Slim & I doco follows the decades long love-story of the music icon Slim Dusty and his wife Joy McKean

There aren’t many comparisons to the 53-year relationship between the late Australian music icon Slim Dusty and his wife, Joy McKean, which spawned more than 100 albums, two children and countless tour dates in regional Australia. This five-decade love affair is at the centre of Slim & I, a new documentary by Red Dog director Kriv Stenders, and, though the music industry has produced many high-profile couplings over the years, none is quite like this one. Sid and Nancy were too vicious, Lennon and Yoko too avant-garde and Cobain and Love were too self-destructive. American country music greats Johnny Cash and June Carter hail from the right genre, at least, but their relationship was rooted in an infidelity born of instant attraction. For Slim, whose real name was David Kirkpatrick, and Joy, on the other hand, it was hardly love at first sight. Joy and her younger sister, Heather, had a radio show in Sydney in the late 1940s and early 50s when a blow-in from Nulla Nulla Creek who called himself Slim came to the big smoke to work with radio DJ and concert promoter Tim McNamara. Joy was already working with McNamara, so it was only a matter of time until they met, though it’s fair to say sparks didn’t exactly fly. “I thought he had tickets on himself and he thought I was a stuck-up little city piece,” the 90-year-old recalls with a laugh. “It took a long while for us to get to know one another, but Slim was very keen on songwriting, and he liked my songs when he started to hear them, so we gradually revised our opinions of each other.” Although it’s no secret to country music aficionados, it might come as a surprise to everyone else to learn McKean would go on to write many of Slim’s best loved songs, such as Lights on the Hill, and be the driving force of his career success. While mutual respect came easy, romance was a little longer to arrive. And, when it did, it came not with a box of chocolates or a bunch of flowers but a gesture of unexpected kindness. McNamara had dispatched Joy, Slim and fellow singer Gordon Parsons — best known as the bloke who wrote Slim’s hit, A Pub With No Beer — on a regional tour, crammed into the back of a huge old car. Now, Joy had polio as a child, which, back then, resulted in her wearing calipers on her legs to stabilise the joints. The devices were fixed to her shoes, at least they were until one broke mid-tour, leaving poor Joy unable to walk, let alone get up on stage to perform. To that point, the tour had been notable for the mischief Slim, Parsons and their mates got up to but all of a sudden things were serious. “So, I started to panic, but it was Slim who said ‘We’ll get the car parked here, you just sit there and let me fix the shoe’,” Joy remembers. Delicately removing the caliper, Slim walked the damaged shoe around whatever little town they’d just arrived in until he found a cobbler who could fix it on the spot. “He came back and, while I was sitting in the back seat of the car, he fitted that shoe on to the caliper and back on to my leg,” Joy says. “And I was thinking ‘You’re the one that, when I was in strife, came and helped me’, and he did it so very gently, so quietly, and he never referred to it later or made me feel under any obligation, he was very tactful. “And I thought ‘Gee, you are a very different person underneath all the shenanigans you and the rest of them get up to, and I just don’t believe you are what you seem on top’, and I started to take a lot more notice and see the other Slim — and that Slim was a very good man.” A Prince Charming shoeing his beloved raises obvious Cinderella comparisons, but Joy is quick to shoot it down. “It wasn’t as glamorous as that, I’m afraid,” she laughs. Slim and Joy’s daughter, Anne Kirkpatrick, can attest that life on the road as a touring country singer is far from glamorous, but it isn’t without its charm. When not at boarding school, much of her childhood was spent on the road with Mum and Dad, and she went on to have a successful career as a musician in her own right, winning a bunch of Golden Guitars (the family collectively has 52, by the way) and an ARIA. “I remember it being a very different childhood, an exciting childhood,” Kirkpatrick says. “I was surrounded by the music, so I was encouraged to sing from an early age, from when I was five ... and I got the travelling bug very early and I soaked up Mum and Dad’s love of Australia ...and I very much wanted to continue in that lifestyle.” One thing Slim & I does well is acknowledge the role Joy played in keeping Slim’s show (and family) on the road, in an era when women rarely got their due. “It was not just a glass ceiling, it was a blinking corrugated iron one you had to get through,” Joy quips. “I think what the film showed was what a real team Mum and Dad were, and how they worked together to build the Slim Dusty legend,” Kirkpatrick agrees. “It was just the most amazing marriage and partnership, and I don’t think the Australian music industry has seen anything like it, ever.” And we’ll probably never see its like in the future, either. Slim & I is available to buy on Blu-Ray, DVD and digital.