My Vinyl Collection 189
Junior Wells, Kitty Wells, Mary Wells. Three gems from the sixties. Blues, country and soul. Music history from the shelves, Vinyl, 33 rpm.
1252. Junior Wells’ Chicago Blues Band, Hoodoo Man Blues (1965)
By the time he was 12 years old, Junior Wells already knew how to handle blues harmonica. That was the year, 1946, his family moved from Memphis to Chicago, where he grew into a tough cat. Working his music through a tough scene. In 1952, he managed to grab the open slot when Little Walter left Muddy Waters’ band. Up on stage with Muddy, Junior deployed his blazing blues harp and from there rolled and rocked all way until his death in 1997.
In Chicago, he’d been listening to a lot of Sonny Boy Williamson on the radio by the time he met Muddy and was a close fit during Waters’ rise. Sonny Boy’s “Hoodoo Man Blues,'' became Junior’s first signature.
In 1957, Wells went solo and signed up with a producer who tried to sell Junior’s records with the overcharged, animated vocals like he delivered on stage. But that act didn’t work in the studio and Junior moved to the unconventional confines of Delmark Records..
There Junior cut his all-time LP in 1965. Hoodoo Man Blues finds the feel of the typical Wells set at Theresa's Lounge on the South Side, where “taverness extraordinaire” Theresa Needham provided Junior and a young guitar player named Buddy Guy a place to find their sound, a style at the very core of the Chicago blues.
Buddy was billed as "Friendly Chap" on the LP because he was still under contract with Chess Records. Delmark was freedom for Guy as well as Junior under ownwer/producer Bob Koestler. With Buddy running out a clean lead guitar, Junior laid down killer versions of "Snatch It Back and Hold It," "You Don't Love Me," and "Chitlin' con Carne."
While he didn’t sell millions to the masses, Junior’s records were gobbled up by rock musicians and the band blitzed San Francisco psychedelic circles with the urban blues at the Fillmore. He and Guy made a State Department tour of East Africa. In 1970, the band toured with Canned Heat and the Rolling Stones.
Indeed, The Buddy Guy-Junior Wells Blues Band ate up the blues circuit until the band broke up in 1978.
Wells kept his gallop up for another 20 years. In 1997 he made his last bounce, Come On In This House, which won a W.C. Handy for Traditional Blues Album. He was felled by lymphatic cancer just that year.
He’d performed in New York City at a benefit to cover funeral costs for a recently-deceased friend, the guitarist Johnny Copeland. Wells collapsed the next day in Buffalo and passed away a few months later.
’'When I was starting, everyone said, 'A young man like you ought to be playing jazz.’ But the blues is my life and I'm stuck with it.’'
Junior Wells was 63.
1253. Kitty Wells with The Jordanaires, Queen of Country Music (1963)
Ellen Muriel Deason, b. 1919, was one of six children raised by Charlie and Myrtle Deason in Nashville. Charlie was a brakeman for the Tennessee Central who played guitar. Myrtle was a gospel singer. At 16, Muriel sang with her sisters on the radio. 1936.
At 18, Wells got married. Good man, a cabinet maker. Johnnie Wright, Mr. Wright. Looked like the usual, but these two aspired to country music. And they became Johnnie & Jack. They are married for 70 years. That’s not a typo. Seventy years.
As Kitty Wells solo she was said to be past her prime at age 33 in 1952 when she went into the studio for what people said would be her last record. She’d decided it was Johnnie who would be the star in their household. One more record for the $125 union scale and that would be it. Wouldn’t hurt.
Of course, the record she cut wasn’t your usual ditty. Why not? Nothing to hold back on that last record.
The song was a song she found to be unusually honest, “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels,” a song that poked a hole in the fifties notions about the power of men who strayed and the feelings of women with whom they strayed.
“Angels” was a response to Hank Thompson’s “The Wild Side of Life,” where the woman gets all the blame for trouble at the honky tonk. Wells replied, Too many times married men think they’re still single/ That has caused many a good girl to go wrong. No. 1 six weeks in 1952, the first in a line of hits that went all the way to 1979. She put 81 records on the Country charts 35 Top 10. “Angels” sold more than a million.
The sales, the sentiment, and the woman singing the snappy words opened the gates for Patsy Cline, Loretta Lynn, Tammy Wynette, Dolly Parton, Emmylou Harris, Shania Twain, the Dixie Chicks, Taylor Swift, Miranda Lambert.
She died at home in Tennessee, 92 years old, in 2012. Johnnie Wright died at 97 in 2011.
1254. Mary Wells, Greatest Hits (1964)
Mary Wells had it tough, sang it tough and left behind a legacy longer than her short career. She contracted spinal meningitis at 2, was partially blind, deaf in one ear and partially paralyzed. Wells sang to hide her pain and by age 10 was performing at clubs in the Detroit area.
She pitched Barry Gordy at the Twenty Grand club while she was still a teen. Gordy signed her to his fledgling Motown subsidiary. “Bye Bye Baby” was released when she was when she was 17 in September 1960; No. 8 R&B in 1961 then a crossover at No. 45. That set the stage for “My Guy,” where a woman rejects the stud for her ordinary boyfriend. And where Wells leaves an exit solo for the ages, evoking Mae West in its husky sexiness. A sound as rare as West’s, dropped into a vacuum of females voices.
"My Guy" went No. 1 in the USA May 1964. It was her only No. 1. She decided to quit Motown for a $500,000 deal with a bigger label in L.A. after she turned 21. She never had another hit and never recovered from her move away from Detroit. She was caught in a cycle of oldies’ tours and short sellers for small labels, raising four children on dwindling royalties and miscellaneous merch sales. She died in 1992. Age 49.