Ralph McTell

Ralph McTell biography

Ralph McTell (born Ralph May in Farnborough, Kent, England, 3 December 1944 and raised in Croydon) is an English singer-songwriter and acoustic guitar player who has been an influential figure on the UK folk music scene since the 1960s.

Ralph McTell is best known for the song "Streets of London", which has been covered by over two hundred artists around the world. 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, featuring Jacqueline Reddin. Albums were also released from both series. He also recorded the theme song to Cosgrove Hall's adaptation of The Wind in the Willows with Keith Hopwood, and this was released as a single in 1984 after the series was aired on ITV.

McTell's guitar playing has been modelled on the style of the US's 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 that he change his professional name to McTell as his career was beginning to take shape.

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 December 3, 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 demobilized, 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." 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 would figure 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. "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, 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." Many years later, McTell expressed that sense of injustice in the song "Bentley & Craig".

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