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She may not be its actual subject but in the song (and indeed the album) Showman’s Daughter Anne Kirkpatrick tells us much about her life.

The title song was inspired by a tragedy that befell a friend, the daughter of one of her father’s old travelling showmen comrades, and in writing the song for and about her, Anne inevitably found herself very close to home, to one of her many homes. “Whenever I look back down along the track” she sings in wistful tone, “I can hear the spruikers loud and clear.”

She can also call to mind Samson the strong man from Greece who ate razor blades and laid on a bed of nails, Bubbles from the girlie show, Happy Harry the double-jointed horse, jugglers, clowns and whip crackers, and a communal Christmas tree under the Big Top. She lived in a cramped caravan among the mayhem, the lights, the noise and all the incomparable characters until the age of 11, when she was sent off to school, the correspondence courses having outlived their usefulness.

“I am a Showman’s Daughter myself, formally recognised” she says, with no small amount of pride. “My dad was an honorary lifetime member of the Showman’s Guild and mum and I will always be accepted as ‘family’. We keep in touch with many of them and I was recently give the full run of Grafton Showground’s during showtime to shoot a video. My family spent six years on the show circuit, with mum and dad doing up to 24 sets a day at the Royal Shows in the capital cities and a dozen at the rural ones. We were Showies and there are very strong memories from those years.”

Memories which, mingled with others just as potent, have taken shape as the most personal of the showman’s daughter’s 13 albums (two of which were duet sets with her father Slim Dusty) and her first solo set since 1997. A recording artist since the age of 12, Anne staked her claim as a woman of distinctive voice with the impressive 1971 Down Home album and since then has crafted and delivered, at irregular intervals woven around the raising of a family, accomplished and ever-evolving albums that display an innate understanding of the essential qualities that render truly great country music so emotionally overwhelming.

Anne’s albums seem to tell her when they are ready for arrival, rather than the other way around. This one draws together emotional threads – some raw, some resolved - from a tumultuous time in her life; a time which saw her lose a father and the nation lose an heroic figure so widely admired and even adored that he was honoured with a State Funeral.

In the song One Of A Kind she pays a powerful daughter’s tribute that starts as stridently as it ends: “He’d blow them all away when he’d hit the stage.” The song had a prescribed purpose. “I wanted to celebrate this amazing, larger-than-life dad, who was human too,” she explains. “He was so spontaneous, so vibrant, so full of life, so charismatic. He was always the presence in a room – such a strong soul. I’m very aware of my dad’s legacy and I know that I can never stop making music. He was so much a part of our lives. Losing him made me think a lot about where I came from. I mean, what a tradition!”.

A tradition going forward as well as back. For the most remarkable aspect of Showman’s Daughter is its intertwining of generations. Multi-layered and inter-connecting musical families are not unknown in American country music – the Cash/Carters, the McGarrigles and Wainwrights come to mind – but it’s hard to think of another contemporary female artist able to front a microphone in a studio armed with high quality songs penned by herself, her father, her mother and her son – as well as friends of them all, the “extended family”. All seamless in their integration into her personal story.

Just as she reminds us how accomplished an observer she is of her own life and environment, with the finely honed works Drive Away, Goodbye, One Of A Kind and the title track, she reawakens in us an awareness of the artistry of her father’s earliest efforts in song. One of the two Dusty-penned classics she takes on even actually pre-dates her mother’s entry into the saga. Slim signed his first recording contract with EMI's Regal Zonophone label in 1946 and recorded the timeless When The Rain Tumbles Down In July. It was not until 1952 that he married Joy McKean of the McKean Sisters.

It was Joy who provided Slim with so many of his most memorable songs and who has been a key contributor to her daughter’s albums since furnishing One Day Blues for Down Home thirty five years ago. This time around her contribution is the heartfelt and evocatively dobro/accordion-laden Peppimenarti Cradle. In this, Anne sings about the cradle that Peppimenarti women from the Territory by the Moyle River made for her to rest and protect her new-born babe twenty five years ago - a long and slender construction of bold ochre colours that now sits atop her bookshelf. “The picture mum paints is so poetic” believes Anne, “she really is an inspiration to me” .

That was not Joy’s only contribution to the album. With the recording undertaken at the Dusty home studio, Columbia Lane, she was, as Anne reveals, “There for me, supportive, a shoulder to cry on. When the going got tough mum and I would have our own Happy Hour and after a glass or two of red wine and a laugh, everything was alright again.”

Players and the guests came by the studio as the album took shape both to play their parts and pay their respects. Bill Chambers, who had taught his own daughter Kasey more than a few Slim Dusty songs by campfire light when he was a fox hunter on the Nullabor, came by to add a rich harmony and dobro to Bernie O’Brien’s Bluer Skies. “Dad’ s corner of the studio was pretty much as he’d left it,” Anne explains, “and when Bill saw that he got quite emotional. Both our families grew up with music and dad just loved Kasey.”

It all began with the song Drive Away. Anne was driving back from a show at Twin Towns on the Queensland border in 2004 with her adult daughter Kate and the Slim Dusty CD Columbia Lane: The Last Sessions was playing. “We had it up loud and there were some tears flowing and somewhere around Tenterfield, when we stopped for a coffee, the first two verses and the chorus of Drive Away just came into my head. I finished it when I got back to Sydney. It was great to set myself something to focus on – a creative outlet.”

At that point there was no specific intention to make a new album but such things take on their own momentum. “I drew on Dad’s strength and that of my family, and creating songs is what this family does – all of us have music that we need to get out. It was my son James [writer of the liquid, languid song Never Say Never] who got me in the studio and Fet who kept me there.”

Fet is the multi-instrumentalist Dusty band mainstay Mike Kerin, who was tagged The Fettler by Slim a long time ago. “He’d keep saying to me ‘What have you got?’ and I’d say ‘Oh, a few songs’ and he’d say ‘Well let’s put them down’ and that’s how it all came together. It took eighteen months, with lots of breaks. We started in November 2004, about ten months after dad died.”

It was a three musketeers effort, produced by Anne, Fet and Michael Vidale (who played bass and also mixed the album), with some stellar musica