Raymaur46's video: Lionel Long - Oh The Springtime It Brings On The Shearing

The late Lionel Long was Australia's best-known and most successful folk performer of the 1960s, but his music was only one facet of a lengthy and varied creative career which also encompassed graphic art, film-making and numerous credits in film and TV, both as a presenter and as an actor -- he briefly took over as host of Sing Sing Sing during one of JOK's illnesses and then hosted his own national TV variety show in 1963-64; as an actor Lionel is remembered for his starring role as Detective Bert Costello in Crawford Productions' Homicide (1968-69). Considering his diverse talents and his many and varied achievements and how prominent he was in his heyday, it's lamentable that there is so little information available on the Internet about Lionel's life and work. In part, this simply due to passing time and fading memory, but there are other factors at work here -- as music historian Zbig Nowara has pointed out in his article on Gary Shearston, historians, discographers and collectors of popular music have tended to ignore performers like Lionel Long, simply because their work falls outside the arbitrary boundaries of the "pop-rock" genre. Another factor is something that we have long complained about -- the unavailability of so many Australian records of this period. Lionel Long was one of EMI's most prominent and successful solo artists for ten years, and he released more than a dozen LPs during the 1960s, earning several gold records. Yet only one compilation is currently available and none of his original EMI recordings have been officially re-released on CD. The absence of these recordings is not merely an inconvenience to "old folkies" -- Long's albums are of interest to any serious student of Australian popular music, not least because they feature some very notable performers, including Dave Guard (the expatriate American folk musician and founder member of The Kingston Trio), legendary Australian guitarist and educator Don Andrews, and renowned jazz musicians like Don Burrows, John Sangster and Wally Wickham.