At the end of the second summer of the Permanent Abnormal, our song selection rings very ironic - although irony itself is an increasingly unknown quantity to the Covid world. But, unless you're an inbound Afghan "translator", chances are you're going nowhere so you might as well sing about going everywhere:
I've been ev'rywhere, man
I've been ev'rywhere, man
Crossed the deserts bare, man
I've breathed the mountain air, man
Of travel I've had my share, man
I've been ev'rywhere...
And we all know what comes next. All together now!
I've been to Reno, Chicago, Fargo, Minnesota
Buffalo, Toronto, Winslow, Sarasota...
Wait a minute, don't you mean...?
I've been to Bradford, Guildford, Oxford, Littlehampton
Bedford, Chingford, Hereford, Wolverhampton...
Or maybe:
I've been to Kaparoa, Whangaroa, Akaroa, Motueka
Taramoa, Benmore, Pongaroa, Horoeka...
In fact, the guy who'd been everywhere was sitting in Coolingatta, Queensland when he wrote it. And where had he been?
I've been to Tullamore, Seymour, Lismore, Mooloolaba
Nambour, Maroochydore, Kilmore, Murwillumbah
Birdsville, Emmaville, Wallaville, Cunnamulla
Condamine, Strathpine, Proserpine, Ulladulla
Darwin, Gin Gin, Deniliquin, Muckadilla
Wallumbilla, Boggabilla, Kumbarilla, I'm a killerI've been ev'rywhere, man
I've been ev'rywhere, man
Crossed the deserts bare, man
I've breathed the mountain air, man
Of travel I've had my share, man
I've been ev'rywhere....
The man who composed that song lived in Mount Kuring-gai north-west of Sydney for more than six decades of his long life, but he went if not quite everywhere a good half of the way - and his song went almost as far. "I've Been Everywhere" sallied forth from Australia to New Zealand, Britain, America, Japan, Germany, Belgium, Finland ("Oon käyny kaikkialla"), Czechoslovakia, whose musical roadmap has outlasted the country ("Já tu zemi znám"). After my appearance on "India Upfront" last week, I'm teaching myself the Indian version:
There's also the Faroe Islands, which version is significantly shorter than most, because there aren't as many towns as there are in India. Oh, and it wound up in that episode of "The Simpsons" in which Homer buys an RV and hits the open road:
I've been to Springfield, Shelbyville, Ogdenville, Cap City
Ogdenberg, Shelbytown, Spring City, Capfield
West Springfield, Paris, Rome, and Shelbyville Adjacent...
Throughout history composers have heard the music in a particular place, from "Loch Lomond" to "The Blue Danube", from Borodin "In the Steppes of Central Asia" to Canteloube's "Songs of the Auvergne". But no one thought to do every place until Geoff Mack came along. As SteynOnline readers know, I love Australia, and, come Australia Day or when I'm on tour in the Lucky Country, I always like to pick an Oz hit for our Song of the Week: Over the years we've sampled Peter Allen, Olivia Newton-John, the Seekers and the lads from Men At Work who gave us "Down Under". But it has to be said that the list of Australian compositions taken up by non-Australian singers is not that long, and even shorter now that the entire Rolf Harris oeuvre has been eighty-sixed. So, by my arithmetic, "I've Been Everywhere" is the most recorded Australian song other than "Waltzing Matilda". If Geoff Mack will forgive me:
It's been ev'rywhere, man
It's been ev'rywhere, man
On and off the air, man
Big screen to county fair, man
They sing it to hawk your ware, man
It's been ev'rywhereIt's sung by Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, Hank Snow, Lynn Anderson
Asleep at the Wheel, Statler Brothers, Rick Moranis, Dolly Parton
Kris Kristofferson, Stompin' Tom, Jailbird Rolf, Lucky Starr
Ladislav Vodička, Homer Simpson, Comfort Inn ads and Rihanna...
Rihanna? Well, after a fashion. A few years back Geoff Mack put them all on a cassette, but ran out of room after thirty or so, leaving some 100 versions that never made his mix tape.
