In Search of Rory McEwen Secret Knowledge

This is the story of someone I never met but wish I had.

In some ways we're strangely similar, in other ways

very, very different.

50 years ago, he was a household name.

Today, not so many people have heard of him.

He was my father-in-law and his name is Rory McEwen.

I loved being with him.

If I knew I was going to see him, my heart and my spirits would rise.

He was startling. He was very quick and articulate.

Also a very natty dresser.

Rory was just sort of magical.

He had an amazing gift for bringing people together

for creativity and friendship.

You cannot explain the genius of someone called

Rory McEwen by concentrating on only one aspect of what he produced.

He is a man of many parts. An astonishing artist.

Here's a guy who draws, you know,

like nobody has ever seen in the 20th century.

I was dazzled by the technique.

Rory didn't really do anything that wasn't really beautiful.

Everything he did was very, very beautifully done.

He was a pioneering television presenter, song-writer

and ground-breaking musician.

I think he should fit in at the very beginning of introducing

the blues to the UK audiences.

But, as to why this has never been acknowledged, I don't know.

I think it's time for a renaissance really.

Every time you think you know where he's going,

he goes in another direction.

So here it is - the story of Rory McEwen.

We begin in 1932, in the Scottish borders,

where Rory was born into a large aristocratic family.

Rory grew up at this extraordinary place, Marchmont,

a palladian house near Polworth in Scotland.

It had a mile-long drive.

You know, they were part of the real catholic establishment.

His father was under-Secretary of State for Scotland,

also a poet, and also a Francophile, so they were very cosmopolitan.

I think we were hugely privileged.

He described it as an 18th century upbringing

and to some extent it was.

I mean there were still horses and carts and the rest of it.

We were very much in tune with the aesthetics of nature.

And the house was always crammed full of flowers.

Rory was taught by a French governess who encouraged him

to paint flowers, a skill that he'd never forget.

I think Rory's background at Marchmont was hugely

important to him, he felt a terrific pride in it, you know.

They were an amazing family.

Our eldest brother was a mad keen jazz fan

and he was also a great influence on Rory

in terms of his musical tastes because it was there

that he first heard Leadbelly, Josh White, Big Bill Broonzy.

I think my father and his younger brother, Alexander, heard this

music and taught themselves to play guitar

from listening to the records that Jamie accumulated.

At Cambridge, in the early '50s, Rory performed

in The Footlights with other like-minded students.

I think I gradually became aware of the fact he was a musician

and played rather brilliant jazz guitar,

and I can't remember the exact date when we began to associate doing

cabarets together for those reviews at the end of the year.

He would play something and I would do something comic,

and then he would play again.

We had very amusing times together as this pair of entertainers.

After Cambridge, Rory

and younger brother, Alexander, set sail for America - really, the very

first people from Britain to explore the roots of folk and blues music.

First stop was New York City, the last home of Rory's idol,

Louisianna-born Huddie Leadbetter,

Leadbelly, king of the 12-string guitar.

Rory was so ahead of his time, and so was his brother.

They knew the background of the blues.

And he went to see Leadbelly's widow, Martha.

They made this pilgrimage. Rory was nervous thinking,

"she won't like these two Scottish boys singing her late

"husband's songs", but it was a great success.

They played Whoa Buck, a wonderful Leadbelly song to which she

clapped her hands, and then she produced this wonderful guitar,

this 12-string which he played. So, there he was, he was in the...

was in the Valhalla, whatever it is,

he was in the kind of temple of 12-string.

The McEwen brothers crossed America, playing gigs to growing acclaim.

These unlikely Scottish stars amazingly

performed on the network Ed Sullivan Show,

years before The Beatles did the same, leading the British invasion.

Back in Britain, Rory was talent-spotted by the BBC's

Cliff Michelmore when he came to launch the Tonight programme in 1957.

It will be a program with lots of young people in it.

One of them, for instance,

is now back in this country after getting on the Ed Sullivan Show

in New York whilst singing his way across the United States.

# On a Monday... #

They used to have a slot for various folk singers.

Rory was the main one I connected with because he played

really good 12-string guitar in the style of Leadbelly.

When I saw someone actually on TV doing this material,

I was like, wow! It was one of those moments, it got me into, like,

taking music seriously because until that point I wanted to be a vet.

Rory was now a rising star and he was given his very own show,

THE trailblazer for music television to come.

# Hullabaloo balah baleh

# He followed my mother all round the town

# Hullabaloo baleh... #

Hullabaloo was the first folk show on television, the first one

actually devoted to folk music, folk and blues.

