Australian Bill Jackson is a well established singer-songwriter – he’s released seven solo albums and toured North America four times – and his most recent album, ‘The Wayside Ballads Vol 3′, produced by Kerryn Tolhurst was awarded Contemporary Album of the Year at The Australian Folk Music Awards in 2021. He’s been working with Kerryn Tolhurst on a new album ‘1965‘ from which ‘Precious Cargo‘ is taken – it’s a song that sees Jackson walking with the likes of Ramblin’ Jack and brushing shoulders with Jack Kerouac, albeit in a dream of New York City back in ’65.
Speaking of the song Bill Jackson has said: “This is a special song for me. My Producer Kerryn Tolhurst is somewhat of an icon in Australia as the main songwriter for a 70’s band ‘The Dingoes’ and especially a song that he wrote called ‘Way Out West’. He relocated to New York where he worked as a musician/producer for 25 years. As a writer his most commercially successful song was ‘All Fired Up’ which Pat Benatar had a major worldwide hit with. During this period Kerryn’s publisher would hook him up with different writers to co-write. This is how he met Mac Gayden in Nashville in the mid-nineties. Mac wrote the classic song ‘Everlasting Love’. Kerryn and Mac jammed onto cassette and gave the jams each a name. Kerryn kept the tapes. In 2022 he gave me one of those jams which they had called ‘Precious Cargo’.
My brief was to write a song around the two parts they were playing. I came at it from the writer/creatives point of view – the words and life experiences created are ‘Precious Cargo’. All this amongst the backdrop of all of those great early sixties Beat Poets and Folk Singers.”