Albert Geoffrey McElhinney was born in Surrey Hills, Victoria in 1922, and caught the songwriting bug early, getting into trouble at Sunday School for a parody of "All Things Bright and Beautiful". War came, and young McElhinney enlisted in the Royal Australian Air Force, becoming an aircraft mechanic, in which capacity he was dispatched to Borneo to help set up allied airfields. At the end of the day, he'd get out his guitar and entertain his mates. The RAAF liked his songs more than his Sunday School teacher did, and he was seconded to entertain the troops and run the concert parties. He opened for the great Gracie Fields before an audience of 18,000 people, and shortly thereafter truncated his moniker to "Geoff Mack". Even then he had a flair for novelty numbers. In 1946, The Windsor and Richmond Gazette, reviewing a concert for returning servicemen, noted:
Geoff Mack, with his guitar, was responsible for most of the laughs with his vocal gymnastics, his number, 'In Der Fuhrer's Face', being a gem of its kind, which had the audience in hysterics.
After the war, he was sent to Japan as part of the occupation and became an announcer on British Commonwealth forces radio. "The man with the 'sound effects' voice" (as the Melbourne Age called him) performed for UK, Oz, French and American troops and for Japanese and German audiences over the next few years, before finding himself in a club called the Casa Carioca in the Bavarian town of Garmisch-Partenkirchen. "The dance floor slid back to reveal an ice rink," recalled Geoff, "and skaters would come out, and the ceiling came right back to show the stars – and you know what the stars are like in the Bavarian Alps!. Bee-yoo-tiful!"
But not as bee-yoo-tiful as an English comedienne and dancer called Tabbi Francis, who was one half of an act called the High Spots. It was certainly the high spot of the night for Geoff. They married in Essex, bought a 250cc Panther motorcycle, and decided to ride it back to Australia. Which they did: the newlyweds took their Phelon & Moore motorbike (made in Cleckheaton, Yorkshire) across Europe, through Turkey, Iraq and Iran, where the sidecar fell apart. But on they pressed, into the nascent state of Pakistan, then India and over to Ceylon, and by steamer all the way to Fremantle on Australia's west coast, where they got back on the bike and crossed the Nullarbor Plain - the largest expanse of arid treeless limestone bedrock on the planet - to arrive in Sydney on Boxing Day 1954.
So Geoff Mack hadn't literally been everywhere, but he'd been halfway to everywhere, which is further than most of us get. And you wonder why that trip never inspired the song:
I've been to Blackpool, Istanbul, Mosul, and Baghdad,
Tehran, Isfahan, Zahedan, Hyderabad...
But that wasn't really Geoff Mack's bag, dad. Back in Oz, "the man with the 'sound effects' voice" acquired the rather pithier sobriquet of "Tangletongue" and a partner called Lucky Grills, who recalled the birth of their act in verse:
It was back in 1950
When I met this man named Mack
We were working in a show in Parramatta
I had just turned 22
Learning all the things to do
To get some laughs with very dodgy patterMacka sang some songs he wrote
Made funny noises with his throat
He really had the audience in stitches
I thought 'Wow', he and I no trouble
Could do comedy as a double
Who knows? We might go from rags to riches...
Not as easy as it sounds. They put together a twenty-strong variety troupe and took a touring tent show round New South Wales and Queensland for ten months a year. And so it was that in 1959 Geoff Mack found himself at a resort in Coolangatta staring at an invitation to a cabaret gig in Sydney. He thought he needed an opening number. "There were a lot of tasteless rock numbers on the radio," he recalled, "and I thought, 'Aw crikey, I should write one'..." How hard can it be?
But what to sing about? Maybe if he just clued in the audience with what he'd been doing the last few years:
It's nice to be back in Sydney
And you ask me what I've seen
If you settle back and listen
I'll tell you exactly where I've been...I've been ev'rywhere, man
I've been ev'rywhere...
He wrote it in a couple of hours, sitting in his panel van, poring over maps of Queensland, Victoria and New South Wales - the only ones he had to hand, which is why the lyric includes no towns from South Australia, Western Australia or Tasmania, and only one from the Northern Territory. Quick quiz for non-Aussies: Can you spot it?
