Music history is littered with tales of troubadours and their guitars.

Willie Nelson has Trigger, a beaten up Martin N-20 classical with a hole where no hole should be.

Neil Young has Old Black, a dilapidated 1953 Gibson Les Paul that came to define his sound.

So does Troy Cassar-Daley, Aussie country music legend and headline act at this year’s Adelaide Guitar Festival (external site) (external site), have a similarly treasured axe?

Turns out he does, and that its origins were right here in South Australia.

"I do have a special one – it’s my most-played Strat, and it’s a Truman guitar from Adelaide," Cassar-Daley, pictured below playing the guitar, says.

"It was made by a man called Greg Truman, and he gave it to me before he passed away. It was a beautiful gift ... it's the best Strat I own and it's often played and loved.

"There are so many photos of me on stage with it. It’s been my number one for a long time.

"I’ve also got a black Tele that’s a close number two that I’ll take away with me if I’m afraid it could get damaged from flying on a small plane, but that Truman would be my Trigger, that’s for sure."

'The toughest years of my life'

Cassar-Daley, who burst onto the scene in the early 1990s, has a trophy shelf groaning under the weight of six ARIAs, 45 Golden Guitars, nine Deadly Awards and pretty much everything else there is to win in Australian music.

But beyond the accolades the proudly Indigenous performer has captured the nation’s heart with his honest take on songwriting.

Cassar-Daley took that honesty to new levels on his latest record Between the Fires, a collection of songs that explores deeply personal moments in the singer’s life: a cousin in jail, a marriage in trouble and, most heartbreakingly, the death of his beloved mother.

"This was one of the toughest records I’ve ever made," he says.

"And it was obviously one of the toughest couple of years in my life too, going through that grief process.

"You only have one mum and dad, and they’re big trees to fall in the forest of your life.

"So when I approached this record it was always going to be an honest one, but I didn’t realise just how easy it was going to be to be as honest as I was.

"Once I’d let go of that protection that we all put around our hearts it became easy.

"There's a little bit of anger on there too – I had a cousin that was in jail at the time, and his missus was playing up on him, so there’s that anger, but the anger was also around the fact that I was never going to see mum again. So I channelled a lot of the emotion I was feeling into this record."

And it hit home, in a big way.

Between the Fires reached number two on the ARIA charts – a career best – but more importantly, he says, it resonated with Australians.

"I played six or seven songs from that record the other day in Darwin before the screening of the little documentary we made of the making of the record, and I have to say that it was probably in the top five shows I’ve ever done," Cassar-Daley says.

"People listen to the stories and they understand what you're talking about.

"They've all lost their parents. A lot of these people are grey nomads who came up after the show saying that they got so much out of it.

"One lady said, ‘my mum has been gone for 15 years and I still grieve her’. And then she said, ‘I think I now have a new way to deal with that and celebrate her memory'."

A long love affair with the guitar

Cassar-Daley says he’s looking forward to playing some of the new songs at his Guitar Festival show, but he’s also excited for another reason – he has a "license to shred".

"Well, shred as much as an old bloke like me can shred," he laughs.

"I really do love to play, and I think people will see that, and there will be stories in amongst that, especially about some of my first experiences with the guitar and how it was an inspiring way of being able to sit down and bond with my friends, Indigenous, non-Indigenous, and my cousins.

"It was a tool that I've used all my life to, I think, create unity as well. The guitar has been the sword, and it's also been the book."

Cassar-Daley says he clearly remembers his first interactions with a guitar, an acoustic that belonged to his uncle.

"This old uncle and my cousins would come up from Sydney and he’d have this acoustic guitar which he’d leave at our house for a couple of weeks," he says.

"We’d walk past it and hit the bottom E string and it would just resonate. We’d run out of the room because it scared us at the same time, like we’d conjured up a spirit. But it had this effect on us, we kept being drawn back to it.

"When my cousins started getting guitar lessons I had to follow suit because I didn’t want to be left out of the guitar club!

"It became my passion, and now I simply can’t walk past a guitar without playing it."

The lessons of history

For Cassar-Daley, who is Gumbaynggirr and Bundjalung on his mother’s side and Maltese on his father’s, the guitar became a means to put his thoughts and feelings into song.

Never shy of an autobiographical song, his work has become even more personal on recent albums as he explored those roots and how they’ve shaped him as a man.

Cassar-Daley says that the past couple of years have been rocky ones to navigate as an Indigenous Australian, but he believes music can work as a catalyst to bring people closer together.

"With the Referendum, the way some people are talking about immigration, it really has been a bit tricky," he says.

"But I haven’t given up on unity.

"I’ve just been through Europe for about three weeks, and I had the realisation that there are four, five – even more – layers of history in these little towns we visited.

"In Malta, where my old man was from, it’s been under the control of so many different people over so many years, and they’ve found a way to all own their own history and live with one another.

"And I came home with a more positive approach because I thought if they can make those layers of history work then we can take ownership of two layers – black and white – and make that work for us. So yeah, I definitely haven’t given up on unity."

The Adelaide show

Cassar-Daley’s Guitar Festival show will be opened by Nancy Bates (pictured), widely regarded as one of the nation’s best Indigenous singer-songwriters (a view shared by none other than the late, great Archie Roach).

Cassar-Daley says he first met Bates in the Port Augusta hotel room where they bonded over shared stories and, of course, guitars.

"We sat in that room for maybe two hours with a couple of guitars and Nancy gave my manager and I a mini concert, but also a little bit more of a an insight into her story – and it was just fascinating," he says.

"So it was a no-brainer to get her along for this because I think she's got many beautiful stories to tell about her family and her lineage, and I think having voices like hers is really important.

"This show is not going to be like anything we've done anywhere in Australia."

The Adelaide Guitar Festival is presented by Adelaide Festival Centre and runs from 10 September to 12 October. Troy Cassar-Daley and Nancy Bates perform on 12 September, at Her Majesty’s Theatre. Visit Adelaide Guitar Festival (external site) (external site)for tickets and more information.