About

Made in Australia from imported and local ingredients

Food Label

---

The main idea of the site is to trace the original versions of songs recorded by Australian artists, mostly from the 1950s, 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. 

---

Page lay-out
• A song released by an Australasian artist at the top
• Previous versions of the song in reverse chronological order
• Original version
Then some pages show:
• Later versions (released after the feature song at the top of the page)
• 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.

---

Original version?
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.

---

Original words
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. 

---

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

Glenn A. Baker

---

Credit where it’s due
I use contributed information if it is verifiable or plausible, and if I think it is essential or interesting.

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, Mark Barkan, David Neale, Tertius Louw, Artie Wayne, Al Kooper, John Madara, Tony Colton, Joe Renzetti, Geoff Green, Gwyneth at the Peter Doyle website, Bruce R. Gillespie, Jan Baart, Tony Martin, Aaron Betts, Andy Gallagher, Erik Alm, John Pierce …

---

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

Daniel Lesueur, Hit Parades 1950-1998 (1999)

---

Australian and New Zealand charts
Thanks to chart compilers Gavin Ryan (Australian capital city Chart Books) and Dean Scapolo (Complete New Zealand Music Chart 1966-1996 for their early support. Their indispensable books seem to be out of print (2020s).

Thanks to Warwick Freeman for supplying his ingeniously compiled New Zealand Top 20 Singles of the Sixties which fills the gap in 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.

---

About New Zealand charts
• From March 1966 NZ Listener magazine published a national Top 20 that is often cited as the first “official” NZ chart. Even so, its data was based around readers’ mail-in coupons listing five of their favourite songs:

YOU CHOOSE THE HITS! Complete the coupon below and you take part in choosing New Zealand’s Top Twenty.
(NZ Listener, 18 March 1966, p. 47)

As NZ chart compiler Dean Scapolo points out, this was “not a good indicator” of what was actually selling. From April 1970 the Listener did use sales figures, but its charts were retired with the coming of official music industry charts in May 1975.

• Warwick Freeman, another compiler, notes that before March 1966 New Zealanders relied on local radio stations, television, record stores and other sources who compiled their own charts. A few of these charts were published, and in many cases lost, but others were simply written down in scrapbooks by keen listeners as the countdown was played on the radio or TV.

One often-cited chart from before March 1966 was the Lever Hit Parade, a Top 8 that was sponsored by a detergent company, compiled by an advertising company, and used by NZ’s state-owned commercial radio stations. Although its methods are not known it was not sales based and probably used some kind of polling. There was also a genuinely sales-based chart published in Playdate magazine for only a couple of months in 1960.

• Those sources have been used in compiling books of historical NZ charts. Dean Scapolo’s Complete New Zealand Music Charts 1966 to 1996 goes back to March 1966 when the Listener’s charts appeared, and Warwick Freeman’s New Zealand Top 20 Singles of the Sixties has additionally used a variety of sources from before March 1966 to compile chart listings retrospectively for the whole decade.

Sources: 1. Flavour of New Zealand’s feature on NZ charts 2. Scapolo’s and Freeman’s chart books. 3. Listener archives at Papers Past (National Library of NZ).

____________

A more detailed version of this is at my blogpost Introducing the N.Z. Hit Parade! (March 1966).

For more about retrospectively constructed charts see my blogpost Toppermost of the poppermost: the charts.

---

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.

---

Cover version or remake?
It has been a convention at some forums to make 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. On the other hand, a song that is released some time after the original is considered to be a remake.

Nowadays, though, cover version is widely accepted to mean any version of a song other than the original, so much so that the remake distinction would be lost on most readers.

Read more at my blog post Cover or remake?

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.