Darwin, Gin Gin, Deniliquin, Muckadilla
Wallumbilla, Boggabilla, Kumbarilla, I'm a killer...
Answer: Darwin. He needed it to go with Gin Gin.
He called it "The Swagman Rock", and figured he might get in on the nascent rock scene. But as usual it just wound up in the act and he sang it in clubs for a couple of years. He had never had a song published or recorded, but a New Zealand publisher expressed interest in putting out a collection of his material, so Mack sent over a quintet of his favorites, and the guy came back and said what about that town-list number you do. So Mack threw it in as a bonus and figured he might as well write a proper introductory verse to set the thing up:
Well, I was humpin' my bluey on the dusty Oodnadatta road
When along came a semi with a high and canvas-covered load
'If you're goin' to Oodnadatta, mate, with me you can ride'
So I climbed in the cabin and I settled down inside
He asked me if I'd seen a road with so much dust and sand
I said 'Listen mate, I've traveled every road in this here land. 'Cause...I've been ev'rywhere, man...
And thus it was established that the intro was to be sung slow, and the chorus taken at frenetic pace. If you're wondering whether it's legal to hump your bluey on a public highway, that's Australian for "carry my sleeping bag".
Audiences loved it, so he took it to the A&R man at Festival Records, who told him to ditch the title "Swagman Rock" because "rock'n'roll will be dead within a year". So he changed it to "I've Been Everywhere". Then he made a demo for Festival, but it was 1961 and Geoff was pushing forty, and they thought that was a bit old to be a teen idol. Fortunately one walked through the door bearing the name "Lucky Starr", which his agent presumably hoped would be a self-fulfilling prophesy. As Billboard magazine, way over in America, would report a few weeks later:
Lucky Starr, Sydney vocalist under contract to Festival Records, has recorded an Aussie composition by Geoff Mack, 'I've Been Everywhere.' The number has raced up all national charts into second place within three weeks and all that is holding it back at the moment is Presley's 'Good Luck Charm.'
By now Geoff was back working in Queensland and didn't know that Lucky Starr had toppled Elvis and hit Number One until he chanced to hear his song on the radio one night. It stayed at the top for fifteen weeks. "The Starr disk has created excitement in both New York and London," declared Billboard. But how to capitalize on that excitement? As Lucky Starr's manager saw it, the trick of "I've Been Everywhere" was that everyone's everywhere was somewhere in particular. So he told Geoff Mack to go write new lyrics for lucrative markets like New Zealand, Britain, Canada and America, and he'd get Lucky to put out a four-track EP called "Lucky's Been Everywhere":
The non-Oz lyrics traveled better than the Oz vocalist did: it would not be Lucky Starr who had the American and UK hits on "Everywhere". Hank Snow, a Canadian, did the US version, spliced together in the studio by Chet Atkins because Hank found all those town names exhausting and confusing to sing in one shot. Not everyone is as adept a TangleTongue as Geoff Mack, but Hank gave it his best on live gigs and acquitted himself credibly:
"The English one was easy," said Mack, "because I could almost do that without an atlas" - and he had the aid of an English wife:
I've been to Farnborough, Edinburgh, Peterborough, Felixstowe
Middlesbrough, Loughborough, Scarborough, Walthamstow
Blackburn, Lisburn, Bannockburn, Londonderry
Wicklow, Glasgow, Hounslow, Tipperary
Hempstead, Wanstead, Banstead
Woodstock, Bass Rock, Bell Rock, Tilbury Dock, wotcha cock!
If you're wondering whether it's legal to wotcha cock on a public highway, that's a cheery Cockney greeting such as one might hear at Tilbury Dock. Married to an Essex girl, Geoff Mack was presumably familiar with the expression. The United States, by comparison, was foreign soil. As Mack put it, "I needed an atlas and a magnifying glass":
Wichita, Tulsa, Ottawa, Oklahoma
Tampa, Panama, Mattawa, La Paloma...
You'll have spotted that the "American version" is, in fact, a North American version breezily crossing into the Great White North with nary a thought. Likewise, the "English version" chugs up to Scotland, over to Northern Ireland, and down south to Tipperary. I assume Mr Mack was thinking not jurisdictionally but of the geography of trucker routes. Very well: Scots, Irish, English...
