ERIC Burdon once said that the first time he heard House of the Rising Sun, it was being sung in a Newcastle club by the then young Northumbrian folk singer Johnny Handle.

During the same period, in the early 1960s, one Luke Kelly was working as a porter in Newcastle and going along to the folk club established by Handle in the city’s Bridge tavern. Kelly later said he “went home and founded the Dubliners”.

And Tynedale’s own Mike Tickell, who subsequently became good friends with Handle, said hearing a radio show in 1962 that included Handle singing one of his own songs, The Collier Lad, was a seminal moment for him.

As Tickell told Ovingham musician and latterly author Pete Wood, his father had been a miner, but this was the first mining song he’d heard. “It seemed to free something up,” said Tickell.

“His songwriting came from direct experience. He uses people and places just like the ballads.”

While Handle, a one-time miner and later founder of The High Level Ranters, went on to produce 132 songs and 317 tunes – a running total that’s probably still moving – Tickell, now a well known folk singer in his own right, went on to produce internationally acclaimed Northumbrian piper Kathryn Tickell and then the rising star that is Peter Tickell, a fiddler now travelling the world with Sting.

Pete Wood, for one, thought a biography of the man widely regarded as the most important folk musician in the North-East was long overdue.

“I couldn’t believe nobody else had done it,” he said. “There are much better writers than me around, but I just felt the story had to be told.”

Johnny Handle: Life and Soul was duly self-published this summer. And let me contradict the unassuming author right now – for he has produced a smashing read.

More than that, he has written a book that is bigger than the sum of its parts. This is not only a biography of Handle, but an important social history of the people and the folk music that have characterised Newcastle and the Tyne Valley during the past 50 years.

Handle was born in Wallsend in 1935 and his early years were spent in Walker, on the outskirts of Newcastle, surrounded by the pits and the industry that have informed so much of his music.

However, the Second World War brought him to the Tyne Valley when his father, a teacher, moved with his pupils being evacuated to the makeshift school set up for them in Beaufront Castle, visible from the A69 midway between Hexham and Corbridge.

Johnny stayed with his mum in a cottage half-a-mile away and attended the local school at Beaufront, rather than the evacuee school.

The sights and people he came across during the four or five years he was there have stayed with him ever since.

Pete writes: “He remembers the headmistress, a formidable woman who deigned to visit the cottage for cucumber sandwiches to make the arrangements.

“It was at this school that he heard the bus to Morpeth, a mile away, grinding the gears as it struggled up Oakwood Bank.

“This was much later commemorated by fellow songwriter Terry Conway in his hilarious eponymous song.”

A thorough biography that follows every meander and occasional right-hand turn in Handle’s life, we learn about the jazz years (during which he balked at the lack of structure in modern jazz) and the ‘early folk club’ years that superseded them, between 1958 and 1965, when many of the folk that people this story first began to appear – Ewan McColl, Martin Carthy, Alistair Anderson, Ray Laidlaw, John Doonan, Benny Graham and Christine Hendry among them.

And the names of some of their bands start to resonate: Lindisfarne, the Doonan Family Band and, the one that cemented Handle’s own reputation, The High Level Ranters.

A succession of successful albums – not least the third one, Keep Your Feet Still Geordie Hinnie – and a series of concerts at Newcastle City Hall brought the Ranters’ national recognition.

Brimming with anecdotes that will take the reader down memory lane, up the Tyne Valley and across the region, Johnny Handle: Life and Soul is Pete’s third book.

The first two were The Elliotts of Birtley and The Green Linnet: Napoleonic Songs from the French Wars to the present day.

All three are available from www.petewood.co.uk

Johnny Handle himself will be giving a concert at Hexham’s Queen’s Hall on Thursday, October 5.