Good evening and welcome to Hullabaloo.

We're going to start the show this evening...

Rory was the compere, he introduced the acts, and he played.

And you had this mix of folk singers

from Glasgow - you know, Sonny Boy Williamson,

black players that were brought over from America - an extraordinary mix.

# I'm goin' down to Rosie's, stop at Jessie Mae's... #

Peter, Paul and Mary.

# Go tell it on the mountain... #

He's a missing part of the history of the early days of rock and roll.

He was a catalyst, he brought people together.

Now Lisa Turner, Martin Carthy and myself, accompanied by David Graham

and Pete McGurk, are going to give a new slant to an old song

and it's called, by Leadbelly, it's called, My Girl.

To say that he was an enabler doesn't really begin to describe it.

# In the pines, in the pines... #

He was somebody who wanted you to be able to do your best.

He always gave it everything he'd got

and that made you do the same,

and he had the capacity for keeping it simple, keeping it basic.

# His head was found in the driving wheel

# And his body never has been found... #

It was focused right down tight

and I think that was a feature of everything he did, myself.

He used to sing all the time, I mean walking down the road.

-Driving us to school!

-Driving us to school,

we used to sing songs the whole way to school,

you know, just endless.

It just seemed normal.

When Jools Holland, my husband,

started to film "Later...",

he met Martin Carthy,

and Martin had a videotape,

which came through the letterbox and we sat down and watched it.

And at the end of that first programme, there was a short

silence and then Jools turned to me and said,

"you've married your dad!"

because it's so similar to "Later...", it's just uncanny.

APPLAUSE

What an amazing coincidence that decades ago his television

show was devoted to folk, blues, world and alternative music

in front of a live audience, with the host sometimes joining in.

And if that wasn't enough of a coincidence,

he also made these records, Hootenannie!

-Hootenannie!

-AUDIENCE: Hootenannie!

But the big difference is I play the piano and

he played the guitar, and he played it in a beautiful, distinctive way.

MUSIC: Send For The Doctor by Doc Pomus

Rory didn't play like a white man trying to play the blues, he had

his own particular, very convincing, confident kind of style of playing.

# Ding-a-ling, ding-a-ling #

# Ding-a-ling, ding-a-ling...#

No-one else was playing 12-string

and also it was very authentic and it was very close to erm...

how Leadbelly played, which was quite difficult.

People later on have used 12 strings

but it wasn't as elaborate as the way Rory played it.

He'd play it with finger picks and played everything.

If you had finger picks, they came from America,

they were called nationals.

I remember when I first got my finger picks, I slept in them!

The point about the 12 is that these double strings,

you get very big sound on each string.

So, almost as if each string is a chord.

Leadbelly said it should be played like the left hand of

a barrel house piano player, and Rory took off with this thing,

actually much more than Leadbelly did.

He was a very great showman.

He enjoyed it, you could see he enjoyed it.

At the height of Hullabaloo's success,

Rory made an extraordinary decision.

He walked away from television and the world of music.

He talked about it as if it was a painful decision,

like letting go of music.

But what he wanted to be doing was painting,

and just painting all day long.

I think that's where he felt he was at his most serious.

Other people could play music, other people could write,

but he had this unique brilliance about the way that he painted.

Rory's focus now turned to botanical painting, his first love.

Every morning he would get up early and he would go and paint.

It was like a sort of nine-to-five, I mean he just went to the

studio in the morning and came back in the evening.

Even if he was travelling,

he always worked a pretty decent day's work, sort of regardless.

He would just focus down and...and get into it

and I just remember it being extremely calm,

for several hours at a time.

When I first saw Rory's botanical paintings

I could barely believe it, they were just so incredible.

The life pulsating through the pictures was quite something.

Rory's depictions of flowers

and plants pay close attention to botanical detail.

But they're more than dry scientific illustrations.

The paintings have a life and luminosity about them.

Their beauty is breathtaking.

His botanical paintings,

though rigorous and accurate, and conforming

to those stern disciplines of the botanical artist, had a kind of zen

lift off, I thought.

I lived with them and I hung them on my walls,

and they spoke to me in a different way to other illustrative pictures.

They...I hung them beside works by Hockney and Kitaj

and Lucien Freud.

They sang together.

I only once saw him paint

because I don't think he particularly liked people watching

him painting, but he asked me up to his studio

and he was wearing spectacles

and he had these little paints and these tiny brushes, and this really detailed work.