But what about the Welsh? Rolf Harris gave it a go:
I've been to Llandudno... Llanelli... Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrnd...
At which point he abandons Welsh towns in mid-municipality and goes back to England. "Ah, the dreadful double-L," as Dame Siân Phillips said to me after my own efforts at parlay-vooing the Cymru on last year's Mark Steyn Christmas Show. Canada's Stompin' Tom Connors was more determined with his own regional variations. He noticed that the "North American version" stayed mostly south of the border, and took to localizing it, depending which corner of our frosty Dominion he chanced to be playing:
Well this truck driver looked at me again, and he said 'Don't you know nothin' about the Maritimes at all, buddy?' He had the audacity to ask me - 'course you Newfoundlanders wouldn't understand that word. That's a big word I learned in Skinner's Pond School, Prince Edward Island...
And then he'd take a zippy trip round "Moncton, Chatham, St John, Campbellton.."
But what about people who never go anywhere? From Australian TV's legendary "Aunty Jack Show":
I've been to Wollongong, Wollongong, Wollongong, Wollongong
Wollongong, Wollongong, Wollongong, Wollongong
Wollongong, Wollongong, Wollongong, Wollongong
Wollongong, Wollongong, Dapto, Wollongong
Wollongong is a seaside town in New South Wales. Dapto is ten miles down the road.
Which is farther than you're allowed to travel in, say, Victoria, where freeborn citizens are permitted by the state to venture no more than five kilometers (three miles approx) from their home. Australia has erected hard frontiers between its states, so Geoff Mack couldn't hump his bluey much further than the end of his garden. Half the world is walled up in Wollongong, with no prospect of getting anywhere near Dapto.
Just as the Oz original led naturally to an American version and the American version led to an all-Texas version, so "I've Been Ev'rywhere" led in the fullness of time to "I Ain't Been Anywhere". Geoff Mack himself even wrote a medical variation: "I've Had Everything, Man". Florida governor turned senator Bob Graham, running for president in 2004, chose to tout his career experience with the campaign song "I've Had Every Job, Man". The bioethicist Robert Baker, bemoaning the lack of a professional ethics code in his field, sang "Codes Are Everywhere, Man", listing thirty-eight professions from accounting to zookeeping that, unlike his, have enforceable codes of ethics.
Some of these variations are droll, some perhaps not as amusing as their authors intended. But the pliability of the conceit gave Geoff Mack's lone hit long legs. The tune obviously isn't much - indeed, the repetitiveness is the point, with occasional key changes to add some sense of development. Sure, the same complaint could be made of a lot of catalogue songs, which, unless they're written by Cole Porter or Richard Rodgers, aren't always the most interesting melodically or harmonically. Usually they get by on clever rhymes. But, although Mack would frequently refer to his song's "triple internal rhymes", this particular laundry list doesn't really rhyme at all: "Birdsville, Emmaville, Wallaville" are not rhymes but identities, as are "Louisville, Nashville, Knoxville" and "Westminster, Southminster, Kidderminster". "Reno, Chicago, Fargo" aren't even identities: They just happen to end in the same vowel. And I'm not sure you can even say that of "Buffalo, Toronto", given the number of people who elide the latter into "Tronna".
Don't get me wrong: That's not a criticism. I think the song's more effective for not rhyming, for using more approximate sound-alikes - as Johnny Mercer, who knew a thing or two about the musicality of place, did when he wrote "Hear that lonesome whistle blowin' cross the trestle" in "Blues in the Night". Instead, my problem with the British and American versions is that the towns are all a bit predictable. Village England certainly doesn't want for unusual names: Stow on the Wold, Barton in the Beans, Nether Wallop, Mudford Sock, Brown Willy, Pratt's Bottom... Likewise, the American gazetteer is not without its charms: Happyland, Cranky Corner, Lost Nation... To any foreigner who grew up hearing "Chattanooga Choo-Choo" and "I've Got a Gal in Kalamazoo", American towns are the most musical on the planet ...but singly. I'm less certain that there's any musicality to be derived from an accumulation of English or American place names. That's what makes the Oz original still my favorite version.
