page_title: Buddy Williams (country musician)
section_title: Career
hierarchical_section_title: Buddy Williams (country musician) / Career
caption_attribution_description: English: Buddy Williams poses for a photo with a Swedish Manufactured Levin Guitar. Circa 1950.
context_page_description: Buddy Williams, born as Harry Taylor and also known as Harold Williams, was a pioneering Australian country music singer-songwriter, known as "The Yodelling Jackaroo".
  Williams was the first Australian to record country music in Australia, three years after the New Zealander Tex Morton made his first recording in Australia. Williams recorded his songs about life and times in the Australian bush. It was with Williams that the bush ballad was first born. Williams's recording of "Give A Little Credit To Dad", complete with trademark yodel, was added to the Sounds of Australia project by the National Film and Sound Archive in Canberra.
context_section_description: Buddy Williams made his first recordings in 1938, a Private Process disk. The two songs recorded at this session were "Where The Jacarandas Bloom" and "They Call Me The Clarence River Yodeller". The latter song was re-worked, called "They Call Me The Ramblin' Yodeller" and recorded during his first EMI session on 7 September 1939. These two long-lost recordings were later released on a Kingfisher Records collection in the early 1990s as part of an early Buddy Williams catalogue re-release, which is no longer available.
  Williams first sang professionally in 1936 at the Grafton Jacaranda Festival in northern NSW. He also did a guest spot on Grafton's radio station 2GF at the time. He left the town of Grafton and busked his way down the NSW coast before approaching EMI records in Sydney where he gained an audition.
  The Page family from Newcastle, who had befriended the young Williams, bought him a black Gibson L-00 acoustic guitar which he used on all his recordings during the 1940s. This guitar was accidentally destroyed while on tour in the late 1940s. Williams later recalled that he had spent his entire life trying to find a replacement guitar that had the same sound quality of his old Gibson, but he never found one. Some of the guitars Williams used during his career included Gibson Hummingbird, Gibson Country and Western, Gibson J-200, and Martin D 28.
  On 7 September 1939, he recorded six songs for the Regal Zonophone label. In September 1939, Australia entered WWII and Williams enlisted in the army. During the war years, many of Williams's recording sessions were done while on leave from active service. In the final days of WWII he was seriously wounded during the battle of Balikpapan and was not expected to live. He was recommended for the Military Medal and carried the mass of scars from his injuries for the rest of his life.
  In 1948 Williams starred in a short film titled He Chased The Chicken which featured live performances of two of his recordings, "The Overlander Trail" and "The Chicken Song". The studio versions of these songs had been recorded in 1946. Another live song in the film titled "Dear Little Lady of Mine" was never recorded nor released on record. Williams was also meant to appear in the 1946 Australian movie "The Overlanders" with Chips Rafferty, but was unable to obtain leave from the army at the time.
  After the war was over and he had recovered from his injuries, he set about forming a travelling rodeo tent show. He eventually wound back his rodeo and tent show after many years and then toured for 11 months of each year with the Buddy Williams Variety Show.
  Though Williams performed mostly in country towns and outback communities, having once commented that during his long touring career he had performed in just about every country town in Australia, he also performed a small number of shows in major cities. During 1940 he played the Theatre Royal, Sydney alongside Roy Rene and Evie Hayes. He also did an eight-week stint at Brisbane's Theatre Royal. In 1973 he played Sydney's Hordern Pavilion for the UNICEF concert alongside big-name American acts such as Tex Ritter and Wanda Jackson. In the early 1980s, Williams did a small number of Sydney shows including shows at the Auburn Baseball Club, the Seven Hills RSL Club, and a show at the Star Hotel in the heart of China Town Sydney attended by Australian 1950s and 1960s rocker Col Joye.
  Williams suffered the first of two massive heart attacks while on stage in the late 1970s. During one of these hospital stays, he received a call from a lifelong fan called Bert Newton, an Australian television icon. The pair became firm friends and Williams later appeared on live Australian TV on the Bert Newton Show, singing "The Overlander Trail" with guitar accompaniment.
  In addition to constant touring, Williams continued to record. During 1965, he moved to RCA records where he became a Gold Record recording artist and recorded a large number of albums. In 1977, Williams was inducted into the Australian Roll of Renown In 1980, he won the first Heritage Award at 
caption: Buddy Williams poses for a photo with a Swedish-manufactured Levin guitar, c. 1950.
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