Johnny Mars

Johnny Mars

Johnny Mars is a harmonica player, singer and songwriter born in 1942 in Laurens, United Kingdom. He grows up in a sharecropping family and receives his first harmonica at the age of nine. His family later lives in several places in the American South, including North Carolina, Georgia and Florida.

Early life and move to New York

When his mother dies in 1958, older relatives settle in Florida, while Mars and his younger brother move to New Paltz, New York. After finishing high school, he plays club dates around New York and records with his band Burning Bush for Mercury Records.

San Francisco, England and later career

In the mid-1960s, Mars moves to San Francisco, where he meets Dan Kennedy and forms the Johnny Mars Band. The group plays clubs and festivals in northern California and also performs for promoter and producer Bill Graham. He then tours England in 1972 after hearing from Rick Estrin of Little Charlie and the Nightcats that there are better opportunities there, and he records a couple of albums before settling in West London in 1978.

Working with producer Ray Fenwick, who also works with Spencer Davis and Ian Gillan, Mars records the well-regarded album Life On Mars. In 1991 he becomes a featured soloist with the British new wave group Bananarama, appearing on the singles “Preacher Man,” “Megalomaniac” and “Long Train Running,” and in the video for “Preacher Man.”

Reputation and performances

During the 1990s, Mars keeps a strong audience in Europe, especially in Ireland, Scotland and Scandinavia. Critics there call him “the Jimi Hendrix of the harmonica.” He shares bills over the years with Hendrix before Hendrix becomes widely known, and with Magic Sam. In 1992 he returns to the San Francisco Blues Festival after a long absence from the Bay Area blues scene, and in 1994 he releases Stateside with Johnny Mars on MM&K Recordings, an album of original, topical material and harmonica playing that avoids standard Chicago blues conventions.