Mike "Lightnin'" Wells grew up in eastern North Carolina, a farming region known for its endless fields of tobacco, cotton, corn and other crops. From a young age Wells chose to plow a different kind of furrow, one that has driven him to dig deeply into the roots of American music. At age ten he learned to play harmonica. He took up guitar at fifteen. Eventually he mastered the banjo and ukulele as well. All the while he was on a mission to learn all he could about roots music. While still in high school he doggedly tracked down albums by Woody Guthrie, Howlin' Wolf and Dock Boggs and began hunting for old 78s.
To say Wells was precocious in his pursuit of American music at its most authentic is an understatement. His passion for pre-World War II music forms -- including various styles of acoustic blues, Appalachian folk, jug and string-band music, even ukulele pop tunes from the 1920s -- led to a lifelong career as a roots-music preserver, performer, producer and educator. He began playing as a solo artist in local clubs in the early 1970s while attending the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. More than fifty years later Lightnin' Wells is still going strong. His music has taken him to stages and festivals all over the U.S. and Europe. He has also recorded seven albums.
A Lightnin' Wells concert is a highly entertaining program of songs and styles by an expert musician with a feel for the timeless spirit of the music and its creators. As fellow musician and journalist Paul Brown noted, "When you hear him, you hear the old Piedmont blues players speaking through him. You hear ragtime, early jazz, old-time banjo songs... More than anything, you hear something that's sincere and real." Writing in Spectator magazine, Bob Burtman called Lightnin' "a veritable bottomless pit of songs and techniques. Wells should be declared a state resource." He is indeed a cultural treasure that should make North Carolinians proud of their musical heritage.
Wells has been playing roots music for so long he's caught up short when asked what appealed to him about these older styles as a young man. "I don't know," he says. "I've been doing it for so long I'd have to think about it." His inability to answer is an answer in itself. In essence, the music has become so ingrained in his being that it's hard for him to recall a time when it wasn't. In advance of his show in Greensboro on Sunday, I talked to Wells by phone from his home in Fountain, N.C. Our conversation appears below.
P: You got into a lot of older music at a young age. How did you acquire a taste for roots music so early in life?
LW: My first instrument was harmonica. I began playing that when I was ten years old. Then I got into a little rock and roll band called the Unknowns in 1965. I was in junior high, and I sang and played harmonica and tambourine. We did British Invasion stuff. This was in Goldsboro, North Carolina, and the kids didn't like it because they wanted to hear beach music. When they broke up, I taught myself guitar at about age fifteen. I was into folk music, early Dylan, heard all those things. I learned a whole bunch of stuff and then began going backwards from Dylan. He kept talking about Woody Guthrie, and I thought, "I've got to hear Woody Guthrie." And he was a shock, 'cause he was so raw. That was hillbilly music. I started loving that, started playing that. And then I'd say, "Hmmm, what's Woody Guthrie into?" Leadbelly, Sonny Terry. I'd keep on going backwards. Then I'd seek out the records. Made a trip to Raleigh to the Record Bar. On a school trip to New York City I went to Sam Goody's, and I remember coming back with an Uncle Dave Macon album, a Howlin' Wolf album and one by Dock Boggs. So I got into things like that. Another name would come up and I'd go, "I gotta hear Blind Lemon Jefferson." And he was a shock. It was not what I expected. A real biggie was Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music. That set me on a path to the real hardcore stuff. I was driven to that, and it kind of shaped my taste. I was a pretty hardcore folkie. In fact, the first time I heard Western swing I didn't like it. You know, "It sounds like big band music." It took me awhile. When I first heard bluegrass, I didn't like that too much, either. Took me awhile, but I broadened from that.
P: I'm fascinated that you were making these roots music discoveries on your own as a high school student in rural eastern North Carolina.
LW: There were a couple of guys I could talk to about it, but that was it. I was pretty much on my own. I didn't have anyone showing me anything musically.
P: What grabbed you? What touched you and made you want to dig into all this older music?
LW: (pauses) Why did I like that? I don't know. I just remember I'd just come home from school every day and play guitar a lot. Learning my first fingerpicking, which was "Spike Driver's Blues," by Mississippi John Hurt. It had one chord. (He hums an arpeggiated G chord.) It was like patting your head and rubbing your stomach (laughs). I was just doing it over and over until I had it down.
