A 15-year-old Robyn Archer (appearing pre-pseudonym as ‘Robyn Smith’) was a BandstandStarflight finalist in 1964. This excerpt, from a Bandstand episode a year later, is one of the earliest clips of Archer in the NFSA collection and provides a portrait of a young and fearless performer on the back of her Starflight run.

Despite being relatively inexperienced, the power of Archer’s voice in this early clip is unmistakable. Her simple acoustic guitar accompaniment allows the strength of the lyrics and the potency of her vocal performance to shine. While the musical style is certainly not one that Archer would become most known for, she has in later interviews credited these folk and country songs for more than just launching her career: their thematic content served as an early inspiration for her developing liberatory politics.

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