Genuine gentleman and a country music pioneer
NCountry singer b March 3, 1939 d December 8, 2018
ew Zealand country music pioneer that he was, there’s a good case to be mounted that Dusty Spittle didn’t get the recognition he deserved – though the man with the crooked smile, the black hat and the resolute handshake wouldn’t thank people for getting too skitey on his behalf.
Once, after a host of American audience members lined up to each hazard one of those handshakes and tell him how much they’d enjoyed his performance, Spittle reckoned: ‘‘I bruised me ears going out the door.’’
His legacy encompasses a 54-year recording career that captures only a portion of his more than 300 songs, uncountable performances chiefly in New Zealand and Australia, national and international awards and a founding role in the creation of the Gore Gold Guitars.
‘‘He was just a delight,’’ fellow singersongwriter Patsy Rigger said after his death last month. ‘‘Just so full of respect for New Zealand country artists, and wanted to help as much as he could. He was a genuine country gentleman.’’
Harold Ian Spittle’s nickname came across as redolent of the Old West but in truth its origin was nothing so cinematic. He’d taken a shine to the silver-grey flower widely known as Dusty Miller.
(After a Tasmanian radio interviewer once suggested that, for a country singer, the surname Spittle was a bit . . . you know . . . he adopted the surname Miller. But not for long. A man is who he is.)
Born without a right eardrum – bit tricky for a musician, he later admitted – he initially regarded himself more as a lyricist-storyteller than a tunesmith.
He was picking beans in Tasmania in 1962 when Violet Swan gave him her poem Shake Hands with Your Brother Again, and asked if he could put music to it. He explained that he left music to others. She explained that he shouldn’t.
Spittle found that tunes did come, simply from listening to the natural lilt of people’s voices. ‘‘I prefer to sing about the things that are real to me,’’ he said in a Jim Sutton Nostalgia Radio Show interview. ‘‘I haven’t got a great imagination so I had to take things that I’d seen and try to write about them.’’
He wrote of the great racehorse Cardigan Bay, the Kingston Flyer and the Clutha river. He wrote, said singersongwriter Jeff Rea, with ‘‘an honesty as true as the man himself’’.
With lifelong friend Max McCauley, Spittle had been a member of the Country Style Promotions Group, packing southern New Zealand venues in the early 1960s. When it wound up in 1968, the leftover money was used to seed the Gore Country Music Club talent quest that would become the Gore Gold Guitars.
A frequent touring performer in Australia, he used his considerable connections to provide a bridge for Kiwi talent. At the Tamworth festival, he started a showcase for New Zealanders that gave them a battler’s chance of reaching a broader audience.
Among awards that it would have been impolite to decline, in 2008 he was inducted into the US National Traditional Country Music Association Hall of Fame, Tamworth’s Hands of Fame in 1986, and the Gore version in 1994.
Country music isn’t typically about life going easily. In 1992 an operation to remove a cyst from his brain left him with half his face paralysed, robbed him of his memory for several months, and delivered a wallop to his performing confidence. Full recovery took a decade.
But he got there. Which was something he credited to his wife Fay: ‘‘She gave me something to fight for.’’
And he still had stories to tell through his songs. His 2008 album What Would I Be Without You was US Rural Roots Music Commission International’s best traditional country album of the year.
Spittle, who lived in Cromwell, is survived by Fay, stepchildren Brent, Cheryl, Bronwyn and Maxine and their families. – By Michael Fallow