Judith Durham (1943-2022)

Judith Durham (3 July 1943-5 August) was internationally celebrated as a member of the wholesome Australian folk/pop group the Seekers. Formed in 1962, with the recruitment of Durham in 1963, her incisive, pure, perfectly pitched and articulated vocals defined the group’s sound. They worked their way to England as a shipboard band on the Sitmar line’s the Fairsky in 1964, originally intending to stay for only ten weeks. But they had sent a copy of their album to the Grade Agency, leading to a stream of casual bookings and to the recording of “I’ll Never Find Another You” at the Abbey Road studios in November. By February 1965, it had reached number one in both the UK and Australia.

The Seekers became, by any measure, the most internationally successful Australian group to that time, and their story has been abundantly documented. But Durham’s career as a full-time member of the Seekers lasted only four years, in a performance/composition history of some seventy years. While most of that history dates from her joining the group to her recent death, it began in earnest earlier, in the early 1960s, as part of a culturally significant movement, but one that has been generally drowned out by the advent of rock from the mid-1950s. Durham’s early history is my focus here, since her involvement in that movement has virtually disappeared from the record, eclipsed by her association with the Seekers.

Judith was musically precocious, singing nursery rhymes and composing songs from the age of two. The family moved to Hobart in 1950, where she first performed in public in the annual school play. On the family’s return to Melbourne in 1956, Judith attended Melbourne University Conservatorium to continue piano training, gaining the Associate Diploma in Music. She successfully auditioned for the Swallows Juniors TV talent quest, then a few months later the Channel 9 Toddy Time, appearing with her sister, who, as Beverley Sheehan, would later become a highly regarded jazz singer, performing and recording with the elite of Australia’s traditionally aligned jazz musicians. In 1960 Judith had her first professional engagement playing for a ballet school. She went on to play piano and sing at the Melbourne Technical College annual revue. Although showing early signs of the chronic lung condition bronchiectasis, which would be the cause of her death, her early ambition had been in opera. But her entire trajectory changed with the arrival of what has been called the “Trad Boom” from ca. 1960.

Melbourne was the epicenter of the Australian jazz revivalist movement, going back to the coterie centered on the Bell brothers, Graeme and Roger, and Ade Monsbourgh in the late 1940s, who had themselves planted the seeds of the “trad revival” in England as a youth dance phenomenon during their European tours of 1947-1948 and 1950-1952. Although eclipsed by the arrival of rock in the mid-fifties, the Melbourne traditional jazz scene endured, an alternative music which tended to appeal to middle-class, more bohemian-oriented but upwardly mobile youth enjoying the benefits of an expanded university system. Duffel coats and corduroys rather than leather jackets and jeans. In the spirit of the Bell brothers, jazz was for dancing. Jazz dances were youth-initiated events, organized in churches and local halls, given a focus by the establishment of the Melbourne Jazz Club in 1957.

They became the site of Judith’s main performance apprenticeship from the early 1960s. In Easter 1961 she won a talent quest for ragtime piano and met drummer Ken Farmer, who mentored her jazz interests and loaned her his recordings of Bessie Smith. She later declared, “I was so knocked out by this music … .It was also my first realization that girls could sing jazz.” Inspired also by the example of Melbourne jazz singer Judy Jacques, she abandoned her operatic aspirations and began to develop a jazz repertoire. Her debut as a jazz/blues singer was at the Memphis Club in Malvern in 1962; when she sat in with the University Jazz Band (UJB), the club promoter, Kemble Miller, gave her four pounds after her first song and offered five if she would come back the next week. She developed her repertoire and a chord book under the tutelage of the UJB’s reed player, John Tucker.

She played with the UJB for five weeks leading to Christmas 1962, when Miller decided to change the band for trombonist Frank Traynor’s Jazz Preachers, Melbourne’s leading traditional group. Miller insisted to an originally resistant Traynor that Judy came with the gig, and she went on to build a strong following in her own right, leading to work also with other bands, including Sny Chambers’s Bayside Band and John Hawes’s band.

My own contact with Judith was as a guest and sit-in trumpet player in this party/dance scene during frequent visits from my home town, Adelaide, facilitated by the fact that when drummer Ken Farmer moved to Adelaide we became members of the same bands. I was struck by the power and purity of a voice that could cut through a full band, and by the authority of Judy’s style as a jazz and gospel singer. In social conversation with her I was also impressed by an approachability, her unpretentious sweetness, and her modesty regarding a talent that awed this neophyte from what then amounted to a “colony” of a traditional jazz scene dominated in the country’s south-east by Melbourne. With a repertoire spanning jazz, blues, and gospel, Judy quickly became one of the most popular figures on the Melbourne jazz scene during the early 1960s.

From there, to the Seekers and their much-documented career. Durham left the group in 1968 to pursue a solo career as a performer in her original genre of jazz and blues.

This stage of her career has also been extensively documented. It included a standing ovation at the 1978 Newport Jazz Festival, public honors (in 1995 she was awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia [OAM] for services to music), and her marriage to and international performance history with jazz pianist Ron Edgeworth. She became an active advocate for a number of charities, including on behalf of Motor Neurone Disease, from which her husband Ron had died in 1994. In 1993 she began a series of Seekers reunion concerts. But, for the intervening twenty-five years, she had steadfastly pursued her love of the jazz, blues, and gospel that launched her career, as well as composing a considerable body of increasingly ambitious oeuvres that became The Australian Cities Suite (2008). Following her death, Judith Durham was honored with a state memorial service on 6 September 2022.

There are numerous sources for the foregoing including discographies, general histories of Australian jazz, and unpublished materials, but I wish to acknowledge in particular Graham Simpson’s Colours of My Life: The Judith Durham Story (Random House Australia, 1994).