Australia’s folk music icon, lead singer of The Seekers
A classically trained singer and pianist, Judith Durham had always been more interested in jazz than folk music. But at age 19, while working as a secretary at an advertising firm in Melbourne, Australia, and trying to launch a recording career on the side, she was invited by a colleague to sing with his folk-pop trio, the Seekers. She soon found herself onstage at the Treble Clef bar and cafe, harmonizing with the band on folk songs like “Down by the Riverside” and “Banks of the Ohio.”
As Durham told it, she was never officially invited to join the group. But in 1964, a little more than a year after she started sitting in with the musicians, they asked if she “wanted to go overseas.” The group had been hired to sing on an ocean liner bound for England. It seemed like a nice adventure, she thought, so she put her jazz ambitions on hold and tagged along with her three singing friends.
The voyage propelled Durham and the band to the top of the pop charts and, somewhat to her dismay, the center of swinging London. Soon after the Seekers arrived in England, they were discovered by a promoter and ushered into a recording studio, where Durham’s luminous soprano elevated songs like “I’ll Never Find Another You,” “The Carnival Is Over” and “Georgy Girl.” “I was shy,” she told a reporter decades later, “but when I sang I felt really empowered.”
Her death, on Aug. 5 at age
79, silenced what Elton John once described as “the purest voice in popular music,” which Durham unleashed in songs by the Seekers and later in her own decades-long career as a solo artist. The cause was complications from a chronic lung disease, according to a statement from Universal Music Australia and the record label Musicoast, which said she died in palliative care after being hospitalized in Melbourne.
For a few years in the mid-1960s, the Seekers were an international phenomenon, rivaling the Beatles in popularity and selling more than 50 million records. With their powerful harmonies and wistful lyrics about love and romance, the group was a gentle alternative to rock bands like the Rolling Stones and the Who. Folksier than most pop acts, poppier than most folk groups, they cultivated a clean-cut image that stood out in swinging London, where Durham avoided the club scene and spurned psychedelic prints in favor of more traditional A-line skirts.
Although she was dwarfed by her bandmates (she stood 5foot-2), she emerged as the group’s focal point, winning over audiences with “her vulnerability and lack of pretension,” wrote culture critic Clive Davis, reviewing one of the band’s 1996 reunion concerts for the Times of London. “Shy and even gauche at times, Durham shares Barbara Dickson’s reserve, as well as her purity of diction,” he added. “She wants us to know that it is the song that matters, not the star.”
Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese called Durham “a national treasure and an Australian icon,” saying in a tweet after her death that she “gave voice to a new strand of our identity and helped blaze a trail for a new generation of Aussie artists.”
In England, the Seekers linked up with songwriter and producer Tom Springfield, the brother of English singer Dusty Springfield, climbing to the top of the British and Australian pop charts with their 1964 single
“I’ll Never Find Another You,” which reached No. 4 in the United States. In 1966, they had their biggest American hit with “Georgy Girl,” the upbeat title song for a British film starring Lynn Redgrave, Alan Bates and James Mason. The song reached No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100, behind only “I’m a Believer” by the Monkees, and was nominated for an Academy Award.
The group’s other hits included