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Ken Wells graduated from Nicholls State University in Thibodaux, La., in 1971 and spent a number of years as a reporter and editor the Houma Courier. He left the bayous in 1975 to attend the University of Missouri School of Journalism, receiving a master’s degree in 1977. He spent four years on the Miami Herald, where he was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and in 1982 joined The Wall Street Journal. He served stints in the paper’s San Francisco and London bureaus, covering stories a disparate as the Exxon Valdez oil spill and the first Persian Gulf War, before moving to New York in 1993 as a page one editor and writer. Ken is a self-described “garage-band level” guitarist who played in a number of Houma-area bar bands before heading off to grad school. Though he decided his career lay in writing, not music, he never gave up the guitar nor his interest in Louisiana or Cajun culture. Many of the songs on this CD are simply a merger of his musical and story-telling inclinations. When he’s not writing songs about South Louisiana, he’s writing books about the place. His well-received debut novel, “Meely LaBauve,” a coming-of-age story set in the bayou country of the early 1960s, was published by Random House in the year 2000; two sequels, “Junior’s Leg” and “Logan’s Storm,” were published in 2001 and 2002. Ken recently completed his first non-fiction book, a travelogue through the U.S. beer industry, called “Travels with Barley: a Journey through Beer Culture in America.” The narrative heart of the book is a car journey he took the length of the Mississippi River, from Minnesota to New Orleans, in search of the mythical Perfect Beer Joint. The book will be published in October by Simon & Schuster/Wall Street Journal Books. You can visit Ken on his Web site at www.bayoubro.com
Pershing Wells picked up a guitar at the age of 14 and never looked back. He is a versatile musician with eclectic musical interests and tastes. He signed a recording contract with Paula Records (the same label as John Fred and the Playboys who recorded the #1 hit Judy in Disguise). At age 18 he was in a band, The Country Sunshine Band, that made the finals of Star Search (and the stage of the Grand Ole Opry). He has played everything from rock, jazz and soul in between. For the past decade he has spent most of his musical career as the guitarist and a vocalist for the The Blue-Eyed Soul Revue, a long-running, high-energy, retro R&B group with an enthusiastic regional following. The band, with Pershing strumming his trademark funk, has been a fixture of the New Orleans Jazz Fest for more than two decades and has been on stage with some of the biggest names in the business: The Platters; Jean Knight of “Mr. Big Stuff” fame; Percy Sledge; and the late-great Ernie K. Doe. Two years ago, when recession cost Pershing his day job as a software salesman, he opened Digital Sac-a’-Lait Productions hoping not just to make a living but to leverage his skills as an arranger, recording engineer, studio musician and producer to help local and regional artists get their songs onto CD. He’s since produced and recorded a half dozen albums, most notably a critically acclaimed CD by Swamp Pop legend Joe Barry titled “Been Down That Muddy Road” in association with New York City’s “Tuff City Records.” You can visit Pershing on his Web site at www.pershingwells.com |
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Photo by Red Morgan |