It was so detailed you could barely see what he was actually doing as he did it.

It was like watching a watch-maker repairing a mechanism, you know

they're doing something but you don't know what it is,

doing these tiny little marks.

And with complete intensity of focus on the job.

It was kind of magic, really, watching him do it because of what came out.

Rory chose to paint on a material rarely used by modern artists,

vellum.

When I first discovered that Rory was painting on vellum, which

in my ignorance I didn't know what it was, but it turns out it's actually

calf skin. It helps to bring that living matter to life, in a way.

The way he's just captured the light and the drama in such a simple form.

Art is about questioning our presence in life,

and that's what Rory did.

He's curious, and that comes through in every brush stroke.

To paint on vellum, it's a very different technique

to painting on paper because the surface is very smooth

and the water colour sits on top. It doesn't sink in.

You have to use tiny little paintbrush marks

and very, very little water.

And this is called a dry-brush technique.

This means it takes a long time to build up the layers

and to make something look as magical as how Rory did in his work.

# Oh, I'm a country chappy and I'm serving in...#

Painting botanical art didn't mean life was quiet.

Married to Romana, with a growing family,

Rory's London home became THE hub of a giddy 1960s scene.

A million miles from the disciplines of his meticulous art.

Rory was definitely, like, the social, you know...

He would be out there inviting people back to Tregunter Road,

where our mother would be catering

for these sort of crowds of people who would be arriving.

Everything was changing.

Things were appearing every day, new artists, new musicians.

Most of them turned up in Tregunter Road.

They must have had a party a night.

To me, they were just dazzling.

You know, you go in there and first of all,

there would be a smattering of quite famous people,

a lot of very pretty girls.

There might be a Beatle or two wandering around.

-Bob Dylan was there.

-I met the Everly Brothers there.

It was so exciting in a way that afterwards, you thought,

"Was that John Lennon in the corner of the room?"

I remember going when Ravi Shankar had been playing

with George Harrison at the Festival Hall or somewhere.

Came back there after a party and suddenly sits down

and out comes the sitar and starts playing that.

The sitar was a completely new thing. We hadn't heard about it.

And we were absolutely in hushed awe.

That was how cool it was.

That was how accessible it was to people like Ravi Shankar

who never played at private concerts ever, but he did play for Rory.

I remember feeling slightly sort of embarrassed

because I thought they obviously don't like it

because they were all shaking their heads.

We used to give, um...hand things around

in our dressing gown and pyjamas.

-Did you...? I mean, I remember doing that.

-Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And I remember making a beeline for...

Because Princess Margaret was there and I was, like,

"Oh, it'll be obvious which one... She'll have a tiara

"and maybe wings."

And then saying, "Where is the Princess?"

Rory was completely at ease in the middle of all this.

Not at all frantic.

And looked like the sort of king of the party

because he looked so wonderful.

There was a sort of feeling of excitement and...

I mean, you did feel this really was

one of the good things about the '60s,

parties like this, and that you were very lucky to be there.

The '60s wasn't all about parties.

It was a time when art was changing, too.

Abstract, experimental and pop art were now all the rage.

Rory's friend, American pop artist Jim Dine,

was a major influence on Rory at this time.

I really believed that he was attracted to the fact that

in our culture, in American culture,

the kind I grew up in, or New York art-world culture,

one was able to express themselves

much more with free association.

He was very glamoured by New York.

He was glamoured by the big paintings, by the Met,

by the...by the sort of show time art.

And I think he really wanted to be there.

Because artists want to be seen, they want to make a name.

And he did want to be up there with big canvases and stuff.

And indeed, those New York poets who came over kind of thought,

"What's he doing painting flowers?"

You know, high-realist paintings.

I think they were almost embarrassed by it.

Spurred on to find a bigger, newer platform,

Rory began experimenting with sculpture.

Working with a range of materials, including glass and Perspex.

If you look seriously at the kind of mindset

that an artist like Rory was all about,

then it should be of no surprise to you

that he is also experimenting with the nature of light.

Because light is a way of explaining time passing.

I thought he was wasting his time

by going to fabricate these glass pieces.

I thought it was a complete waste of money and time.

And it really, really made me angry to see a waste like this.

But there's nothing you could tell him.

He wanted to be...a so-called modern artist.

So called.

So stupid, you know. So stupid.

# When I was barely...#

Rory also turned his hand to film-making,

following German sculptor and performance artist, Joseph Beuys,

as he completed a live action

on Rannoch Moor in the Scottish Highlands.

