Gary Jeshel Forrester
Gary Forrester is a musician, composer, novelist, poet, short-story writer, biographer, memoirist, playwright, academic, and historian based in Rotorua, New Zealand. He was profiled by Random House Australia as one of the major figures in the Australian music scene during the 1980s and 1990s, and in New Zealand by FishHead: Wellington's Magazine as a "modern Renaissance man." In a 2018 interview with New Zealand's leading newspaper, Forrester was described by the Sunday Star-Times as "a Native American descendant, on his mother's side... who settled in New Zealand in 2006. a published author and poet and has released three solo albums in the past three years."
According to Fishhead, in addition to his teaching fellowship lecturing in legal ethics at the Victoria University of Wellington Law School from 2008 to 2016, Forrester had published "three novels and a book of poems, a successful bluegrass composer and musician, an advocate for indigenous rights, and a father of six children." He taught at the University of Melbourne from 1976 to 1980, at the Northwestern School of Law in Oregon from 1983 to 1985, at Deakin University from 1991 to 1992, at the University of Illinois from 2000 to 2003, at Victoria University of Wellington from 2008 to 2016, and, in 2024–2025, at Batumi Shota Rustaveli State University in the Transcaucasian country of Georgia. The latter position with Batumi Shota Rustaveli State University was undertaken by Forrester as a Peace Corps Volunteer, 55 years after he first served in the Peace Corps in Guyana, South America, in the 1960s. At the age of 78, he became one of the oldest of the 250,000 persons to have served in the Peace Corps' 62-year history.
Beginning in the 1980s, he represented Indian tribes in securing restoration legislation through the United States Congress; authored a text on American Indian law; and wrote numerous articles on the rights of indigenous peoples, the environment, civil procedure, and other legal topics.
Strangers To Us All: Lawyers and Poetry declared that "Forrester is a hard man to pigeon-hole. He has practiced law, taught law, and spent time away from the legal profession. He is a singer, musician, poet, and writer."
Bluegrass, Folk, and Americana music
Forrester's bluegrass compositions were recorded on the albums Dust on the Bible, Uluru and Kamara. Between 2015 and 2018, Forrester issued his first three solo albums, Alma Rose, Jeshel, and The Old Churchyard, featuring 30 new compositions.In 1988, Forrester's single "Uluru" was featured on two national commemorative albums by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, as "the cream of a very rich mix" of Australian country music. The ABC observed: "Like our landscape, the history of Australia is best told by our poets, and this recording offers a unique slice... of our bushland, our people, our dreams, and our extraordinary sense of humour."
Forrester's music also appeared on the Larrikin Records 1996 composite album, Give Me a Home Among the Gum Trees, along with Australian country-folk icons Eric Bogle, Judy Small, The Bushwackers, and others.
Random House Australia's 1991 profile declared that "the most striking aspect of the albums, apart from their frequency, is the exceptionally high standard of songwriting." Australian Country Music observed that the bluegrass band fronted by Forrester, the Rank Strangers, "have a musical immediacy that typifies the best of bluegrass and recalls such players as The Stanley Brothers and Bill Monroe."
According to Country Beat, Australia's country music journal, Dust on the Bible was "one of the best bluegrass-country albums released in Australia" in 1987, and Forrester was "one of the best songwriters living in Australia." In December 1988, Mike Jackson of The Canberra Times wrote that the Rank Strangers' second album, Uluru, "featured some delightful lead breaks on mandolin, banjo and fiddle, and some rock-solid accompaniment from guitarist and bass player." Jackson said that the album was "worth buying for the fiddle playing alone. Hale shows great technique and a flair for appropriate harmony lines while matching the punch of the mandolin and banjo well."
In 1988, the Rank Strangers swept the Australian Gospel Music Awards in Tamworth, New South Wales, winning Best Group, Best Male Vocalist, and Best Composition. In 1989 and 1990, Dust on the Bible and Uluru were finalists in the overall Australian Country Music Awards. The Rank Strangers were edged out in 1989 in ACMA's "best new talent" category by future country star James Blundell, and in 1990 in ACMA's "song of the year" category by country legend Smoky Dawson. In 1990, the Rank Strangers finished second in the world in an international competition sponsored by the International Bluegrass Music Association, Nashville, Tennessee.