P: You mentioned hunting for roots music albums on trips to Raleigh and New York, which was pretty precocious for a kid to be doing in the late Sixties. At that time, the typical teenager was getting into Jimi Hendrix, Cream, Iron Butterfly and the Beatles' latest tangent. You were moving in the other direction.
LW: I was finding 78 rpm records then, too. They were easy to find. You could find 'em for a quarter. North Carolina was a hotbed for string-band music and all the hillbilly stuff. A guy who was into rock and roll gave me his dad's collection of 78s. I know he was sorry later, 'cause it had records by Gid Tanner and all that stuff. So that started my collection, which I've been doing ever since. I found an old 78 about six months ago in Greensboro. It's on the O'Henry label. There used to be a studio in the basement of the old O'Henry Hotel and they had a small label.
P: What is your most treasured 78? Have you ever come across one by Robert Johnson?
LW: No, but this is close. There's a guy named Sam Collins. I found a mint copy of one of his slide guitar gospel records at the Raleigh fairground for 75 cents. I met Gayle Dean Wardlow, who is one of the biggest blues 78 collectors in the world. He's from Meridian, MS, but I met him in Greensboro. He lived there briefly in the late 80s, when he taught at A&T. Of course, if you have a record like that you wanna tell somebody. Wardlow wanted that record so bad he courted me for two years! He offered me a Robert Johnson for it. I settled for a Gary Davis 78, a Blind Blake 78 and his old copy of the Sam Collins 78. I did a nice trade. That was probably my most prized record, but I have his old copy, so I still have it.
P: Have you ever gotten into selling records or thought about it?
LW: I was thinking about that. I used to want to archive it with the Southern Folklife Collection at UNC. And then I changed my mind. All that stuff sits there in boxes, and I'd rather get it into the hands of collectors who love it and play it. And I could make some money. I haven't had the heart to do it yet, but I've been thinking about it. So gradually, this started during COVID, I've been digitizing my 78 collection.
P: You're known as an acoustic musician. Have you ever owned an electric guitar?
LW: For a little while I was playing with an electric band that played Chicago blues. I was singing and playing harmonica. Then I got a really cheap Silvertone guitar with a lipstick-tube pickup and put heavy-gauge strings on it so I could play slide, do some Elmore James, stuff like that. Not so much anymore. White blues bands were kind of a dime a dozen. We never made more than a hundred dollars each, and we'd play at some sports bar or something. There was nowhere to go with it.
P: Have you ever gotten to meet any of your heroes?
LW: Oh yeah. During the time I was at Chapel Hill, I was taking some graduate-level folklore classes. They let me do that, and there was a guy from England named Bruce Bastin in my class. He was 30 years old and getting his doctorate. He was a blues specialist. I thought I knew something about blues, but he knew everything. He was bringing all these blues guys who were still alive to Chapel Hill as part of his doctorate. So at this same little bar I was playing at, the Endangered Species, he'd bring in Guitar Shorty, Peg Leg Sam, Henry Johnson. One of the greatest shows I ever saw was Willy Trice at Gerard Hall at UNC. He was a contemporary of Blind Boy Fuller. That changed my life. It turned me on to Piedmont blues. I thought, "These guys are right in my backyard, this is great stuff, and people all over the world will love it. I wanna do this, I wanna play this."
P: Who have you played with over the years that sticks out in your mind?
LW: How I started getting out -- I call it my apprenticeship -- was I began working with the remaining Piedmont blues players. The first one was Big Boy Henry, from Beaufort, N.C. We did a 45 record of his in 1983. It was a protest song, "Mr. President." It was to then-president Ronald Reagan. Big Boy was interesting because he could make up lyrics on the spot and would sing about contemporary events, which a lot of them didn't do. I worked with him, and we were very close. I made my first trip to Europe with him. I also did one with Algia Mae Hinton. I was really close to her. She lived about 45 minutes from me in Johnston County. She didn't drive so I needed to carry her around. She buck-danced too. For her big finale, she'd always play the guitar behind her head and buckdance at the same time. The crowd would go nuts. I took her to Michigan, to a big festival there. We flew out to the Port Townshend, Washington, blues festival, which I've done a lot of times now.
