Obituary by Ian Woolley
Singer Judith Durham put Australia on the 60’s musical map at a time when the Beatles would dominate the world…
The Seekers
For a brief time, the Seekers would give the ‘fab four’ a run for their money and would become the first act from their continent to have a US No.1.
The official history of young Melbourne signer Judith Cock is well documented. Early in life, Judith believed her future would be as a pianist and she went on to gain her Associate In Music, Australia (A.Mus.A.) in classical piano as a student of world-renowned concert pianist Professor Ronald Farren-Price at the Melbourne University Conservatorium, with her first professional engagement in the arts playing piano for a ballet school.
As Judith admitted to the Sydney press two years ago, “It is a long way from her early days. It was the early 1960s, and there were literally no role models for a female Australian singer with dreams of a big career”.
Not that Durham ever envisioned global fame; there was no indication anywhere that such a thing was even possible for a girl from Melbourne.
She had the voice, and was classically trained on the piano, but says: “I felt totally inadequate. It was a learning process all the time. I hadn’t seen other people. We used to watch a show on television with American records, and [local] performers would mime to the American tunes. My role models came in my imagination, from what I’d heard on the radio or on record. Vera Lynn, I loved, but I’d only ever heard her on the radio. Gospel singers, Bessie Smith, Mahalia Jackson. So it was in my head that I visualised the emotion but no way to see how people do it. I was shy. But when I sang I felt really empowered.
“Mum prayed to the Lord that when her children were born they wouldn’t be tone deaf.” (It worked: Durham’s sister Beverley Sheehan is also a singer.) “Mum says at two years old I was singing my own little songs, she didn’t know where I’d heard it so I must have made it up. I used to sing along with the radio.” By the time she was on the radio herself, she’d abandoned her family name – she was born Judith Cock – and taken her mother’s maiden name, Durham.
Her first great musical love was jazz.
“We all loved that music,” she says. “A lot of people have forgotten that era because they think the 60s started with The Beatles, but three years prior to that or even earlier there was a huge craze of Dixieland jazz … it was all the rage. The town halls and RSLs would be packed with teenagers listening to Dixieland jazz and blues and gospel.”
young Judith Durham
Still in her teens, although excelling on piano, little Judy Cock dreamed of fame singing opera or musical comedy and in 1961, aged 18, she was ready to begin classical vocal training. One night, just for fun, she ‘sat in’ with a trad jazz band at a local dance called “Memphis”, and found instant success performing blues, gospels, and jazz standards of the 1920s and 1930s, also developing as a serious ragtime pianist.
She began using her mother’s maiden name, and at 19 she made her first record, an EP for W&G “Judy Durham” with Frank Traynor’s Jazz Preachers.
Meanwhile, by day since leaving school, Judy’s first job was as Secretary to the Pathologist at the Royal Victorian Eye & Ear Hospital, but on taking a new secretarial job at J Walter Thompson Advertising, on her first day, she met Athol Guy.
Athol played acoustic bass and also sang bass in a trio called The Seekers and invited her that very night to come and join him and the two guitarists Keith Potger and Bruce Woodley, to sing acoustic four-part harmony folk and gospel at a Melbourne coffee lounge “Treble Clef”.
Still singing regularly with various jazz bands nearly every other night, she then became a regular every Monday with The Seekers.
Adopting her birth name Judith, she recorded an album with The Seekers for W&G, appeared on local TV, then set sail for London in 1964 on “SS Fairsky” for a 10-week stay, singing for their supper on board.
The Seekers
On the advice of Australian entertainer Horrie Dargie, the group sent the album and TV footage ahead to a big theatrical agency, The Grade Organisation, and on their arrival in ‘swinging London’, agent Eddie Jarrett booked them extensively in clubs, TV, and variety theatre.
He asked Tom Springfield (Dusty’s brother) to write and produce a single, resulting in the surprise chart-topper “I’ll Never Find Another You” which made The Seekers the first Australian group ever to hit No.1 internationally, made Judith Australia’s very first international pop princess and pin-up girl, and unexpectedly cemented her in the group as a full-time Seeker.