Forrester led the Rank Strangers on tours of Australia and America, sharing billings with bluegrass legends Bill Monroe, Alison Krauss, Ralph Stanley, Emmylou Harris, Tony Rice, Peter Rowan, and many others. The American tour included "successful appearances at the Station Inn in Nashville and the IBMA Fan Fest in Owensboro, Kentucky," as well as headlining at the Louisville Bluegrass and American MusicFest in Kentucky, then "the largest music festival in the USA."
Bluegrass Unlimited, the oldest and most influential journal of bluegrass music, declared that "the Rank Strangers have a unique angle on bluegrass music, and ought to be proud of making their own brand of music come out on top in the Land Down Under." BU described Uluru as "one of the most intellectually stimulating bluegrass works of recent years, and it cannot be restricted to mere national boundaries." The Rank Strangers were the subject of a feature article in the December 1988 issue of Bluegrass Unlimited. In a 2011 retrospective, BU featured the career of the Rank Strangers' banjo guru Peter Somerville, and recalled Forrester as "an excellent songwriter" of "challenging original material."
Britain's country music newspaper, International Country Music News, noting the band's successes at Australia's National Country Music Festival in Tamworth, New South Wales, found the compositions contained "archetypal elements of nostalgia, humour and religion", as well as themes that were "contemporary and Australian in influence." International music critic Eberhard Finke, writing in the German magazine Bluegrass-Bühne, identified the source of some of the compositions: "In 1987 when his grandfather died in Illinois, he put his grief into writing songs. Not that they are sad songs – there are swinging happy ones, with plenty of religious overtones that brought him closer to his grandfather's legacy. He tuned his guitar to double drop-D, DADGBD, making the G-run more difficult, but better suiting his words and melodies."
Music critic Jeff Harford, writing in the Otago Daily Times, reviewed Forrester's 2015–2017 solo material as follows: "For every nugget of truth in a great song, a corresponding seam of life experience is commonly found in its writer", and "Forrester brings a hatful of both to this Americana-folk release. The composer, novelist, poet, academic, and legal advocate for indigenous peoples takes a sideways step from his bluegrass past with the Rank Strangers to deliver a no-frills set that is, for the most part, nothing more than the man, his guitar and harmonica. That his... originals sit comfortably alongside covers of Bob Dylan, Nanci Griffith and Gillian Welch songs says much about their strength."
Music critic Colin Morris, writing in Wellington's The Dominion Post, wrote that "Forrester is a damn fine guitar picker.. with an innate sense of rhythm coupled with fine lyrics and a story to tell. His Rosa Sharon is redolent of Johnny Cash singing Hurt. Seek it out."
In a 5-star review of Forrester's 2017 double CD, Jeshel, Mike Alexander of The Sunday Star-Times wrote: "There's something almost serendipitous about 'Jeshel' Forrester posting his latest album with little or no fanfare. He's one of those people you might meet only to find that beyond the lack of self-important promotion, his life's work, influence and achievements are those of someone who has already left a footprint. As a reference point only, Forrester evokes the ghosts of preelectric Dylan, whose Girl of The North Country he covers, early Johnny Cash and the melodic sensibilities of Willie Nelson and Kris Kristofferson. There are simple narratives on Jeshel, which includes songs from his previous album Alma Rose, such as The Ballad Of Polly Kincaid and Koori Man, where the story is left to leave its own impression, more personal songs such as Rest For The Weary and the almost confessional Black Top Road and a few covers by Dylan, Gillian Welch, Nancy Griffith and Buddy and Julie Anne Miller. Forrester's music is simple and down-to-earth, just straightforward honesty. What surprises is that there are no swines among these 25 pearls."
James Belfield, the music critic for New Zealand's weekly current affairs magazine, the New Zealand Listener, described Jeshel as a "stunning double album of country folk", evoking "relentless storytelling skills" – the "easy acoustic strum and fingerpicking drift behind a clear, authoritative voice that tells outlaw country tales the equal of those by Waylon Jennings, Kris Kristofferson, Willie Nelson and Johnny Cash." Belfield wrote that "dates stand out like beacons – the 1866 cavalry massacre in the Battle of the Hundred in the Hand in the Crazy Horse history lesson Hoka Hey, the 1961 tension between the Bible and the indigenous sun dances in Hannah Cried, the 1945 return from war of the doomed Blue Eyed Boy – but it's the realism and vitality of the characters that loom largest."
