Tamworth Country Music Festival

Sarah recently released her amazing new single, Once You've Gone Country, that I played just a few seconds ago, and she has every intention of continuing to write and release great country songs, which she plans to do well into the foreseeable future.

From performing annually at the Tamworth Country Music Festival to gigging all over Australia, Sarah is claiming her space in the country music industry and is preparing to write and fight for what she believes in and to always do so in the spirit of vulnerability and honesty.

I'm delighted to say that I have this very talented young lady standing by on the phone waiting to have a chat with me.

So allow me to bring her on air without any further ado.

And, you know, I mean, she quotes Dolly Parton and, you know, people like that as being her influences.

You know, I mean, you can't go wrong with that, can you? So what's been your most memorable experience so far as a performer? I know there's got to be a lot of them, you know, but just pick one, you know, that sort of stands out because I'd love to ask this question because sometimes you get some really great answers, you know what I mean?

I think my most memorable moment as an artist so far is just heading to Tamworth Country Music Festival and playing the main stage up there.

It's a really cool experience and it's such a great platform as well.

But the irony was, so Sid was a glazier and his mate Graham had this beautiful cart and Sid had done the glass in the cart.

Now I knew Graham, his mate as well, because my uncle's very involved in Tamworth Country Music Festival and like that was my school is country music and Sid would go up there.

So we would catch Sid.

Sid wasn't a drinker.

As far as I could tell, you grew up listening to quite a bit of it.

And you went to the Tamworth Country Music Festival for the first time this year.

And there is the single that's already out down down is about your experiences there.

So for the sound of that song, you enjoyed yourself.

Start of the year.

I think pretty much after Tamworth Country Music Festival.

Right.

Yeah.

Sophisticated Betty from Melbourne.

From New South Wales, Catherine Jones, who's an award-winning artist who's had a long association with Tamworth Country Music Festival.

And that's just a small selection.

So if you appreciate good music of any kind, it's well worth checking out.

Some of the children that benefited from Dolly's Imagination Library are right here in Australia.

which is of course home to the Tamworth Country Music Festival and is the sister city to Nashville in Tennessee.

There's an extra special bond with Dolly during her 2014 visit to Tamworth.

Dolly celebrated this musical bond and Tamworth later became a flagship hub for her Imagination Library program in Australia.

Yeah.

Now one place you have played often is the Tamworth Country Music Festival, and you have-

Yeah

... a headline show at the festival.

And so, yeah, I actually wrote this song 10 years ago and I had been to nursing homes singing it when I first started out with my performances and a lot of the people were saying to me, you know, this is a really good song, you need to do something with it.

It sat in the drawer and I went through quite an intense songwriting stage when I got back from the Tamworth Music Festival in January this year.

So I spent a good solid month going through what I had and readdressing it and coming up with some more material.

But I just couldn't go past this one because in this phase of writing, I was writing songs about... things that make you feel good, moments that feel like warm like the sun and then the darker moments that you've got to find your way out of and then those moments in life where decisions come at you at a hundred mile an hour and they sort of collide and you've got to make a decision really quick and sometimes when we look back on those you know, we should have spent more time thinking about them.