Riding this Road

Trade Paperback

My life making music and travelling this wide land with Slim Dusty

An award-winning songwriter and musician, Joy McKean wrote many of Slim Dusty's most famous songs and won the first Golden Guitar ever awarded at the Tamworth Country Music Festival for her song 'Lights on the Hill'. Now, for the first time, she turns her talent as a writer to telling us about her own life. On the way she reveals a lifestyle that has long gone, when performers would load up their trucks and caravans and drive across the country, putting on a show at every town big, small and tiny then moving on to the next place to do it all again the next night.

Joy, a household name since the 1940s, started her singing career as a teenager when she and her sister Heather compared their own radio program, 'The Melody Trail', breaking new ground as the first women to host an Australian radio show. Joy continued to shatter conventions by writing country and trucky songs in her own name, not her husband's.

From country halls to showgrounds, cities to the most remote communities, Joy and Slim performed everywhere and won the hearts of legions of fans. Now, with honesty and love, Joy explores her life from childhood to the present, fifty years of marriage to Slim, song writing, recording and constantly touring right around Australia while raising their children Anne and David. Joy's is a life full of music and memories that will inspire and entertain.