P: When you pick songs to perform and record, do you go for familiar songs in the classic repertoire of the different roots-music styles, or do you like to pull out obscurities? Or do you do a little of both?
LW: A little of both. I like the obscure stuff, but it's nice to have stuff that's recognizable to people, that will catch them when you're playing live. I like to mix it up. For general audiences, I'll mix it up. I'll do some blues, play different instruments -- I'll play harmonica, play slide guitar, then pick up the banjo and do an Appalachian folk thing. I'll mix in a pop song from the 1920s on the uke. I've got about a hundred of those I can do. When I do a classic song that people know, I like to do the verses people don't know. That's fun to do. When Oh Brother, Where Art Thou came out, they used some original recordings like "Big Rock Candy Mountain." I used to play that, so I started to play it again and people loved it 'cause they heard it in the movie.
P: How many songs would you estimate are or have been in your repertoire? In other words, how many songs have you learned over the years?
LW: Oh, that's a tough one, I don't know. Somebody once said, "Oh, he knows thousands of songs." Thousands is an awful lot. I'll bet I know at least a thousand, but I don't know after that. I have a gift of being able to remember lyrics. That's a real gift. I don't know how or why, but I can do that. I might blow a lick but I won't forget a lyric usually.
P: How did you happen to pick up the ukulele, and how does it relate to the roots music you've been doing? Is there a whole school of uke tunes that were part of the pre-war American music scene?
LW: It was big in the 1920s. It was introduced by the Hawaiians in the 1910s in San Francisco, and there was a big craze for the Hawaiian stuff. The 1920s and the Jazz Age is when the uke was most popular. The Elvis of the uke was Cliff Edwards, known as "Ukulele Ike." He was introducing all these new songs Gershwin was writing, and he was the king. It started this whole craze, and everybody copied Ike 'cause he was so popular. During the 1920s, Martin was producing more ukuleles than guitars. But by the Thirties it was over. The Depression hit. It was time to get rid of this frivolity. So the guitar got a lot more popular and the uke was out. It was resurgent in the late 1940s because of Arthur Godfrey, but then Tiny Tim kind of ruined its reputation in the 1960s.
P: Did you ever cross paths with the late Joe Thompson, the renowned black fiddler and string-band musician from Mebane, N.C.?
LW: I got to play with him one time. I went with all the people that were still active in the 1980s and 1990s. Big Boy Henry, Algia Mae Hinton, those are my people. George Higgs, he moved close to me, I got to work with him later. John Dee Holeman, we got to be good buddies later. I did a show with Etta Baker several times. I got to meet John Jackson, who is one of the greatest players I've met from Virginia. I got to be friends with John Cephas and Phil Wiggins. Especially Phil, we got to be really good buds.
P: You have recorded seven albums to this point. Are there particular ones you would steer people to as a good starting point to get into your music?
LW: The first one, Bull Dog Blues, is out of print. Second one, Ragtime Millionaire, people really like that because it's all Piedmont blues. That one's really good for people who love fingerstyle guitar. It went out of print but a friend of mine from Alberta, Canada helped me do a reissue. I did one with the Music Maker label twenty years ago called Ragged But Right. That's more of a mix. There's some banjo and uke on that, but it's basically blues. That's good for a general overview, but if you're really into Piedmont blues I'd say Ragtime Millionaire. More recently I've been doing liner notes for Bear Family Records.
P: You've written the notes for a couple of volumes in Bear Family's exhaustive series, That'll Flat Git It!: Rockabilly & Rock 'n' Roll. The volumes you worked on focus on rockabilly from North Carolina.
LW: I love working with them. It doesn't pay worth a dang, but I like working with them. They're the best in the world, I think, as far as reissues.
P: What is the future of American roots music in this country, based on what you've seen?
LW: It's always going to be alive through people that play at fiddler's conventions, blues festivals and things like that. I mean, those are strong communities. All these people know each other and play with each other. They might live in distant places but they still see each other at these music events.