About

Made in Australia from imported and local ingredients

Food Label

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The main idea of the site is to trace the original versions of songs recorded by Australian artists, mostly from the 50s, 60s or 70s with some forays into the 80s.

It’s about the history of songs: that’s why it’s called Where Did They Get That Song? It’s not a general guide to Australian music, and it doesn’t list every Australian band and singer. If that’s what you need, try here or here.

The site is mainly about cover versions recorded in Australia, but some original Australian records are featured if the question “Where did they get that song?” has an interesting answer.

The focus is on Australia, but a number of notable New Zealand records are also included. 

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Each page is about a song recorded by an Australasian artist. Versions of the song are listed chronologically, in reverse order, working back from the Australian or NZ record to the original version. After that you might find Later Versions (recorded after the feature song at the top of the page) and Red Herrings (same title, different song).  

I don’t try to list every version of a song ever recorded. For that, try here or here or here.

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At this site, “original version” means the first time the general public was able to access the song. This could be the first record release, but it could be a public performance or a published manuscript of a song.

Unreleased demo versions don’t count as original versions, although some demos are mentioned if they are especially interesting or significant in the history of the song.

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The words at this site are my own: no copying and pasting from other sites without acknowledgement. If I do quote someone, I make it clear who they are. References are noted or linked to, but not if the information is widely known and easily verified in standard sources. 

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I minutely examined the label and wondered what those words were within the brackets

Glenn A. Baker

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I use contributed information if it is verifiable or plausible, and if I think it is essential or interesting.

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Many people have emailed me with corrections, suggestions, and answers to my questions: experts, collectors or researchers; people who were there, friends of the band, or sons and daughters of the artist; people who remembered some fact that everyone else had forgotten.

My policy is to credit anyone who contributes anything, but special thanks to Terry Stacey, Tony Watson, Philippe Edouard, Dave Overett, Joop Jansen, Andrew Ainsworth, David Walker, Kees van der Hoeven, honeydhont, Dunks at Milesago, Phil Chapman, Brian Lee, Mike Robbins, Chris Vening, Rod Stone, Peter Robinson, Ronnie Burns, Davie Gordon, Margaret G. Still, David Johnston, John Gambrill, Jon Stratton, Dave Monroe, Phil Milstein, Zbigniew Nowara, Ostin Allegro, Artie Kornfeld, John Yeager, Ray Rivera, David Neale, Tertius Louw, Artie Wayne, Al Kooper, Geoff Green, Gwyneth at the Peter Doyle website, Bruce R. Gillespie, Jan Baart, Tony Martin, Aaron Betts, Andy Gallagher, Erik Alm…

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Le hit-parade n’est pas une science précise.

Daniel Lesueur, Hit Parades 1950-1998 (1999)

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Australian and New Zealand charts
Personal thanks to chart compilers Gavin Ryan (Australian capital city Chart Books) and Dean Scapolo (Complete New Zealand Music Charts). These indispensable books seem to be out of print (2023).

Thanks to Warwick Freeman whose ingeniously compiled New Zealand Top 20 Singles of the Sixties fills some gaps from the first half of the 1960s.

In some places I have cited national Australian chart positions from Grant Dawe’s excellent Australia: Top 100 Singles.

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A note about New Zealand charts:
As Dean Scapolo notes in his NZ chart book, there was no national NZ chart until March 1966. Even then, it was Listener magazine’s “pop-o-meter”, based on readers’ votes and “not a good indicator” of what was actually selling. From April 1970 sales figures were used, but the Listener charts were retired with the coming of official music industry charts in May 1975.

Another New Zealand chart compiler, Warwick Freeman, has used a variety of historical sources to compile retrospective charts going back to 1960, published in his New Zealand Top 20 Singles of the Sixties and other chart books.

Read more about charts at my blogpost Toppermost of the poppermost: the charts.

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When did that record come out?
There are fanatics like me who must find the original version of a song, but it isn’t always straightforward. If two records appear around the same time, you might not be able to refine it further, and all you have is speculation or circumstantial evidence. I can publish that, but I use words like probably and possibly. Sometimes I just have to declare it a draw and leave it at that.

Read more at my blog.

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Cover version or remake?
In the early days of the Internet, Usenet groups such as rec.music.rock-pop-r+b.1950s would insist on making a distinction between a cover and a remake.

In this strict terminology, a cover version appears near the release of the original version in order to take advantage of the song’s current or potential popularity. Several versions of a song could be selling well at the same time, especially in the pre-1960s era, but there are plenty of later examples.

Johnny Farnham’s version of Raindrops Keep Fallin’ On My Head (December 1969) qualifies as a cover version of B.J. Thomas’s original (October 1969) because the two records were around at the same time and they charted together in Australia.

On the other hand, at Usenet, if you called Billy Thorpe’s version of Poison Ivy (1964) a cover of The Coasters’ original (1959) , someone would quickly point out your gaff. No, no, no, after 5 years, Billy’s version was a remake.

Nowadays, though, cover version is so widely accepted to mean any later version of a song that the remake distinction would be lost on most readers. The big song history sites The Originals, Second Hand Songs and (obviously) Cover.info all use cover to mean any later version, and these are run by experts in the field.

At some point I also realised that cover was used by songwriters to mean any recording of their published song. I first noticed it in an email from an American songwriter who said one of his songs got a lot of covers. Coming from a songwriter, this indicates that a song was successful, it did some good business, regardless of when it was released.

Where did they get those old Aussie bush songs?

The Australian bush was uniquely deficient in original songs. The most famous of them, “Waltzing Matilda” is set to a Scottish tune; “Click Go the Shears” to an American one. “The Banks of the Condamine” seems to have been a resetting of an English song from the Napoleonic Wars.

Don Watson, The Bush (2014), p 109.