- Original name:
- Amos Wells Blackmore
Junior Wells
Junior Wells (born December 9, 1934, Memphis, Tennessee, U.S.—died January 15, 1998, Chicago, Illinois) was an American blues singer and harmonica player and one of the musicians who introduced electric Chicago blues to international audiences. From 1965, he was one of the most popular of all blues performers.
The son of an Arkansas sharecropper, he moved in 1946 with his mother to Chicago. At age 18, Wells replaced Little Walter as harmonica player in the city’s finest blues band, fronted by Muddy Waters, and led his own first recording session. Wells went on to success as a Chicago entertainer. He had an early 1960s hit record Messin’ with the Kid, and an extended engagement at the Chicago nightclub Theresa’s. In 1965 he recorded one of the first Chicago blues albums, the popular Hoodoo Man Blues, accompanied by guitarist Buddy Guy. The next year Wells and Guy toured Europe. The pair subsequently made numerous recordings and played in many concert tours in the 1960s and ’70s, including as the opening act for the Rolling Stones.
Wells was noted for his elegant attire and his grand, energetic manner, both in his many performances with Guy and with the bands he led on his own. He selected his repertoire from senior bluesmen, including harmonica players Junior Parker and the first Sonny Boy (John Lee) Williamson, who had influenced him. Both his singing and playing were uniquely dramatic and intense, being punctuated with shouts, sexual moans, and humorous asides. Wells’s 1996 album, Come On in This House, won a W.C. Handy Blues Award. Before his final illness from cancer he appeared in the movie Blues Brothers 2000; days before his death his 1997 album, Live at Buddy Guy’s Legends, was nominated for a Grammy Award.
Wells was posthumously inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame in 1998. In 2012 the U.S. Library of Congress added Hoodoo Man Blues to the National Recording Registry, a list of audio recordings deemed “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.”