O. Jenkins Ralph McTell

Every Album, Every Song
1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-78952-490-1
Verlag: Sonicbond Publishing
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 160 Seiten

Reihe: On Track

Best known for his international hit' Streets Of London', Ralph McTell has recorded over 300 songs in a career that spans more than 50 years. Due to his considerable melodic and lyrical gifts, a good many of McTell's compositions surpass 'Streets' in quality and have won him the admiration of fans and critics alike.
Heavily influenced by Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan and dozens of American country-blues artists, McTell eventually found his own voice. Distinct themes emerge in his works, including compassion, optimism, fathers and sons and the struggles faced by musicians and other artists who portray not just what life is but how it feels. While his soothing voice and delicate guitar skills make his songs enjoyable to so many, McTell tempers such grace with a definite edge. Many of his best works are protest songs.
A portrait painter, McTell's canon is populated by dozens of memorable figures that spring both from his experiences and his imagination. Yet, upon listening to his recordings, perhaps the most fascinating character that emerges is McTell himself. In this album-by-album, track-by-track review of his career, readers meet both the man and the musician as the elements of his craft are explored.

Professor Paul O. Jenkins is the University Librarian at Franklin Pierce University (New Hampshire, USA). He is the author of three books and served as the co-editor of Teaching The Beatles (Routledge, 2018). Besides writing liner notes for Ralph McTell's 2006 box set The Journey, Jenkins recently published a detailed examination of John Prine's songs in Popular Music And Society. He believes that human emotions can most effectively be shared and explored through the medium of music.

Autoren/Hrsg.

O. Jenkins, Paul

Leseproben

Chapter 1

From Croydon to Here: Significant Dates in the Life and Career of Ralph McTell

We know a great deal about Ralph McTell. He has written two volumes of his autobiography (Angel Laughter and Summer Lightning), released a three-CD set (As Far As I Can Tell) of recordings from talks based on those volumes, given numerous candid interviews and was the subject of an excellent study (Streets Of London: The Official Biography Of Ralph McTell) by Chris Hockenhull in 1997. While it goes without saying that every artist draws on their life experiences for material, McTell’s work is so heavily informed by events in his life that it is useful here to include a condensed overview of the man and his career. In Summer Lightning, McTell writes: ‘Most of my songwriting is autobiographical. The incidents described in them have become songs because it has been possible to contain the poetry or symmetry within the confines of the song format’.

1944: Ralph May (he will later take the stage name of McTell) was born on 3 December in Farnborough, Kent. May’s father, Frank, named his son after his one-time employer, Ralph Vaughan Williams. Before the war, Frank worked in domestic service, first as a chauffeur and later as a gardener, before becoming a car mechanic once he left the army. Ralph’s mother, Winifred Iris Moss, was also in the service and was 28 when her son was born.

1946: McTell’s brother, Bruce May, was born. He would play an important role in McTell’s career, serving as his manager for many years.

1947: McTell’s father abandoned his family to live with another woman. In shock, Winifred struggled to hold her young family together, scrubbing doorsteps and taking in ironing to make ends meet. Eventually, the family settled in Croydon, a borough of London, and moved into a damp basement apartment. McTell’s mother later found work in a chemist’s shop.

1949: In February, McTell suffered life-threatening wounds, hit by flying glass, when a drunken lorry driver drove into a shop window near the pavement where McTell and a friend were looking into a sweetshop window. He spent 15 weeks in the hospital, often attended by an Irish nurse named Mary. Upon his release, he convalesced with his grandparents in rural Brackley (Oxfordshire).

Circa 1950: McTell saw his father for the last time. It was another traumatic incident in his life and he recalled it vividly. He flew into a rage, vowing to take care of his mother. McTell (Angel Laughter, 45): ‘Suddenly I burst out with a string of invective that stopped both my parents in their tracks and they just turned and stared at me’. McTell (Hockenhull, 9): ‘The feeling of needing a father figure to look up to stayed very close to me until my late teens’. McTell eventually found such a man in his upstairs neighbour, Kevin Connaughton, whom he would later pay tribute to in song.

1951: McTell began playing harmonica after receiving the instrument from Kennards, a department store in Croydon. McTell was a popular child, full of invention and high spirits despite the challenges with which he had been presented.

1952: On 2 November, 16-year-old Christopher Craig shot and killed a police officer in Croydon. His accomplice, Derek Bentley, was later executed for the crime. The injustice of Bentley’s death stayed with McTell his entire life and prompted him to portray the incident in song years later.