I think Joseph Beuys was very connected to the earth and the land

and something that they were appreciative of the same things.

I mean, they must have been to make that film.

LAUGHTER

Sculptures, films.

Rory did not want to be pigeon-holed

as a traditional botanical artist.

I think he was vulnerable.

Because I remember him talking about

his relationship with people like Jim Dine

and, um...and the American artists

who were painting very big paintings.

And I remember him saying, "It's just so great, the way they...

"Everything's so big in America

"and they can do these big paintings."

And there was a sort of sense of,

"I wish I could. I wish I could do that."

Rory's search for the new and the bold did pay off.

His paintings became more minimalist and more dramatic.

He now included fruit, vegetables and nature in decay.

Rory had that incredible capacity

to show the world in an onion.

And it carries with that all the kind of miraculous life

of all the plants in the world in the one thing.

The onion paintings are so beautiful.

I mean, when I look at those paintings, I don't see an onion,

I just see something...

You know, the paintings are really exquisite.

It's like a jewel, it's something really precious and amazing.

All painters, in a way, teach you how to look at the world.

And Rory's, by showing you the tiniest detail of a leaf,

was actually teaching you about life and death,

nature, colour,

the importance of everything around you.

He was getting better and better and better.

Finally coming to terms with this is what he was put on earth for.

It told what the plant was about,

rather than just...capturing it.

It-it-it... Not in an expressionist way,

but in a deeply human way.

And it was the best of Rory. Really the best.

In the late '70s, Rory was diagnosed with cancer.

He was 45.

It spurred him on to painting perhaps his greatest works.

The leaf paintings all have titles of places.

They don't identify the leaf.

Where he picked the leaf up is what was important.

I remember when he was ill,

that he had to walk very slowly.

And he said how he really enjoyed it

because he was seeing so much more.

These leaves, they're memento mori.

They're specific to a time and a place.

They're extremely powerful images

which meant a lot to him in his life.

It's like a map of his life.

All those paintings, all the places that he...

Our mother lived in East 61st Street,

that's, I think, where he met her.

By 1982, Rory's cancer returned

and he was told that his brain tumour was incurable.

All of his friends were pretty desperate when we knew he was ill

and he put a very good face on it

and he used to wear a wonderful turban to hide the operation

and whatever treatment he'd had

and carry on as though things were normal.

I think he was in extreme pain and he was listening to music.

Walkman cassette machines had just come out.

And he would listen to either opera, or Indian music, um...

as a way of dealing with it.

He couldn't play his guitar, he couldn't sing,

plus he was in a lot of pain.

Um...it was miserable.

And he said, you know, I remember trying to cheer him one day

and he just said, "It's just, you know, this is a very dark place."

# High upon Highlands and low upon Tay

# Bonny George Campbell...#

Well, I heard that he had left the house,

walked to South Kensington Tube station

and put himself under a train.

I was just completely devastated.

And, er...I still can't really cope with it.

I just, you know, I have to go somewhere else, really.

It's just terrifying.

I hardly could take it in.

Um...to me, it was gruesome.

He was such a gentle person

and the violence of his death

was such a sort of terrible conflict.

That has been something very hard to...

to sort of deal with in a lot of ways.

He would have been THE last person you would have thought that...

they would have been put in a position where

that was their only option.

And I think... I can only imagine how bad things must have been

for that to be the case.

# Home came his good horse

# But never came he. #

Rory was just 50 when he died.

But his story doesn't end there.

'Rory was, really, my mentor.

'And he taught me how to play the 12 string.

'I feel that I'm the sort of...

'One of the last practitioners of this Leadbelly style.'

# 18, 19, 20 years ago

# Took my gal to the country store... #

'And then when he died, he left me this Guild guitar,

'which is a beautiful 12 string, and I treasure it.'

# Whoa, Buck, and gee by the lamb

# Who made the back band Cunningham. #

So I never met my father-in-law, this extraordinary man, Rory McEwen.

He was the first to do so many things.

As Van Morrison said earlier,

he was instrumental in bringing the blues to Britain

and he was the first person to do what I do in television.

But would I give up my career in music and television as he did?

The answer is no.

Because even if I lived to be 1,000 years old, I could never,

ever paint as beautifully as he did.

And it is his paintings that are a fantastic legacy.

I hope you've got a sense of this incredibly-gifted man

and how he shared those gifts.

And I hope you've enjoyed his story.

# Candyman

# Candyman

# Candyman

# Candyman

# Candyman

# Candyman

# I'd do anything in this whole wide world to get my candyman home. #