, New Zealand's only magazine devoted to the national music scene, described the 2017 album Jeshel as "packed with well-written and performed songs", and noted that "Forrester has had an intriguing career in and out of the music industry, recording country albums in Australia in the mid-1980s, both as a solo artist and as part of the award-winning Rank Strangers." The "stand out" songs included "Hoka Hey, which tells the story of Crazy Horse, and Bob Dylan's Girl of the North Country."
NZ Musician described Forrester's solo compositions as "lovely" and "surprisingly complex": "With a steely yet gentle voice that at times reminds me of Johnny Cash or Leonard Cohen, Forrester's neatly constructed songs and dulcet tones will lull you along his album's entirety. His lyrics have an aged air, the word choices interesting without being corny or melodramatic. Stories range over a lot of topics and he uses nice rhyme schemes that don't follow his finger patterns. His rhyme and rhythm provide plenty to listen to in an uncomplicated way, the choice of chords, and the mixture of major and minor shapes come together beautifully without being something heard before – despite this being folk music. Choruses build nicely and verses flow down like rivers. A lovely, surprisingly complex album."
An article in the Sunday Star-Times praised the "sparseness and emotional directness of the storytelling on the exquisite Jeshel", and stated that the songs "mesmerisingly weave their own stories." The article referred to the Native American and Aboriginal themes in many of the songs, and quoted Forrester as follows: "When I went to law school, I was motivated by Martin Luther King and how the law could be used as a tool for social justice. Working with the Lakota tribe in America was a natural extension of that original thinking... to do things for people who need the law to be on their side to make any progress."
In 2018, Forrester released his third solo album, The Old Churchyard. The Sunday Star-Times rated The Old Churchyard as a 4.5-star album, stating that "Forrester is a throwback, in the most respectful way, to a time when songwriters had something to say and were armed with just an acoustic guitar and a suitcase full of songs. Think early Bob Dylan or Johnny Cash and a smattering of Glen Campbell or Jim Croce. The likes of them are still around but harder to find in the body electric of contemporary music. What makes Forrester so compelling is, aside from some beautifully accomplished guitar work, that he possess a voice that is melodic, warm and fragile." Noting Forrester's background as "academic, poet, lawyer, nomad, activist, author and troubadour," the review found that he "seamlessly weaves his life experiences" into his songs with words that are "timely and universal, touching on themes such as domestic abuse, unrequited love, and personal anguish."
NZ Musician magazine declared that The Old Churchyard was "in the same vein as late-career Johnny Cash – bare bones recordings of a bared heart." NZ Musician noted that Forrester's Martin D-28S guitar "sounds almost like a Carter Family autoharp on , lending the song a back-porch authenticity. The original songs really tell a story, a la Cohen, Dylan, or Skyscraper Stan. The key to this collection is the premise of a stroll through a rural graveyard populated by the spirits of friends, family and imagined persons of influence. The songs are a deliberate throwback in time, with the freedom to pen a fresh, mostly American mid-west history to the names found on those gravestones. Overall, the tone is downbeat, often just flat-out sad and weary. But there’s also a little dark humour. For example, in the song "Leo & Sam," Forrester conjures old cautionary epics such as Frankie and Johnny. Given the sparseness of his musical arrangements, it's a testimony to the allegorical lyrics and appeal of Forrester's voice that listener interest is easily maintained throughout."
David Thorp, writing in the McLeod Newsletter, agreed: "Accompanying himself on a Martin D-28S guitar, impeccably picked and sounding effortless, Jeshel's voice is smooth, the songs varied but of a consistent quality, from gentle love songs to ballads and traditional songs.
In 2018, Forrester joined with Talei Shirley to form The Dunning-Kruger Effect, an acoustic duo, which recorded the album, "... and with no craven." The album features historical songs from ancient England, Ireland, Scotland, and Scandinavia, as well as idiosyncratic versions of more recent folk songs. Mike Byrne of the McLeod Newsletter described "... and with no craven" as "melancholic and elegiac... The delivery of these songs is near perfect. Talei has a gentle and cadenced voice, and the guitar accompaniment is intimate and knowing."
On 26 April 2020, while in isolation during New Zealand's COVID-19 lockdown, Forrester put together a new solo acoustic album of 11 original songs and 2 covers, for non-commercial release on the Bandcamp online music streaming website. During the lockdown, the only available recording device at his lakeside cabin was a cell phone, so the new collection of songs was titled "The Covid Phone Album."