Ralph McTell
One of the pioneers of American blues guitar-playing this side of the Atlantic, Ralph McTell has been a voice to be reckoned with on the UK folk scene for over four decades. An adopted child of US beatnik counterculture during the 1950s and 1960s, Ralph’s musical storytelling owes as much to Jack Kerouac and Woody Guthrie as it does to the black guitar legends that inspired him to strum the life out of an old ukulele and form a skiffle band before the age of 15.
Ralph is an artist nobody can escape hearing at least once in their lifetime. He has busked Parisian cinema queues, graced the Isle of Wight Festival with Hendrix and co, performed song England for the end credits of friend Billy Connolly’s World Tour of… shows, produced the music for Skol lager adverts and touched the life of any child of the 1980s by writing and performing all the songs for cult-classic Alphabet Zoo.
With traces of rock’n’roll, jazz and R&B nestled alongside the esoteric sounds of jug band, ragtime and bluegrass, Ralph’s is a unique talent and one which has not gone unnoticed. In 2002 he was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award for Songwriting at the BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards and is a former Melody Maker favourite, Ivor Novello winner as well as responsible for giving the world universal favourite ‘Streets of London’, which has to be up there with the most covered songs in history, having been imitated over 200 times. A surrogate son of Cornwall, McTell has the sands of the shoreline blowing in his soul and the sound of summer at his fingertips – a sound which is not to be missed at this year’s festival.
Links:
- Listen to the song ‘Streets of London’ and learn what inspired the lyrics
- 2003 interview with Ralph McTell
Video:
Streets of London
Ralph McTell interview
