Lionel Joaquin Paul Long OAM (1939 – 1 January 1998) was an Australian country and folk singer, songwriter, guitarist, actor and artist.
On completion of his high school years, Long decided to go and work as a jackaroo in the Hunter Valley and then into the expansive outback of Queensland where he also honed his skills in singing and playing guitar.
Wills had previously produced the breakthrough Australian country hit "Pub With No Beer" by Slim Dusty and had also signed Frank Ifield to the label.
Through the EMI Columbia label, he released almost a dozen albums from 1961 to 1970, meeting critical acclaim and becoming Australia's most popular performer of traditional "bush music".
In 1963, he released his third LP, The Bold Bushrangers: Songs of Wild Colonial Days, which featured Australian artist Sidney Nolan's Ned Kelly on the sleeve.
[2] Soon after O'Keefe returned to host the show in early 1963, Long's popularity was so strong that he was given his own TV program titled Music Time, which aired for a year.
This album was dedicated to Lionel's early memories of fishing off the coast of New South Wales near Port Macquarie and his boyhood adventure of trying to sail from Sydney to Newcastle (130 km) in a rubber dinghy at the age of 10.
Lionel Long was also an acting teacher in the early 1980s for children and teenagers, who worked from firstly a church hall in Bankstown, New South Wales, with actress Erica Watson (who was later featured in the mini-series The Day of the Roses played by Gigi Edgley) as his assistant coach.
Having dabbled in acting on TV since 1961 (Whiplash and Riptide), Long went to London in 1964 for a cameo appearance in The Amorous Adventures of Moll Flanders, starring Kim Novak in the title role.
Long played the role of the father (Charles Dawson) in the Australian 1976 Columbia feature film Barney, also starring Spike Milligan and Sean Kramer and directed by David Waddington.
Lionel Long re-signed with EMI in 1980 and released his final album, High, Wild and Handsome, which featured guitarist Tommy Emmanuel, a version of "Let It Be" by the Beatles and the well-known Kermit the Frog song "Rainbow Connection".
Lionel performed his music well into the 1980s, appearing at the Sydney Opera House in 1987 and travelling to Nashville, Tennessee, to work with the LeGarde Twins on various recording deals.
[2] Long's vineyard homestead near Rylstone in the Western highlands of New South Wales was owned and managed for 10 years under the name Stonybrook by Matthew Batten, advertising creative, screenwriter, and author.