Country music legend Reg McTaggart was a trouper to the end: the 79-year-old Arrowtown musician’s final gig was in Cromwell just two weeks before he died.
A community stalwart and a humble individual with a cheeky smile, McTaggart recorded 11 albums during his career. Those featured songs by 60 New Zealand songwriters, and they won numerous awards in New Zealand and Australia.
He was also involved with the Arrowtown Autumn Festival, as a performer and soundman, from its inception in 1985. In 2009 he became its first life member — he only reluctantly pulled out of the festival last year.
Dunedin-raised and apparently from a non-musical family, McTaggart got his first guitar at the age of 9.
His first band was a skiffle group that played at school functions, and by 14 he was strumming guitar and singing in a dance band playing ’50s rock’n’roll.
He recalled listening to the likes of New Zealand rocker Johnny Devlin on his grandparents’ old radio in their North Otago farm’s cowshed.
After school, he became a farm worker at West Wānaka Station, then the Lee family’s Cardrona farm, before becoming farm manager at Warepa, near Balclutha.
In the early ’70s, he and his wife, Judy, who he married when they were both 19, moved to Queenstown to manage a syndicate-owned Frankton Flats farm where the Five Mile/Queenstown Central shopping centres are now.
He developed a love of country music at Cardrona, listening to Invercargill’s 4ZA — ‘‘I thought I must have a go at this’’, he said in 2014.
McTaggart said he had entertained thoughts of pursuing music fulltime, ‘‘but when you end up getting married and having a family, there was no money in music’’.
He and Judy had two children, Des and Adele.
Peter Doyle, of Queenstown, recalled ‘‘we used to go out and play in his barn [in Grant Rd] — you could make as much noise as you liked’’.
‘‘After a couple of years of mucking around he actually formed a very good band, Kawarau County.’’
McTaggart also became the long-time president of the Shotover Country Music Club.
He got involved with the Arrowtown Autumn Festival through his drummer, the late Ross Martin, who founded it.
But his music career really took off after he won the Buddy Williams Award at Australia’s famed Tamworth Country Music Festival in 1989 — his first album, Crossing Bridges, which followed the next year, sold about 6000 copies.
For 30-plus years he was a regular at the Bay of Islands Country Rock Festival and in 1994 was the first overseas guest artist at Adelaide’s Port Pirie Country Music Festival.
In between gigs he farmed in Frankton until 2004, after which he retired to Arrowtown and concentrated on music fulltime.
Judy, who had written a song McTaggart recorded, died in 2009.
Explaining his success with country music, he said: ‘‘I enjoy it and I think I probably understand it a bit more than what some people do, and I’ve got some very good mates on those recordings that are very sympathetic to the kind of music I play’’.
Mr Doyle said he was ‘‘pretty laid-back and he would talk slowly, but he was quite a natural on the stage — he interacted with an audience pretty well’’.
Despite being well known to country music fans, ‘‘he was very humble, he never acted the part of being a star ... he was a reluctant legend’’.
McTaggart’s contribution as a sound and light man to the autumn fest and many other events was amazing — ‘‘he never baulked at anyone asking him to do anything’’.
‘‘If it hadn’t been for him I don’t know what we would have done because there were no audiovisual companies then,’’ Mr Doyle said.
Many also recalled his sense of humour, including a ‘‘dribble’’ glass which had little holes in it disguised by its pattern, which he would trip up many unsuspecting visitors with.
McTaggart died on November 18.
He is survived by his second wife, Glenys, whom he married in August, children Des and Adele, grandchildren Stacy, Josh, Kendra, Drew, Bradley and Wade, who all shared the stage with him at some point, and great-grandchildren Baxter and Margot.
