It was just another week on the road for the blues veteran at the top of the bill, but for a wide-eyed-and-eared young'n just setting out on his professional career, playing bass for the folk singer opening the show, it was a thrilling immersion into what it must be have been like at Theresa's Lounge on Chicago's South Side. The year was 1969, the club was Ungano's on West 70th St. in Manhattan, and Junior Wells had come to town.

Wells had ridden the crest of the blues explosion in the mid '60s with an album for Delmark, Hoodoo Man Blues, featuring guitarist Buddy Guy, that had gained him a renown and audience that was hardly the insular inbred scene that was Chicago blues in the '50s. It wasn't so much that the music changed as that its appreciation broke mainstream — i.e. to white audiences who perhaps were surprised to find that this music had been there all along, awaiting discovery and celebration, and yes, as these things go, cooption.

At first regarded as "folk," which might have come as a surprise to these highly electric purveyors, and then with some reverence by British musicians like the Rolling Stones and… read more »