for envy and have fun with the song. But I like to include the two, blue and brown. “I mean, what color is love? I’ve met so many great people who just want to live and let live. I can understand people who can’t come to terms with other people. That’s their lot and that’s their choice. But the world is really a great place to be in, if you have the right attitude.” His early influences included singing cowboys and minstrels he saw in movies. But the biggest was his father, who led a vaudeville troupe in the 1930s and 1940s. “He painted up and danced, both traditional and contemporary. He was a musician, dancer, comedian, com-pere and organiser of shows. “As a child, I saw him as just one of the personalities. He was my dad on stage. But I grew to realise that he was the instigator, the prime mover.” Little was 13 when his mother died. She never saw his rise to fame. But his father lived on, into the ’70s. “He was just as proud as punch,” he says. “He was so beside himself with joy.” Little looks back on his career with understandable pride. He mentions boxers Lionel Rose and Tony Mundine and track star Cathy Freeman. “Once a champion, always a champion,” he says. “Meaning, I was a singer once and I will always be a singer, interpreting songs, no matter what my age is. “I’ve been blessed with good health and a good attitude towards life and people and good songs keep coming. So all I have to do is really breathe my soul into them.” In 1959, the year he first signed with Festival, he made his acting debut in the Billy Graham evangelical film, Shadow Of The Boomerang. When he heard it had been screened some years later in Madison Square Garden, New York City, it occurred to him that although he’s never been to the US, in a sense he was transported there through the film. He starred in Tracey Moffat’s short film, Night Cries, and had a role in the German film-maker Wim Wenders’ feature, Until The End Of The World. In 1989, the year Little was named Aboriginal of the Year by the National Aboriginal and Islander Day Observance Committee (NAIDOC), he played his first theatrical role in Black Cockatoos. He has also had a non-singing role in the opera Black River. Little was inducted into the Tamworth Country Music Roll of Renown five years ago. Before returning to Festival, he recorded an independent album, Yorta Yorta Man, the title song a response to all those over the years who have asked for his story. “I had my royal command performances and performed when the Pope came to the community in Alice Springs,” he says. “I was flown especially up there for that. “So in lots of ways, I’ve been entertaining royalty and parliamentarians and many people in high places. I was representing a nation within a nation and I’d like eventually, in winding up my career, to represent Australia abroad in some capacity … as an ambassador in whatever way, shape or form, indigenous or otherwise.” He was a qualified teacher by his early 50s, is father of a budding film-maker and a baseball player, and he counsels younger Aborigines about not neglecting their culture. “The children are learning,” he says, “because we of this generation said, ‘You’ve got to go back to your roots to know who you are before you know where you’re going to go.’ “It’s a matter of stimulating and regenerating the history in a formal and semi-formal way so that not only do we get our facts and our heritage back alive, we’re educating the world that we have a rich history to share. For many years, that was not given the opportunity to be enjoyed.” Invariably cast as a tribal elder in his latter years as an actor, he has endeavored to be subtle in articulating the predicament of his people. “I leave politics to the politicians,” he says. “I let them know I’m an entertainer, spreading goodwill … “I believe that to each his own. I don’t always agree with a lot of my politician countrymen but we all have something to say. “We’re all messengers. Sometimes the message is loud and clear. Other times, subtle and sweet.” The Sunday Age, 04-Jul-1999 |
Larry Schwartz Writer 