WHILE most farmers can be described as a “Jack of many trades”, Coleambally prune farmer Roy Duffell is more aptly described as a man for all seasons.
Or a fiddler for many bush bands, to be more accurate, seeing as though he’s played in three different bush bands in the Riverina in as many decades.
Upon arrival at Roy’s home, which he shares with wife Judy 15 kilometres south of Coleambally in the Riverina, he apologises for smelling like smoke.
You see, like most other farmers, Roy, or “Duff” as he’s known to his band mates, is involved with the local Rural Fire Service brigade serving as captain and he’d just come back from battling are on nearby Pooginook Station.
He also lists qualified marriage celebrant, appearing nude in an art gallery calendar, being an active Lions Club member and volunteering at local schools on his impressive resume.
Duff was born in Yenda and trained as a classical violinist from the age of six and has sung in choirs all his life, but it wasn’t until he learnt to play the spoons that he discovered his true love of bush music.
“I was at a dance in Griffith where the Tin Rattlers were playing and I was talking to the man on the spoons who showed me the basics.
“I used to stand behind him and play along then one night he just pushed me out the front – I was as nervous as anything,” he said with a laugh.
But Duff was off to St Vinnies scouting around for a good set of spoons soon after and hasn’t looked back since.
In 1976 he joined the Bagtown Bush Band, so named after the temporary settlement for the men who worked on the first Murrumbidgee Irrigation Area canals on the outskirts of Griffith.
The Bagtown Bush Band merged with another local bush band, Patterson’s Curse Bush Band, in the early 1980s to consolidate members and skills.
They became known as the Gum Creek Bush Band.
In the meantime, Duff had graduated from the spoons to the violin, but not as he remembered it from his childhood days.
“We needed a fiddler and my roommate dobbed me in after seeing my violin so I became the fiddler,” he said.
“We kind of made it up as we went along and I learnt a lot from other fiddlers, bands and books on folk and bush music.”
So when the call went out for somebody to be Griffith’s very own “Fiddler on the Roof” for a town festival, Duff was really the only man for the job.
“They put me up on the roof of one of the businesses in Banna Avenue (Griffith’s main street) and I just played away up there, it was a great view!”
An amateur actor who’d already played characters such as Uncle Max from The Sound of Music, and George, Earl of Mountararat from Gilbert and Sullivan’s Iolanthe, Duff has more in common with Tevye, the main character of The Fiddler on the Roof, than a love of music.
He admits the early years of being a bush band man demanded a lot of time and energy, much like Tevye devoted to his family.
“There was a lot of travelling, we (the Bagtown Bush Band) were the resident band at the Kinross Woolshed in Albury so we’d travel across and play both Friday and Saturday nights.”
After more than three decades in the fiddling game, Duff enjoys it more than ever and there’s time for less work and more play, so to speak.
He now fiddles as part of John and Annette Morey’s Narrandera-based Swag and Billy band.
“The attraction of bush music is that it’s a family fun thing which a whole family can enjoy together, no matter what their ages are,” Duff said.
“We just make it up as we go along nowadays, we work well together, but my favourite part is when there’s just a bunch of musos all jamming away and there’s no structure, it’s just somebody saying ‘let’s try this’.
“It’s important to us to not only enjoy playing, but to be able to share our music with other people, so if they want a band, we’ll muster one up somehow.”
