About Johnny

Songwriter, harmonica player and singer Johnny Mars was raised in a sharecropping
family. He was given his first harmonica at age nine. His family lived in various places
around the South, including North Carolina, Georgia and Florida. When Mars' mother
died in 1958, the older family members settled in Florida, while Johnny and his
younger brother went to live in New Paltz, N.Y. After he graduated from high school,
he played club shows around New York and recorded with his band ‘Burning Bush’ for
Mercury Records.

In the mid-1960s, Mars moved to San Francisco, where he met Dan Kennedy and
formed the ‘Johnny Mars Band’, playing clubs and festivals in northern California,
as well as shows for rock promoter/impresario/producer Bill Graham. After hearing
about the greener pastures in the United Kingdom from his friend Rick Estrin of
‘Little Charlie and the Nightcats’, he toured England in 1972. There, he recorded a
couple of albums, eventually moving to West London in 1978. Working with producer
Ray Fenwick, who also worked with Spencer Davis and Ian Gillan, Mars had success
with the much-praised album, ‘Life On Mars’.

In 1991, Mars became a featured soloist with the British New Wave pop group
‘Bananarama’. The group used him on their singles ‘Preacher Man’, ‘Megalomaniac’
and ‘Long Train Running’. He also appeared in the music video production of
‘Preacher Man’. Through the 1990s, Mars retained his strong European fan base, and
he enjoys a particularly strong following in Ireland and Scandinavia. Critics there have
called him “the Jimi Hendrix of the harmonica”. After all, Mars did share bills with Hendrix.

In 1992, after a long absence from the Bay Area blues scene, owing to his new foothold
in the UK and the rest of Europe, Mars was invited to play at the San Francisco Blues
Festival. In 1994, Mars had an American release ‘Stateside with Johnny Mars’ on MM&K
records. Richard Skelly of the ‘All Music Guide’ wrote, “Stateside with Johnny Mars
features brilliant, original, topical compositions and superb, unique harmonica playing,
unfettered by the standard Chicago blues conventions”.

Since 2000, Mars has worked extensively with the harmonica teaching programmes
sponsored by the European Blues Association. More recently, he received UK national
news coverage in 2003 for his innovative approach to replace the recorder with the
harmonica to teach music to students in schools in the Portsmouth area.

Although Mars is best known as a leader of electric blues bands, for the past 3 years,
he has formed a duo with acoustic country blues guitarist Michael Roach. Together,
they mix city and country styles to great effect.