You'll notice there are Australian towns the lyric doesn't care to namecheck: Sydney, named after the 1st Viscount Sydney; Melbourne, named after the 2nd Viscount Melbourne; Adelaide, named after William IV's queen consort; or even Geoff Mack's own birthplace of Surrey Hills, named for the English county. Instead Mr Mack hymns:
Wollongong, Geelong, Kurrajong, Mullumbimby
Mittagong, Cooranbong, Grong Grong, Goondiwindi
Yarra Yarra, Bouindarra, Wallangarra, Turramurra
Boggabri, Gundagai, Narrabri, Tibooburra
Gulgong, Adelong, Billabong, Cabramatta
Parramatta, Wangaratta, Coolangatta...
The lyric gets more aboriginal as it goes on. And, in a song of limited melodic interest and few rhymes, that's what makes it musical. Which is odd to me - because I've always found actual aboriginal music rather tedious, at least when compared with the musicality of the aboriginal words selected by Mack. Lest you think I'm going native, I regard the Maori version as a poor substitute:
Kaparoa, Whangaroa, Akaroa, Motueka
Taramoa, Benmore, Pongaroa, Horoeka
Rimutaka, Te Karaka, Whangarei
Nuhaka, Waimahaka, Motuhura, Waikaka...
The vowel sounds aren't as mellifluous, and the consonants - those 'k"s especially - are cumulatively grating. So, if I want to hear "I've Been Everywhere", I always return to Geoff Mack humpin' his bluey on the dusty Oodnadatta road - and leave the Kiwi, Pom and Yank covers on the distant horizon. It's a worldwide smash, but it sounds best in Australian.
Half-a-century after the first hit recording of his song, Geoff Mack enjoyed one last Top Five hit, getting a co-writer's credit on Rihanna's song "Where Have You Been?" - for reasons that are obvious from the first few seconds. After half-a-century as the world's most endlessly mutable list, it fell to Rihanna to turn it into a big pop hook entirely disconnected from any sense of place. Indeed, she uses "I've been ev'rywhere" as a euphemism for her sexual experience, swapping Mack's atlas for a tour round her own parts:
Of all the places for an Oz novelty number to end up, that must surely have taken Geoff Mack by surprise.
Lightning that spectacular doesn't strike twice, and Geoff Mack seemed at peace with that. "Two hours work, and I'm still living on it fifty years later," he said. "How lucky can you get?" He wasn't a rocker when he wrote "The Swagman Rock", and he wasn't a country songwriter when Hank Snow made his song a Number One country hit in America and he was inducted into the Songwriters' Hall of Fame in Nashville. He always saw himself as a variety entertainer - who just happened to give Johnny Cash, Lynn Anderson and innumerable other country singers a literal country song. In the 2011 Queen's Birthday Honours, he was awarded the Order of Australia Medal, and so the man who'd been everywhere got to go to Government House. It was left to an Englishman called Peter Harris to go everywhere in the song. A fan of the number, Harris began his quest to visit all ninety-four places in December 2009 and completed his epic voyage in September 2011 at the final stop - Birdsville in Queensland. Geoff Mack conceded that he could not make the same boast:
"Actually, I've never been to Birdsville," he told The Australian four years ago. "I know I say it in the song, but I've never been there. And it's probably too late now. I'm ninety. I am only allowed to drive 10km in daylight... It would take me a long time."
"10km in daylight": That's twice as long as many Australians are permitted to drive today. "Over the cage floor the horizons come," as Ted Hughes observed in another context.
So Geoff Mack and "I've Been Everywhere" belong to a lost world where Australians were free to go at least somewhere. I've never had any desire to go to Birdsville, but now it shimmers beguilingly in the far, far distance of, oh, seven-and-a-half miles.
Geoff Mack lived in a better world. When you've ridden your motorbike through Iran and Pakistan, you don't need to go to Birdsville. Of travel, he'd had his share, man.
~If you enjoy our Sunday Song of the Week, we now have an audio companion, every Sunday on Serenade Radio in the UK. You can listen to the show from anywhere on the planet by clicking the button in the top right corner here. It airs thrice a week:
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