1957: Frank May was electrocuted in an accident. Despite his anger at his father, young McTell was devastated. McTell (Grenfell, 81): ‘I just could not cope. But I also could not cope because I always nurtured the thought that I would get to see my dad one day and find out what went wrong’. The May family moved house to 17a Miller Road. McTell enrolled in the John Ruskin Grammar School to prepare for the eventual admission to university. He was terribly unhappy there, however, feeling ‘outclassed’ by his more affluent peers and talked his way into being demoted from form 3U to the less stressful 2W. He learned to play the ukulele and formed his first band, whose repertoire included songs by Lonnie Donegan and Buddy Holly.

1960: Unhappy at school and hoping to finally ‘belong to something with a structure to it’, McTell decided to join the Junior Leaders Battalion of the Queen’s Surrey regiment. He was miserable in service, though, and after six months, borrowed £50 from his mother so she could ‘buy him out’. As part of the arrangement, McTell resumed his schooling at Croydon Technical College, promising to pursue some O-levels, but his heart was not in it. He eventually received an A level in Art. In a move that would change his life forever, he took up the guitar. His inspiration was an EP by Ramblin’ Jack Elliott called Muleskinners that included a cover of Jesse Fuller’s ‘San Francisco Bay Blues’. Dozens of American country blues artists soon began to crowd his imagination. His first guitar, acquired from Kennards, was barely playable, but its promise was still seductive.

1960-1965: McTell’s years of wandering and apprenticeship. At Croydon Technical College, he met like-minded students and embraced Beatnik culture. McTell began to learn the guitar in earnest with the help of Max Faulkner. Weekend trips to music festivals became frequent, and he started to seriously consider a career as a performer. He sharpened his craft by briefly joining the Hickory Nuts, an English bluegrass band that featured Pete Chalkey on banjo, Ray Tassey on mandolin, and Mick Lewis on double bass, before making a tentative start as a solo performer. Still shy and lacking confidence, he was helped greatly by Wizz Jones, an established and respected folk artist. In 1961, he visited the continent for the first time, busking in Munich and Paris. McTell also embarked on his first serious romantic relationship and the couple travelled to Spain together. He hitchhiked throughout Europe, visiting Belgium, Italy, Germany, Greece and Turkey with a succession of friends and musical mentors, including an American, Gary Petersen, who notably improved the young performer’s guitar techniques and helped him expand his repertoire. While in Paris in 1965, McTell met and quickly fell in love with Nanna Stein, a Norwegian woman working there as an au pair.

1966: McTell returned to England after a lengthy spell in Paris and considered moving to America. Upon learning that Nanna was pregnant, the couple married in Norway on 30 November. They subsequently moved in with McTell’s mother in Croydon, before relocating to Cornwall. McTell was now writing his own songs and briefly joined a jug band fronted by Michael Bartlett, aka Henry VIII. McTell then began to tour (mainly in Cornwall) with Wizz Jones. Upon seeing his name paired with Jones’ on posters advertising their gigs, the young performer felt it didn’t sound quite right. He would prefer a last name that included two syllables. He had long delighted in the music of the blues performer Blind Willie McTell and suggested rechristening himself as a performer by the name of Ralph McTell. Jones concurred, and the stage name was thereafter used. Some of McTell’s live performances from this period are included in his box set, The Journey, released in 2006. On stage, McTell now included some original compositions to augment the folk and blues covers that still dominated his set lists.

1967: McTell and his wife moved back to London with their son, Sam, born on 21 January. McTell was still undecided as to his eventual career choice. He studied for a year at a teacher training college in Tooting before finally deciding to become a full-time performer. He became a fixture at Les Cousins in Soho, joined Essex Music as a house writer and soon signed a recording contract with Transatlantic, the then-top UK folk label under the direction of Nat Joseph.

1968: McTell’s first LP, Eight Frames A Second, was released to favourable reviews. He met double bass player Danny Thompson, who would become a staple on future recordings. Bruce May became his older brother’s manager.

1969: McTell’s second album, Spiral Staircase, was released. Producer Gus Dudgeon, convinced a reluctant McTell to include a track he had been working on since 1966. It was called ‘Streets of London’. On 24 August, McTell performed the song on BBC’s ‘Country Meets Folk’ program. Hundreds of listeners called in to learn the identity of its performer. Later the same year, McTell’s third album, My Side Of Your Window, appeared. Its strongest track was ‘Michael in the Garden’, loosely based on Nanna’s autistic brother, Olebjorn.

1970: McTell’s star continued to rise. His live performances attracted the attention of ambitious American entrepreneur Jo Lustig, who became the young performer’s new manager. Due to his increasing reputation as a composer, McTell was now known more as a singer-songwriter than simply as a ‘folkie’ and Lustig felt eager to introduce his star to a larger audience. McTell was immediately apprehensive about such a move, presciently stating (Hockenhull 54): ‘I don’t want to be a big star, because I’d end up a nervous wreck; I’m much happier playing in the more intimate and friendly atmosphere of a small club’. Emblematic of his growing stature was McTell’s performance on 30 August at the three-day...