Three Rivers Hotel

There’s no fool like an old fool, they say, so what happens when a bunch of oul’ coots gather together to make music? The next batch of posts may enlighten you as to the question just posed and may also, perhaps, enrage or entertain. Anything’s better than a yawn, I guess. And everything that is not that bloody virus is a plus. At the moment we can’t meet as a group, as we are in lockdown, so I have set out a version of songs that are in our repertoire but which have not yet been recorded. With any luck (and, as three of us are north of 70, we’ll need it!) we will be able to resume our normal practice of meeting weekly and playing tunes, singing songs and generally enjoying the crack.

Three Rivers Hotel was written by Stan Coster. We, the band Banter, have performed the song for twenty-five years. Stan is another one of those larger than life Aussies that this land seems to produce in prodigious numbers. Below I give a potted biography of his life that demonstrates this. I also wish to pay tribute to a performer and songwriter that didn’t make it to the biblical span of three score and ten- but didn’t he cram a lot of living and a lot of songs into the time he had!

Stan Coster was born at Casino on the north coast of New South Wales, Australia in 1930. He left school at the age of 14 and worked for a local butcher in Woolgoolga, NSW. By the age of 16, he was cutting sleepers for train tracks and at 18 years of age he went to work as a station hand before moving to Sydney and in 1948 moved to Cooma, New South Wales, to work on the Snowy Mountains Scheme. While on the land Coster worked as a ringer, fencer, slaughterman, horse-breaker, kangaroo shooter, and shed hand and was able to draw these experiences into his bush ballads. In 1950, at age 20, Coster joined a travelling rodeo as a rough rider.

In 1956, Coster began writing songs and met Slim Dusty in 1960 at Longreach, Queensland. Dusty recorded his first Coster song, “Return of the Stockman” in 1962. Dusty went on to record another 70 of Stan Coster tracks. Popular compositions such as his “Three Rivers Hotel”, which tells the story of building a train line into a remote nickel mine, were based on his own life experiences and brought to popular attention through performances and recordings by Slim Dusty and other artists. In 1977, Coster won the Golden Guitar for APRA Song of the Year with his composition “Three Rivers Hotel”, recorded by Slim Dusty.

In the 1980s Coster started his Stan Coster Show at the Tenthill Hotel in Tenthill, Queensland in the 1980s to crowds too large to be accommodated in the hotel.  In 1987, Coster won another Golden Guitar for APRA Song of the Year for “He’s a Good Bloke When He’s Sober”. In 1989 he was awarded an OAM for “Services to Country Music” and was in 1990 inducted into the Australian Roll of Renown at Tamworth. He won the 1995 Golden Guitar (Heritage Award) for Bush Ballad Song of the Year with “Lawson’s Loaded Dog” and in 1996 released his last album Come Back to the Bush. (adapted from source, Wikipedia)

Sam the Man sings John Williamson’s take on the song on this site: Banter IV  Song 45. For the lockdown redux version I have added three verses that are in Slim Dusty’s version. I also slowed it down a bit to 165 bpm in waltz time using the Band-in-a-Box/RealBand combo comprising acoustic bass, fingerpicked and strummed guitars with Nashville waltz drums for the rhythm section. I use vintage electric piano, pedal steel guitar and gritty electric guitar variously in the verses and use a B3 organ in the chorus with doubled voices.