blackiel7591@btinternet.com, Kent, England
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Although he's best known for his classic folk song 
staple "Streets of London," which first appeared on his 
Spiral Staircase album in 1969, Ralph McTell is a 
multi-dimensional guitarist and singer/songwriter who's 
influenced hundreds of folk singers in Great Britain, 
Europe and around the U.S. Fortunately, people in the 
U.S. and around Europe are beginning to connect to 
his vast body of excellent original work, and not just 
"Streets," which has been recorded more than 200 
times by artists as diverse as Bruce Springsteen, 
Aretha Franklin, and even the angry punk group 
Anti-Nowhere League, and is still McTell's most 
requested song.  McTell was raised in post-WWII 
London with his mother and a younger brother as 
Ralph May. His father left home when he was two. He 
began to show musical talent when he was seven, 
when he began playing harmonica. When skiffle 
bands became all the rage in England, Scotland and 
Ireland, McTell began playing ukulele and formed his 
first band. Later in his teens, he began playing guitar. 
At the College Jazz Club in London, McTell first heard 
Ramblin' Jack Elliott sing Jesse Fuller's "San Francisco 
Bay Blues." Elliott's performance proved to be a 
revelatory experience for the shy, young, 
impressionable McTell. He took his earliest cues from 
the great blues and folk singers: Elliott, Woody Guthrie, 
Leadbelly, Blind Boy Fuller, Blind Blake, Robert 
Johnson and Blind Willie McTell. He took his adopted 
last name from blues singer McTell, and his songwriting 
inspiration from the writings of Jack Kerouac and John 
Steinbeck. After a few years hanging around London, 
he took off to travel along the south coast of England 
and the rest of Europe, where he made his way around 
hitchhiking and busking. While busking around 
Europe, he met his wife Nanna; shortly thereafter, they 
had a son.  McTell tried a conventional career as a 
teacher, but continued playing the folk clubs around 
London. He began a long tenure at Les Cousins in the 
Soho section of London and there he began to make 
a name for himself. A music publisher was so 
impressed by McTell's early songs that he secured a 
recording deal for him. His first album, Eight Frames a 
Second, was released on the Transatlantic label in 
1968. With a gentle voice, superb guitar playing skills 
gleaned from his days as a ukulele player, and a level 
of modesty that showed through on stage, McTell 
began incorporating his own songs into his live shows, 
which were mostly blues in those days. By July 1969, 
McTell was booked at the Cambridge Folk Festival 
and in December of that year was headlining his first 
major London concert at Hornsey Town Hall. By May 
1970, McTell completely sold out the Royal Festival 
Hall and was booked to play the Isle of Wight Festival 
alongside Jimi Hendrix and Bob Dylan. He made his 
first U.S. tour in 1972 and returned to London to sell 
out the Royal Albert Hall in 1974, the first British solo 
act to accomplish such a feat in 14 years.  The third 
song he ever wrote, "Streets of London," was 
something he deliberately left off his debut album, but 
at a producer's insistence, he included it on his second 
album for Transatlantic, Spiral Staircase. After the song 
was re-recorded in 1974 as a single for 
Reprise/Warner Bros. it became a huge worldwide hit. 
The song reached number two on the British charts, 
and in Germany there were four different versions of 
the song on the charts at one point, three by McTell 
and one by a German singer.  The pressures of 
worldwide success temporarily became too much for 
the shy, reserved McTell, and in the spring of 1975, he 
announced his intention to quit touring and withdraw 
from the music business for a while. He came to the 
U.S., where he relaxed and wrote songs in relative 
anonymity for a year before going back to the U.K. to 
play a Christmas benefit concert in Belfast. He 
continued recording for Warner Bros. in the 1970s, 
releasing Right Side Up in 1976, Ralph, Albert and 
Sydney in 1977 and Slide Away the Screen in 1979. 
For most of the 1980s, he spent his time touring and 
working on a children's television show called 
Alphabet Zoo, which led the TV network to create a 
show especially for him, Tickle on the Tum, and both 
programs introduced McTell to new generations of 
fans.  In 1995 and 1996, McTell returned to the U.S. 
and performed a series of sold-out shows on the East 
Coast, and his visibility in the U.S. may have been 
helped along by Nanci Griffith's decision to record one 
of his songs, "From Clare to Here," on her Grammy 
winning Other Voices, Other Rooms album.  McTell's 
discography is very extensive and demonstrates his 
commitment to his craft as a songwriter. Though many 
of these albums are hard to locate, they're well worth 
seeking out, most originally recorded for Transatlantic, 
Reprise/Warner Brothers, or Mays.  In 1992, he 
recorded an ambitious project about the life and times 
of poet Dylan Thomas, The Boy With a Note, released 
on Leola Music; recently, the U.S. has seen the 
Stateside release of From Clare to Here (1996, a U.S. 
release of Silver Celebration) and Sand In Your Shoes 
(1998). Blue Skies Black Heroes appeared the 
following year.