Ralph McTell

Ralph McTell was born Ralph May in Farnborough in 1944, and he found his voice by listening across the Atlantic. He patterned his guitar playing on the American country blues pickers of the early 20th century, Blind Blake, Robert Johnson and Blind Willie McTell among them, and it was a friend who suggested he borrow that last one's surname for the stage. He can handle a piano and a harmonica too, but the guitar is the heart of it.

His first album came out in 1968 and won him a following on the folk circuit, and Spiral Staircase, released on Transatlantic Records in 1969, gave him "Streets of London", the song that became the one everyone knows him for. A small army of artists around the world have covered it since, and a new recording in 1974 took it to No. 2 on the UK Singles Chart, the biggest hit of his career.

Later, in the 1980s, children's television came calling: he supplied the songs and the playing for Alphabet Zoo and then Tickle on the Tum, and he recorded the theme to Cosgrove Hall's The Wind in the Willows.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.