The Australian singer Slim Dusty, who has died of cancer aged 76, was best known in Britain for a record that fleetingly monopolised the radio waves in 1958, A Pub With No Beer. The song told of a parched stockman herding cattle in the outback, who travelled many miles to a bar - only to find it was dry.
It had been an immediate success in Australia, where it was the first, and only, 78rpm record to be awarded a gold disc. It subsequently became a top 20 hit in Britain, the stuff of the BBC Light Programme's Two-Way Family Favourites and an erratically sung, bar-room anthem. BBC television viewers, meanwhile, had seen Dusty in an interlude clip singing Waltzing Matilda on horseback.
Dusty came to embody an ideal of rural Australia, later symbolised by his performance of the same song at the closing ceremony of the Sydney Olympic Games three years ago. In 1983, his recording of it was beamed down from the space shuttle Columbia as it passed over Australia.
Born David Gordon Kirkpatrick, in the northern New South Wales coastal town of Kempsey, Dusty grew up on a dairy farm in Nulla Nulla Creek. Like many rural Australians, he was drawn to the American hillbilly music of Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter family, and he played a crucial role in the creation of an indigenous genre that fused the imported country sound with the traditions of bush poetry and song associated with Waltzing Matilda's author Banjo Patterson and others.
He wrote his first song, The Way A Cowboy Dies, at the age of 10, and the following year chose Slim Dusty as his stage name. At the age of 15, after his first broadcast on Radio 2KM Kempsey, he made his first recording, Song For The Aussies, a patriotic wartime number. In 1946, he signed a contract with EMI Records, for whom he made 100 albums, mainly of his own compositions.
H is career was part-time until 1954, when he launched the travelling Slim Dusty Show with his singer-songwriter wife Joy McKean. They toured small outback settlements, and soon graduated to the more lucrative showground circuit.
Dusty became known for the simplicity of his performances, appearing alone as a cowboy-hatted stockman with an acoustic guitar. He once described his music as "songs about real Australians. I have to be fair dinkum with my audience. I can't see any other way of doing it". His reputation in Australian country music circles grew gradually, but he did not impinge on the national consciousness until A Pub With No Beer.
In the 1960s, he expanded his touring schedule to an annual 30,000-mile, 10-month trek, involving more than 200 concerts. He also performed in New Zealand, Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands. His biggest hit after A Pub With No Beer was Duncan, in 1980, and he re-recorded the song with Rolf Harris 16 years later. Among his biggest-selling albums were Beer Drinking Songs Of Australia (1986) and G'day, G'day (1989).
Dusty published two autobiographies, Walk A Country Mile (1979) and Another Day, Another Town (1997). The feature film, The Slim Dusty Movie, appeared in 1984.
He received numerous awards, including an MBE in 1970 and the Golden Gumleaf Heritage award at the 2000 Australian Bush Laureate awards. In 1999, he was given the inaugural Senior Australian Of The Year title by the Canberra government. In 1995, a permanent Slim Dusty exhibition was opened at the Australian Country Music Foundation in Tamworth.
He is survived by his wife and two children.
· Slim Dusty (David Gordon Kirkpatrick), singer and songwriter, born June 13 1927; died September 19 2003