Page Text: Fresh Picked
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Fresh Picked is a new album of 12 original songs recorded by the Country Pumpkins Band in May, 2021 with Richard Cooke at Sanctuary Sound Studio in Tilba, NSW. It is the same studio where the band recorded its’ previous album, Pat the Possum.
Two of the songs were written by lead guitarist, Rick Bamford, three by bass player, Michelle Scobie, and seven by Graham Scobie, with one of those being a co-write with producer, Richard Cooke. Graham is a winner of a Tamworth Songwriters Association Award for 100 Years Australia and an Australian Gospel Music Award for Aussie Gospel Bloke while Michelle was a TSA finalist for Pat the Possum. Johnny Dozer Driver was a semi-finalist in the 2021 Lyrics Only section of the TSA Awards under its’ previous title, The Fire at Yankee’s Gap. Johnny Dozer Driver and A Cultivated Man by Graham plus Redbank Creek by Rick were all semi-finalists in the TSA Awards in January, 2022
There are a number of reasons why the album is named after a song written by Rick, called Fresh Picked. Firstly, all the songs were written for this album, with Rick only recently arriving in the band after the departure to Melbourne of previous long-term guitarist, Chris Curtis. Chris had played with the band at Gympie Muster in 2009. So, Rick is also fresh picked by the band and naturally, there’s plenty of fresh picking by him on acoustic and electric guitars as well as lap steel and dobro.
The title song starts out talking about fresh picked vegies and links in to being fresh picked for the Vietnam War in 1967. Rick was conscripted at the age of 19 but the song is primarily about a friend of his who served in Vietnam. Rick’s other song on the album is a rollicking number called Redbank Creek. Michelle wrote Take All of My Love after the farm she shares with her husband, Graham, was consumed by a bushfire on 23 Jan 20. Her other two songs are Toongabbie Girl which talks about where she grew up in Sydney and her other song, Hear His Call is a gospel song.
Graham’s songs range from a tribute to his farming Dad who died in 2019 aged 95, called A Cultivated Man, to an ode to the often overlooked Queensland Blue pumpkin and another humorous ditty about those annoying little stickers on fruit called Give the Sticker the Flick. He tributes local south coast NSW hero, Neil Lavis, who won a gold medal in the 1960 Olympics in Rome on a horse called Mirrabooka and gives his own political view on the devastation of bushfires in Stand to Intention. Eureka is a tongue-in-cheek apology for his ancestor, James Scobie, being a spark that ignited the flame of the Eureka Stockade and Johnny Dozer Driver is another bushfire song describing an incident in the 2018 fire at Yankee’s Gap near Bega.