Frances Peters-Little was never happier than when she was on the road. Some nights, when she was small, her mum and dad would make up a bed in a suitcase backstage, tuck her in, and she’d fall asleep as her father’s clear, sweet voice and the gentle patter of applause drifted over her.
“I lived on the road with my parents. We’d travel from town to town,” she remembers. “You’d meet other kids and know them for a day or two and then move on to the next town. I look back now and think it was pretty special. I was loved and looked after by my parents, and that’s all I felt. I think about those early days with a lot of happiness.”
Frances’ dad was the legendary singer Jimmy Little, and back then, in the 1960s, he was a sensation. “He was our first Aboriginal pop star,” says fellow Golden Guitar winner Troy Cassar-Daley, “the glue between black and white Australia.”
A regular on Brian Henderson’s and Johnny O’Keefe’s , Jimmy had already scored his first hit with a cover of , and’s Bob Rogers noted his musical “perfectionism”, his “melodious voice” and the “warm sincerity”
