Buddy Williams (country musician)

Buddy Williams was born Harry Taylor[1] in the Sydney suburb of Newtown and was soon placed in Glebe Point Orphanage.

After many failed escape bids as a child, he was fostered out as a young boy to a dairy-farming family at Dorrigo on the north coast of New South Wales (NSW).

Times were hard, and life on the farm was tough for young Williams, but it also allowed freedom he never had in the orphanage.

He worked at many jobs and started busking around the north coast of NSW, dodging the police who at the time frowned upon such activities.

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.

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.

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.

In 1973 he played Sydney's Hordern Pavilion for the UNICEF concert alongside big-name American acts such as Tex Ritter and Wanda Jackson.

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 1977, Williams was inducted into the Australian Roll of Renown[4] In 1980, he won the first Heritage Award at the Tamworth Country Music Festival for his song "What A Dreary Old World It Would Be".

[citation needed] In 1978, Buddy Williams was the subject of a documentary titled The Last of the Fair Dinkum Outback Entertainers, narrated by his good friend John Singleton.

Williams's last recordings were made months before his death in 1986, when he was sick with terminal cancer, and released posthumously.

The Le Garde Twins who toured with Williams also recorded a number of his songs, as did Rex Dallas, Slim Dusty, Nev Nichols, Lindsay Butler and more recently Ashley Cook, who recorded a complete album of Williams's songs.