A great Australian singer died last week, but it wasn’t Olivia Newton-John. Few Americans recognized the name Judith Durham, but many more would recognize the voice that propelled this 1964 folk-pop single to No. 4 on the US Hot 100 in 1965, towards the end of the Great Folk Music Scare.
The classically trained Durham was moonlighting in jazz clubs in Melbourne in 1962 when the three guys who became the Seekers, one of them her coworker at an ad agency, lost their lead singer. They recruited her and by the next year they were on the Australian charts. They parlayed their hit version of “Waltzing Matilda” into a cruise line gig that brought them to England, where they met Dusty Springfield’s brother Tom, who wrote this for them. It topped the charts in both Australia and the UK.
The group hit the UK top 20 nearly a dozen times over the next three years, but their biggest US success came in 1966 when they recorded the theme song for the British rom-com “Georgy Girl.” The record was No. 1 in Cashbox, whose rankings weighted sales more heavily than Billboard’s, where it topped out at No. 2. The lyrics for the vinyl version are different from the ones that open the film, which are different from the ones on the closing version. The music was again by Tom Springfield.
Durham left the group in 1968 for a successful solo career in Australia and Britain, but never charted again in the US. She was 79 years old.