According to the Sunday Morning Herald, Durham was a fixture in Melbourne jazz clubs in 1963 and worked days as a secretary at an advertising agency. There she met account executive Athol Guy. Like Durham, he sang in his spare time – with a band called The Seekers, with high schoolmates Keith Potger and Bruce Woodley.
He invited her to join them in 1963.
They released their first album – Introducing The Seekers – that year and cracked the local charts. In early 1964, they headed to London – just as the popular music world was undergoing a revolution.
“The Beatles were just about to arrive in Melbourne at the same time I and The Seekers had bought our tickets to go over to England … they arrived [just] after we left.”
What happened next is territory well covered: the string of hits – I’ll Never Find Another You, A World Of Our Own, The Carnival Is Over, Morningtown Ride and Georgy Girl.
Knocking The Beatles from the top spot on the British charts. A Best Original Song Oscar nomination for Georgy Girl originally written (music by Tom Springfield, words by Jim Dale) and recorded as the title song for the movie starring Lynn Redgrave, James Mason, Charlotte Rampling, and Alan Bates. The song was nominated for an Academy Award® and the single made history when the group became the first Australians ever to reach the No.1 spot in the USA.
And later that same year, the unthinkable: the split.
It was unthinkable, at least, to everyone but Durham and Ron Edgeworth, the English musician who would become her husband (and musical director) the following year.
“I didn’t know how the boys were feeling,” she says of her decision to pursue solo ambitions and different musical styles. Years later, Woodley wrote to Durham detailing the upset she had caused. “We knew the fans were upset but I didn’t realise that the boys for a long time had been upset,” she says. “So it was good that I did find that out. I really hope that any wounds are now healed.”
After The Seekers, Durham went solo – often returning to her jazz roots, including volumes one and two of the sublime Judith Durham and the Hottest Band In Town, recorded in the US. She never scaled the global heights of The Seekers era – but in 1990 a tragedy helped bring that era back to the forefront of her life.
A car accident on the Calder Highway put her in hospital and back on the front pages. The crash claimed the life of the young woman driving the other car. Durham had broken bones, but not spirit.
“That was a very big turning point for me,” she says of the outpouring of affection that followed. “People’s goodwill towards you can enlighten you, your sense of being appreciated. It’s funny how fate really stepped in there because one of the people who’d come to visit me in the hospital was Keith’s cousin.”
After her recovery, a reunion dinner was organised – as the 25th anniversary of the band’s split approached.
With the confirmation of the public’s affection fresh in mind, Durham agreed to a reunion with the trio she still calls “the boys”, who since the break-up had been through various incarnations with replacement singers. The stunning response to the 1993 reunion tour became the template for the next 25 years as The Seekers parlayed an apparently unquenchable public affection for their music into hit albums and tours.
“It was such an incredible thing that life took it’s course, whatever was meant to happen. The big thing is I’m glad I lived long enough. I could have been dead twice, as we know.”
In the public mind, Durham is often associated as much with the true grit of her survival as she is with the love of her music. After the car accident, and just as The Seekers reunion was taking off, Edgeworth was diagnosed with motor neuron disease. Durham nursed him till his death in December 1994. Then in 2013, during the band’s Golden Jubilee tour, she suffered a stroke on stage at Melbourne’s Hamer Hall. It affected her ability to read and write, and she spent months in rehab. But it did not affect the musical treasure: her voice.
“The doctor said, ‘Can you sing me a bit of a song?’ and of course, I sang Morningtown Ride.”
Her last public performance was in 2016 and in one of her last interviews (in 2019), 76-year-old Judith admitted that she was medically advised not to fly. She had the lung condition bronchiectasis since she was a child. “I’m advised now medically not to travel,” she explains, matter of factly.
No more tours, no more stages, after a lifetime of both – but she reveals this with no hint of lament in a local Sydney press announcement.
In the same year, Durham was the 2019 inductee into the Honour Roll of the Australian Women in Music Awards (Helen Reddy was the inaugural inductee in 2018).
A press release on her official social media page said “It is with overwhelming sadness that Musicoast Pty. Ltd. and Universal Music Australia announce the death of international music legend Judith Durham, aged 79. After a brief stay in the Alfred Hospital, Judith was admitted to Palliative Care on Friday 5 August, where she passed away peacefully that evening. Her death was a result of complications from long-standing chronic lung disease.