Sources of Australian Pop Records from the 50s, 60s and 70s plus some Aussie originals and some New Zealanders
Originals / Covers / Remakes / Songwriters / Chart Positions
The Johnny Young hit first recorded by an American band that claimed to be from Down Under
The David Gates song that was a hit for an Australian singer years before Bread
Two sisters from a small town in Texas who wrote a hit for Maria Dallas from a small town in NZ
The Billy Thorpe hit derived from a 1936 record by Harlem Hamfats
The Premiers – Farmer John (1964)
Les Gaelic – C’est Pas Normal (You Stol[e] My Love) (1966)
Yvon Bonneville – Monsieur Jean (1967)
[Cornet duet by unknown artists] – La Paloma (1895)
Johnny Yukon's real name was Ben Gabus. He was from Texas, born in Galveston in 1931, but he later lived in Lafayette, Louisiana where he could be heard regularly at the Jury Room Lounge. He wrote Ride Away (With A Song In Your Heart), released by Slim Whitman in 1954.
As Johnny Yukon, Ben recorded his own composition Made To Be Loved (1959). It didn't make him famous, but it charted #25 in Italy, and it had a good run Down Under through local cover versions.
In 1960 it was recorded twice in Australia: by top Sydney deejay John Laws, and by a new young talent called Adam, an alias of Ian B. McLeod, now better known as the enduring country music artist, producer and record label owner from Warragamba NSW.
Neither of those records was a commercial success in Australia, but in New Zealand it was recorded by The Keil Isles, also in 1960. They were a popular Auckland rock'n'roll band formed by Samoan-born Olaf Keil and his cousin Freddie Keil with a line-up that included other members of the Keil family.
Chart placings are hard to pin down for New Zealand in the 1960s, but Warwick Freeman's retrospective chart places The Keil Isles' version of Made To Be Loved at #3 New Zealand.
Ben Gabus released Made To Be Loved again in 1964, this time as Ben Gabus. This is sometimes mistaken for the original version, partly because of confusion between two record labels with the same name and catalogue numbers.
In his later years Ben Gabus, known briefly as Johnny Yukon, lived in Lexington, South Carolina and ran the Ben Gabus Tree Service.