AHRON SHAPIRO

EVERY year at about this time, country music flows down the streets of Tamworth just about as freely as the cold beer flows from the taps of their pubs.

It’s the Tamworth Country Music Festival in the city that’s described as the Nashville of the Southern Hemisphere.

It’s also the city home to musicians who go by the curious names of 8 Ball Aitken and Bird.

“Come on in, we’ve made a kugel for you,” 8 Ball Aitken says when we meet at his home. The Queensland native, who sports a long bright red beard and speaks in a soft voice, will be performing at the festival, which runs until January 24

Aitken has led an interesting life. The Golden Guitar nominee went from picking mangoes and bananas, to picking the strings on his guitar. Though not Jewish himself, his fiancee and manager Bird Jensen are, and Judaism has come to influence his music.

Aitken is a welcome friend at Brisbane’s Beit Knesset Shalom Progressive Synagogue; he has played at synagogue functions and filmed part of a music video there.

Over the past six years, he’s released three albums and toured in towns all over Australia as well as 15 countries.

“[His music] is not strictly country,” Jensen says. “It’s part blues, folk, country and indie rock,” she explains.

The pair’s hard work has finally paid off. “We earn our living through our own original music,” Jensen says. “A lot of people can’t do that.”

Many artists in Australia, including Aitken, are partially supported by the Australian Business Arts Foundation (ABAF).

To get more funding, business-minded Jensen even makes her own “8 Ball shmattehs” -– T-shirts and other tour merchandise -– and says she is willing to go the extra mile in ways other managers probably never considered.

“If anyone [donates enough money to get 8 Ball Aitken back into the studio], I’ll personally make them a shabbat dinner in their home,” Jensen enthuses, “and it will be good.”

8 Ball Aitken are performing at the Tamworth Country Music Festival until January 24.

Enquiries: www.8ballaitken.com