An exhibition from Knox is currently on display, following a collaboration with the Australian Music Vault in Melbourne.

Managing director at 2 Rivers, Lorrayne Fishenden, said it was an honour to have the country music icon, colloquially known as 'Black Elvis' - a name he picked up at the 1980 Star Maker competition in Tamworth - attend the gallery.

"We voted to just do a bit of an intimate conversation about his career and his contribution to music and also social justice," she said.

"What he's done for community and for Aboriginal country music particularly is quite phenomenal.

"His contribution [to social justice] is 15 years within the justice system through prisons, back before they got paid for it so he did that all off his own back, travelling around to jails and working with inmates."

He has continued to work with the community and be a mentor in recent years too, which Ms Fishenden said was incredibly selfless as he put his own successful career on the backburner.

Born in Moree and having been an active singer since 1981, Knox is one of the great musical exports from north-west NSW.

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Among his accolades are the 1993 NAIDOC Artist of the Year, a 2004 induction into the Australian Country Music Foundation's Country Music Hands of Fame, and the Jimmy Little Award for Lifetime Achievement in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Music at the 2006 Deadly Awards.

In fact, just hours prior to his speech, he was inducted into the 2022 Galaxy of Stars as part of the Tamworth Country Music Festival.

Just for good measure, Knox also cheated death twice, surviving a plane crash in 1981.

He was required to be airlifted from the site of a light plane crash, but en-route to hospital, that plane also crashed - killing his bandmate.

Being such an unique individual, there was significant interest in his talk, with staff having to deal with an overload of people despite trying to keep the event quite low profile, due to the amount of COVID-19 within the community.

"It was very, very popular, we took limited numbers and actually had more than double turn up which we were lucky we were able to accommodate," she said.

"It's very popular, we did very little advertising because we knew it would be popular, had it not been a COVID year I have no doubt we would've had a couple of hundred people come in."

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