Davidson appeared on TV shows such as Happen Inn, Town Cryer, Hudson & Halls, and the Nick Tansley-hosted variety show With A Bucket On Your Head. In the early 1990s, while living in Australia, she toured with US artists Guy Mitchell and Johnny Tillotson, and performed at country music’s Fan Fair in Nashville, Tennessee, in 1992.
Davidson learnt to walk aboard the SS Athenic as the family emigrated to New Zealand
Born in Bulawayo, in the British colony of Southern Rhodesia, on 9 June 1953, Barbara Davidson learnt to walk aboard the SS Athenic as the family emigrated to New Zealand. With the colony being brought into the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, and cries for its independence growing, her father could see trouble on the horizon and settled his family in Christchurch.
“Dad was working for Caltex Oil at the time, and he wanted to get a job in Australia,” Davidson remembered. “But in the 1950s they were only taking blue-collar workers from the Mediterranean; they weren’t taking middle-management people. So, he got a position in New Zealand. He’d heard that the fishing was good!”
Barbie was mad for American child star Shirley Temple, so her mother taught her some basic dance steps and Barbie charged the neighbourhood children a ha’penny and a penny to watch her sing along to ‘On The Good Ship Lollipop’ on the radiogram. She was fascinated by her father’s new ukulele and had him teach her a few chords.
“Then Dad bought a guitar and I said, ‘Ooh, I really want that.’ So, I borrowed it off him and then I eventually used it all the time. When everybody watched television, I had dinner and I’d take myself off to my bedroom and I would sit there night after night learning how to play the guitar and sing.”
After 10 years in the South Island, the Davidsons moved to Auckland where Barbie attended Glen Eden Intermediate. There she teamed up with a classmate and won the school’s talent quest singing ‘Call Of The Bellbird’. But it was her younger brother Jonathan who inadvertently orchestrated her break into television.
A pupil at Titirangi Primary School, Jonathan mentioned to his teacher that his sister could sing. The teacher, Brian Hirst, had just been appointed choral arranger for the new NZBC television show The Country Touch and was bringing together a group of teen singers to appear on it.
On ‘the Country Touch’ TV show, the backing singers performed with deadpan faces
Davidson was part of the chorus for the programme’s full run from 1968 to 1970, perched on hay bales, backing host Tex Morton or featured guests such as Rusty Greaves, Christine Smith, Big Mike Durney, Ken Lemon and Garner Wayne, as well as singing Hirst’s ensemble pieces. “With deadpan faces,” Davidson recalled. “There was no expression; none of us had any expression. It was not encouraged.”
When the show ended, she struggled in bands where the musicians couldn’t transpose the current pop songs from men’s keys to women’s, until her father sought advice from Barbara Doyle at The Ranch House Restaurant in Beach Haven. “She lapped up the chance,” Davidson said. “She said, ‘You’re gonna be perfect for me. I don’t have to pay you very much because you’re so young, but you’ll certainly have experience.’”
Soon, Doyle became Davidson’s manager. Davidson would stay weekends performing at The Ranch House and even learned to work the spotlight so she could take in the shows by the likes of The Platters, The Peddlers, Johnny Farnham, and Four Jacks and A Jill.
It was a matter of sink or swim when she had her guitar ripped away and was ordered to sing with the Mike Walker Trio. “I remember Barbara saying, ‘I’m sick of you playing guitar. You’ve got to sing with the band,’” Davidson said. “Well, I was distraught! ‘What am I gonna do with my hands?!’” She quickly worked it out and subsequently made several appearances on Happen Inn, singing hits such as Melanie’s ‘Brand New Key’ and Pickettywitch’s ‘Summertime Feeling’.
In the early 1970s she became part of the Hegan Entertainments stable, even though she never officially signed with them due to her father’s suspicious nature. Every weekend, she would be flown to provincial centres to perform pop songs of the day with the house band at various cabaret venues.
“I was probably 18, 19, and I was terrified. I was fine when I was on stage, but as soon as I left that stage, I didn’t know what to do. I kept getting hit on by guys. So, I would run up to my room, shut the door and stay there till the next morning and then fly home!”
The loneliness of the travel became too much. Davidson backed away from Hegans and spent the rest of the decade singing in Auckland bands. She was part of the resident Diamond Lil cabaret show at the Ace of Clubs on Cook Street, where she got to hone her cabaret chops with The Carl Doy Trio. The show even undertook a successful North Island tour.
Later, Davidson discovered the jazz scene at The Naval & Family Hotel on K Road, headed up on Tuesdays by Joe “Fingers” Webster and His Honky Tonks. She asked to sing with the band and afterwards met Ted Chappell, who invited her to join his group Phase Four who played there on Thursday nights.
seeing a Dolly Parton TV show gave Barbie Davidson a musical epiphany
But it wasn’t until seeing a Dolly Parton TV show while visiting her parents that Barbie Davidson had a musical epiphany. “I loved her vivaciousness and the style of music that she was singing,” she said. She bought the latest country releases by Parton, The Judds, Reba McEntire, and Tanya Tucker, and set about constructing a repertoire for her own band.
