Ralph McTell

Ralph McTell (born Ralph May, 3 December 1944) is an English singer-songwriter and acoustic guitar player who has been an influential figure on the UK folk music scene since the 1960s. McTell is best known for his song " Streets of London" (1969), which has been covered by over two hundred artists around the world.

McTell modelled his guitar style on American country blues guitar players of the early 20th century, including Blind Blake, Robert Johnson and Blind Willie McTell. These influences led a friend to suggest his professional surname.Hockenhull, p. 40. An accomplished performer on piano and harmonica as well as guitar, McTell issued his first album in 1968 and found acclaim on the folk circuit. He reached his greatest commercial success in 1974 when a new recording of "Streets of London" became a No. 2 hit on the UK Singles Chart. Other notable compositions include "From Clare to Here", a ballad about Irish emigration. In the 1980s, he wrote and played songs for two TV children's programmes, ''Alphabet Zoo'', which also featured Nerys Hughes, followed by ''Tickle on the Tum'',Hockenhull, p. 109. featuring Jaqui Reddin. He also recorded Keith Hopwood's and Malcolm Rowe's theme song to Cosgrove Hall's adaptation of ''The Wind in the Willows''.

Biography

McTell's mother, Winifred (née Moss), was born in Hammersmith, London. During the Second World War she was living in Banbury, Oxfordshire, with her sister Olive when she met Frank May. They married in 1943 while Frank was home on leave from the army. Winifred moved to Croydon, Surrey, and McTell was born on 3 December 1944 in Farnborough, Kent. He was named after Ralph Vaughan Williams – Frank had worked as the composer's gardener before the war. A second son, Bruce, was born in 1946. Frank was demobilised, but after a year or so at home, he walked out on his family in 1947.

Winifred was left to support herself and bring up the boys unaided. She told McTell's biographer, "I remember Ralph saying to me quite soon after Frank left us, 'I'll look after you, Mummy'. I guess he'd got used to Frank being away all his short life."Hockenhull, p. 9. But despite their father's desertion and the consequent poverty, Ralph and Bruce May had a happy and fulfilled childhood in Croydon.

McTell's love of music surfaced early. He was given a plastic mouth organ and his grandfather, who played the harmonica, taught and encouraged him. The brothers spent many contented summer holidays at Banbury with their uncle and aunt and their grandparents. Banbury and north Oxfordshire figured throughout McTell's life. Later, he recalled those childhood summers in his song "Barges".

Influences

Other childhood experiences shaped McTell's songwriting. A young Irishman and his family were the Mays' upstairs neighbours. Needing a father figure, McTell greatly valued the young man's friendship, which later inspired the song "Mr. Connaughton". Similarly, "Mrs. Adlam's Angels" recalls his Sunday school teacher: "I loved the ceremonial and the music," he says, "you can hear the influence of hymn tunes in my song structures."

In 1952, two youths attempted to break into a Croydon warehouse: one, Derek Bentley, surrendered to the police but the other, sixteen-year-old Christopher Craig, shot and killed a police officer. Yet at the trial, Bentley was sentenced to death. "My mum knew the Bentleys," McTell recalls. "I was about eight, but even then I could see the horror and injustice of executing a teenager for a murder he didn't commit."Farquarson, "Streets Ahead". Many years later, McTell expressed that sense of injustice in the song "Bentley & Craig".

Teens

After passing his 11-plus school examination, McTell attended the John Ruskin Grammar School. He hated his time there, and despite being a very bright pupil, he did not do well academically. Many of his fellow pupils were from wealthier backgrounds, and though having many school friends, he felt he didn't fit in.

Musically, his tastes tended towards being an outsider as well. He was captivated by skiffle and American rock'n'roll. Acquiring an old ukulele and a copy of ''The George Formby Method'', he played his first chord. He later recalled, "I was thunderstruck – it was like magic!" Soon, he mastered skiffle classics such as "Don't You Rock Me, Daddy-O", and by his second year at school, he formed a skiffle band.

By the age of 15, McTell was very anxious to leave grammar school and the British Army looked like a way out, so in 1959 he enlisted in the Junior Leaders Battalion of The Queen's Surrey Regiment. Army life proved far worse than school. After six months, he bought himself out and resumed his education at technical college, passing several O level exams and an A level exam in art.

In 1963, McTell was working on a building site, and it is of this time that he wrote, in the mid-1970s, "From Clare to Here". "There was an Irish gang on the site, and the ''craic'', as they call it, relieved the stress of the hard work. I was working with an Irishman called Michael, as so many of them are. And I said to him, 'It must be very strange to be here in London after the place you come from.' And he responded by saying, 'Yes, it's a long way from Clare to here.'"

Discovering African American music

At college, McTell became interested in the beatnik culture that flourished in the 1950s and early 1960s. Besides reading the works of writers such as Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, he discovered African American music – jazz, blues and R&B. Inspired by musicians such as Jesse Fuller, Ramblin' Jack Elliott, Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters, he bought a guitar and practiced assiduously.

He and a group of like-minded friends became habitués of London's Soho jazz clubs and regularly went down to Brighton to "...sit on the beach looking windswept and interesting," as McTell put it. Soon he was spending much of his time away from Croydon, supporting himself with temporary work in factories, laundries and hotels.

During his travels, McTell met musicians who were destined to remain lifelong friends, among them Jacqui McShee (later to gain fame in the band Pentangle), Martin Carthy and Wizz Jones. He was persuaded to join a bluegrass-influenced band called the Hickory Nuts, who performed all over England and, despite playing in some dire places for pin money early on, ended up with decent fees and respectable crowds in venues such as Croydon's Fairfield Halls.

Busking

By now, McTell had begun travelling abroad, busking around Europe with his guitar. He spent time in France and visited Belgium and Germany. Other trips took him to Italy and through Yugoslavia ("I felt a madness there, even then") to Greece.

Paris was a city that McTell revisited frequently. Late in 1965 he and a friend from Croydon took a room in a cheap hotel on the Left Bank, earning their rent by busking cinema queues. After braving a bitterly cold Paris winter, McTell met a young American, Gary Petersen, who had studied with the legendary guitarist Reverend Gary Davis. "There was a great anticipation every time I got to play with (Petersen)", McTell recalled. "Each time I learned something new, and through him I learned how to play ragtime properly."

In 1966, McTell met another émigré to Paris, a student from Norway named Nanna Stein. The pair soon became inseparable. Back in England, they lived in a caravan in Cornwall. McTell and Wizz Jones were regular performers on the Cornish circuit, especially at The Folk Cottage in Mitchell. It was Jones who suggested the stage name "McTell", "after Blind Willie McTell, whose 'Statesboro Blues' we both loved".

Cornwall captured McTell's heart – a place whose "unique spirit got to me" – and the county has always remained a place for him to retreat to. By the end of 1966, he and Stein were expecting their first child. They married on 30 November in Norway and returned to live in Croydon with Winifred. Their son, Sam, was born on 21 January 1967.

After an unrewarding spell at teacher training college, McTell decided he had to try to make it full-time in music. As well as his vocal and instrumental talents, he was developing as a songwriter and was in demand in folk clubs and festivals.

Record deal

During 1967, McTell landed a deal with Transatlantic Records and by the end of the year was recording his first album. Arranged by Tony Visconti and produced by Gus Dudgeon, the album, '' Eight Frames a Second'', was released early in 1968. It came to the attention of the BBC
...