As Far As I Can Tell by Ralph McTell, published by Leola Music Ltd, £12.99

ate last year, folk singer Ralph McTell sent a message to Bradford peace activists.

They had organised a concert for Palestinian International Medical Aid at Bradford Playhouse to raise money to help buy a cardiac bypass machine for Gaza.

McTell had given permission for his most famous composition, Streets Of London, to be sung to the words of Streets Of Gaza, performed by Bradford singer-songwriter and peace protester Karl Dallas.

His message was: “Keep singing and keep campaigning. I’ve given a few items to be auctioned at the concert, so I hope you’ll dig deep.”

A couple of years before, he had brought a concert of famous American songs – some by Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan – to the City Varieties in Leeds. He was last in Bradford in the mid-1990s when he played the Alhambra Studio.

Those songs were in the spirit of the rambling troubadour, an inclination which impelled Ralph May, as he was named, to hit the road as a young man.

Now in his mid-60s, Ralph McTell has brought out an autobiography covering his early life and his beginnings as a busking, guitar-playing folk singer who roamed France, Italy, Spain, Germany, Greece, Turkey and England. Those were the years when young men and women from suburban places thought nothing of hitch-hiking all over the world.

McTell’s meaty autobiography, bringing together two earlier volumes, also contains song lyrics, poems and fragments of letters – there is one to Woody Guthrie. It is also a biography of an age, an age of idealism and optimism that pervaded cities such as Bradford, Newcastle, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester and London.

Bradford artists such as David Hockney and Doug Binder, for example, left Bradford for London’s Royal College of Art and confidently made names for themselves in the wider world.

Ralph McTell had the same outlook. But for him, as for many, the age of idealism was shattered by the bullets that killed President John F Kennedy that November day in Dallas.

“It was like discovering there was no Santa Claus. Idealism could be blown away by an assassin’s bullet. Just as the civil rights marchers had been disposed of and union leaders in the States, now it seemed that even the President could be dispatched at the whim of a madman. The prospect was numbing,” he writes.

By August 1968, the world had become a different place. The smoke of burning cities, from Hanoi to Los Angeles to Paris, and the blood from broken bodies had displaced the summer of love.

In an interview with the T&A in April, 2007, he explained that life as a young musician in the early Sixties was all about playing the music.

The music in clubs compensated for the “barren and bleak towns” where, apart from a few trendy coffee bars and clubs, there was hardly anywhere for youngsters to get off the street and, as he says, “hang out”. So he went on the road.

“Everything was different to the way it was at home. From the vehicles on the road to the taste of their coffee and cigarettes. Each corner threw up new sights and you could be anyone you wanted to be.”