With Phase Four – which had become Phase Five, Phase Six, and then Tuxedo Junction – disintegrating, Davidson co-opted drummer Neil Polkinghorne, guitarist Alan Quinnell and bass player Deacon Eavesto form Barbie Davidson & Blue Dude. When the band played a presentation at Kawau Island for her employer Fullers Captain Cook Cruises, Davidson met 1ZB marketing manager Michael Kelly who offered to become her manager.
In 1988, Davidson and Kelly moved to Australia, firstly to Townsville. She appeared on the tropical cyclone Aivu relief show, where variety singer Barry Crocker’s MD, Barry Heidenreich, told her she’d get plenty of work in Sydney. But the couple moved to Brisbane, where Kelly had her record a demo tape with the intention of pitching it to Eldred Stebbing in Auckland.
She travelled back to New Zealand to appear on the TV special A Country Music Spectacular Down Under, alongside The Warratahs, Jodi Vaughan, Brendan Dugan, Gray Bartlett, and Patsy Riggir, that was filmed as part of the Aotea Centre opening celebrations in September 1990.
Meanwhile, Eldred Stebbing liked Davidson’s demo and financed an album, recruiting as oridycer tge former Split Enz/Citizen Band bass player and label owner Mike Chunn, who was then working on something else at Stebbing Recording Centre. Davidson flew in Brisbane drummer Michael Thompson; musical director Martin Winch brought in such Auckland studio luminaries as Red McKelvie, Billy Kristian, Glenn R. Campbell, and Suzanne Lynch.
Released through a Stebbing deal with Warner Music NZ in 1991, Borderline was chock full of Nashville material as well as covers of Crowded House’s ‘Better Be Home Soon’, ex-Daddy Cool/Mondo Rock frontman Ross Wilson’s ‘Bed Of Nails’, and Australian country singer Lee Conway’s ‘Valley Of Fools’. It was a finalist in the 1992 NZ Music Awards for Country Album, beaten out by John Grenell’s Windstar – Aotearoa. It also brought Davidson the title of Best New Talent at the short-lived NZ Professional Country Music Recording Awards.
With radio and television interest in New Zealand country music practically non-existent at the time, the corresponding tour was an uphill battle. When the PA broke down at the Hyatt Kingsgate in Rotorua, Davidson took her band down into the audience and completed the show a cappella.
Back in Sydney, she was singing at leagues clubs and performing on P&O cruises with charts written by Barry Heidenreich. But after moving to Melbourne, Davidson and partner Michael Kelly parted ways. “There was nothing really happening in Melbourne for cabaret country because there weren’t the clubs to do it with, so I came back to New Zealand,” Davidson said. They rekindled their relationship and lived in Cambridge while Kelly set up a regional TV station in Hamilton.
Davidson’s 1991 album included a cover of Crowded House’s ‘Better Be Home Soon’
It was a chance encounter with singer/songwriter Ritchie Pickett on Hamilton’s Victoria Street that brought about Davidson’s next opportunity. “He said, ‘What are you doing back here?’ He said, ‘It’s your lucky day because Jodi Vaughan’s looking for another girl to fit into her country group.’”
From 1993 to 2000, Vaughan, Davidson and Celine Toner performed all over the country as Girls Talk. As well as their own shows, they opened for Kenny Rogers, Ricky Skaggs, and The Little River Band, before calling it a day at the Trinity Hill Vineyards, near Hastings, for the celebration of the new millennium.
“It was great,” Davidson recalled of the trio. “Our harmonies were just crunchy. I would always sing melody, Jodi would do high harmony, and Celine did the low harmony, and it was fabulous.”
Davidson took to performing with backing tracks at Fisherman’s Wharf Restaurant in Auckland, but her health began to deteriorate. She was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease until, in 2005, a homeopath offered up another opinion and suggested an MRI. A brain tumour was discovered and removed. Though benign, the tumour recurred three times, requiring three surgeries.
In 2014, Davidson was awarded a Scroll of Honour from the Variety Artists Club of New Zealand, but a year later her career was stymied when she lost most of her left hand in a ride-on mower accident. “I was traumatised. I stopped singing for about three years because it was so traumatic. It was awful.”
With confidence returned, she teamed up with Glyn Tucker to put together a Divas & Diamonds tribute show tour of the top half of the North Island, but the Covid pandemic shut it down. “We sold out Tauranga Baycourt Theatre, we had the Turner Centre, we had the PumpHouse Theatre, we had a Taupo theatre booked, all cancelled,” Davidson said.
In recent years, Barbie Davidson has continued with her divas shows, performing the hits of Shirley Bassey, Cilla Black and Tina Turner, as well as reigniting her country persona with fiddle player Nick Jones – and keeping her hand in the jazz field.
