Rory is IMHO a fascinating artist in many respects. I have read watched and listened to every book, interview, video, and recording I could find about him. There are always conflicts in accounts, and gaps in timelines. But most sources do touch on the high points of his short but intense career. No written account has been able to really satisfy everyone's curiosity about him.
The one improvement I would like to see in a Rory book is an accurate citing of sources, times, places. The Muise book is my favorite so far, but I would like to have seen references to dates and places of these interviews with Rory and with those who worked with him. Of course as the years pass, and memories fade, accuracy will pay the price.
A good story, including a true story, has a beginning, a middle, and an end. The beginning would be something I'd like to hear about. The things Rory saw, heard, was intrigued and interested in, that got his interest in his future vocation. In many interviews he speaks of watching old Westerns. You know, those really old, kinda corny Saturday Matinee type kid's cowboy shows, with people like Gene Autry, Roy Rogers, Tex Ritter, and so many others, guitar playing singing cowboys. I've heard Rory loved those. And when I watch some of those old clips, I can see what lured him in. Most of these are old folk songs. The influence? No coincidence there
Gene Autry
Roy Rogers
Tex Ritter
Ricky Nelson, Dean Martin
And the influence of the old U.S. Armed Forces radio stations that Rory used to be able to hear, programming intended to bring a little of back home to homesick American soldiers stationed in Europe during and after WW2 (where, ironically enough, my dad and uncles were stationed in those years). So as a child he was hearing from an outsider's point of view, the same music that my cousins and I were hearing in our young parents' homes, music that seemed too familiar to us to be really moved by, but was the music of home, so it left its mark.
The irony isn't lost on me. From what I have read, as a child Rory heard a lot of his parents' favorites, I believe I read that the music heard in his home was classical, and Irish folk music. So the music on the U.S. Armed Forces Stations must have seemed quite different. The Irish music of his home likely seemed too familiar, but that, too left its mark.
You can hear it in his renditions of Western Plain- An American song, Ledbelly, with a decidedly Irish flavor:
The clip was recorded toward the end of his life, what a precious gift he had. (BTE, that Martin had its own angelic voice, that Takamine not so much, but in Rory's hands it still sounds good)
Ledbelly doing the same:
Rory must have heard this on the radio, when he was just a child.
I bet he heard this one too, when it was a hit on American radio- I bet he did, because ALL my uncles played this one on the "record player." And my uncle Bob used to play and sing it on his old steel string acoustic- but more in the old tradition. I associated it with my parents old fashion music.
And one day, in high school, I heard this, and it was the same old song, but with a different feeling
-The first time I had ever heard Rory- I was barely a teenager, and there it was, like so much of the British Invasion, our old music coming back to us, but damn, what he did with it!
BUT ONCE AGAIN, I Digress-
I would like to hear stories about the ways in which Rory was inspired to make music, about that "Aha" moment where he knew what he wanted to be, and determined to be. And places and dates, if you please.
They say in order to be successful at something, you must dream it first. That is what I want to know, about the dreams that inspired him, kept him going.
FINALLY
But my question to you, those of you able to read all this boring stuff to the end, if you could pick up a book about Rory and read it, what would you want it to tell you about the great man himself? What would you want to know if you could find out something about the man that you did not know (and that he would be okay with people knowing. A person's private life is that).(IMHO)
