Who’s Who
(28 July 1899 – 15 October 1977)
Designer, businessswoman, singer, banjolele player
Tag Archives: musician
Lou Bennett
Shirley Andrews
Jessie Couvreur (Huybers) ‘Tasma’
Maggie Chisholm
Who’s Who
Entertainer, musician
Links:
Featured in WHM 2006 Gallery Musical Belles
See Lena and Maggie Chisholm
See all Musical Belles
Lena Chisholm
Who’s Who
Entertainer, musician
Links:
Featured in WHM 2006 Gallery Musical Belles
See Lena and Maggie Chisholm
See all Musical Belles
Caroline Carleton
Who’s Who
(? – 1874)
Lyricist
Wrote the words to Song of Australia c. 1859
Kathleen Burns
June Bronhill
Who’s Who
(26 June 1929 – 25 January 2005)
Soprano opera singer
Vera Bradford
Elsa Stralia
Elsa Stralia 1881-1945
Soprano
Born Elsie Mary Fischer on 1 March 1881 in Adelaide, Ela Stralia became a famous soprano. Her first performace overseas was at Covent Garden as Donna Elvira in Don Giovanni on 10 July 1913.
Barbara James
Barbara James 1908-2004
Saxophonist and Jazz Singer
“Barbara James had begun her career as a young sixteen year old playing the saxophone and singing in her father, Will James dance band. It was whilst singing in a fashionable restaurant called the Old Cavalier in King Street that she began to develop a strong jazz style of singing.
Ruby Davy
Ruby Davy 1883-1949
Doctor of Music
Rita M Wilson’s biography of Ruby Davy, Academic and Artiste (1995) is a touching account of an outstanding but little known Australian woman pioneer in academic terms.
Dr Davy won her Doctorate in 1918 from Adelaide University at the age of 35. There were no further women Doctors of Music for 58 years after. She was also awarded Fellow of Trinity College, London, the first woman outside that country to earn this honour.
Vera Bradford
Vera Bradford 1904-2004
Vera Bradford, Australian concert pianist, was born in Melbourne on 5 September 1904. Music was always an integral part of her life as her mother, also a fine pianist, would hold her baby daughter on her knees while she practiced. Her father and brother were also musical being accomplished violinists. Vera’s destiny would seem to have been inevitable and it is not surprising that she quickly became a famous international concert pianist, enjoyed a career that spanned seventy-seven years.
Marie Narelle
Marie Narelle 1870-1941
Concert Singer, Australia’s Queen of Irish Music
Catherine Mary Ryan was born at “Combanning Station”, between Temora and Cootamundra in 1870. Quite early in her life, and perhaps because of her Irish family life, she showed a natural aptitude for singing. She gained her basic training at the Presentation Convent at Wagga Wagga and sang for the consecration of the Catholic Church in Temora (1881).
Kathleen Burns
Kathleen Burns, 1914-1999 Dance Band Pianist
Kathleen Burns (pianist) played for wool-shed dances on the Monaro, and led an all-woman dance band in the NSW Central West town of Orange, before joining as pianist one of that town’s regular Old-Time and Swing dance bands (see picture 1946).
Daisy Sutton
Daisy Sutton, 1905-1990
Daisy Sutton lived in a weatherboard cottage in the main street of Wedderburn, a former goldrush township in central Victoria. Born in 1905, she was rather shy about playing for a tape recording, and would not play in the evening because ‘it upset her heart’ and she could not sleep afterward.
Lena and Maggie Chisholm
Born in Brushgrove near Grafton, northern NSW, Lena and Maggie Chisholm began their musical training at the Roman Catholic college at Brushgrove, and then moved to the Presentation Convent in Lismore for their musical tuition, perhaps as borders at St Mary’s. At that time, the convent prepared their musical students for examination by London Trinity College.
Amy Castles
Amy Castles, 1880-1951 Concert Singer
Amy Castles was born in Carlton, Melbourne in 1880. Early in her life she moved to Bendigo where she attended St Mary’s Convent, learning singing from E Allan Bindley, whose daughter, soprano Pauline Bindley, had a substantial singing career in the first half of the 20th century.
