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Module 1. Roots and Influences: Growing Up in Ozark

Course 1: Singing the News. Understanding Jesse Welles and the Wellespring Project
Estimated Time: 15–20 minutes

🧭 Module Objectives

  • Describe the family, geographical, and cultural environment that shaped Jesse Welles' early life.
  • Identify the musical influences that fueled his transition from listener to maker.
  • Explain how themes of persistence and self-reliance emerged in his creative identity.

A Town Called Ozark

Jesse Allen Breckenridge Wells was born in 1992 in Ozark, Arkansas—a town of just over 3,500 people surrounded by forests, factories, and dirt roads. He often describes it as "a turkey plant, an engine plant, a gas station or two and a handful of restaurants." (Farm Aid, Against the Grain Podcast, 2025)

His father was a mechanic, his mother a schoolteacher; his grandfather dubbed Beatles albums onto cassette tapes that Jesse carried on bike rides and long bus trips. At twelve, he bought a "$56 First Act guitar from Walmart," an instrument he has called "an extra limb." Even then, he played not for an audience but for understanding: learning how sound could translate feeling.

For more than a year, he had no idea how to actually play.

I didn't have any kind of video, and I hadn't really seen anybody play guitar, so I thought they were moving their tuning pegs awfully fast. I broke a lot of strings thinking you change the melody around like that. I didn't realize you needed to fret it... I asked my old man, because your dad's supposed to know how to do everything, 'Do you know how to play this thing?' I was at a loss. He'd never played a guitar in his life. I saw his big finger hit the fretboard, and he changed the note on the low E string. And I went, oh, shoot, that's probably how you have to do this. (Acoustic Guitar interview, 2025)

He soon started taking lessons from "an old guy named Harlen Nichols who lived down the road."

Persistence and Ingenuity

The stories from his childhood reveal a theme that still defines him: refusal to be denied access to learning. When local librarians forbade headphones on library computers, the teenager wrote to the county seat and won permission to use them. In addition to listening to songs on the public library's computers, he'd check out records to listen to at home, and explored musical history through short musical clips on an Encarta Encyclopedia CD-ROM.

He soon started recording, using a borrowed copy of Sony Acid software:

I borrowed that and put it on my computer, and I would multitrack. I had a washboard, a recorder, and my guitar. I was always recording and making little tunes. I loved to make my friends laugh. I had a guitar with me all the time. (Acoustic Guitar interview, 2025)

That combination of rebellion and resourcefulness runs through his career, from home-burned CDs sold at school to self-produced videos two decades later.

Formative Sounds and Teachers

Wells grew up between musical worlds: Motown records, the Beatles, and church choirs on one side, Nirvana, grunge, and classic heavy rock on the other, anchored by an admiration for Bob Dylan, Woody Guthrie, and classic blues artists like Huddie Ledbetter and Mississippi John Hurt.

Those Beatles records that my grandpa had given me were really all I listened to for probably five or si years until I was a teenager and found Black Sabbath and [Led] Zeppelin and stuff like that... I just loved the music that I got to listen to with Mom in the car on the oldies radio. It was a format that has kind of gone away, but it was British Invasion and Motown, essentially, and some classic country every once a while. (Acoustic Guitar interview, 2025)

His first teacher, Harlen Nichols, would tune his guitar for him (until he learned how to do this himself), showed him how to play classic folk songs like "Camptown Races," and developed his own kind of tablature so that Jesse could practice songs at home. Beyond these lessons, he recalls "studying what the grown-ups did" at jam sessions and copying their phrasing by ear.

His early heroes—John Lennon (The Beatles), Robert Plant (Led Zeppelin), Kurt Cobain (Nirvana)—taught him that expression mattered more than technique or gear.

You can play the blues on any old guitar—you don't need scalloped necks and all that stuff. Plus, there's more longevity to the blues. (Guitar.com interview, 2018)

Even the aesthetic tagline he suggested in a 2017 interview, "Winter, Liquor, Dream," suggests emotion first, form second.

Life Lessons from Work and Play

Throughout high school he juggled jobs: waiting tables at a Chinese restaurant, DJ-ing for KDYN Real Country radio, chainsawing trees at a nature reserve. Each was a crash course in audience, timing, and voice. He also played football and band: a blend of small-town normalcy and creative tension that later colored songs like "Seventeen."

These contradictions bred the dual themes that will carry through the course: rootedness and restlessness.

From Local Gigs to First Recordings

By his late teens he was recording under the alias Jeh-Sea Wells, selling homemade CDs at shows and uploading to Bandcamp. He called it "learning in public." The grainy bedroom tracks already showed his fascination with tone, texture, and honesty over perfection.

Seeds of Themes We'll Follow

  • Honesty and labor — Music as work ethic and moral practice.
  • Community and self-sufficiency — The Ozark "commune" that was really community.
  • Access and agency — Early DIY efforts foreshadow his later independence.

Each seed will flower in later modules as we trace his path through rock, silence, and folk revival.

Where We're Headed

Next, in Module 2: Experimentation and Emergence, we follow those Ozark roots into the college years and the formation of his first bands. We'll see how trial, error, and community living forged the sound that would eventually crash into Nashville.

Knowledge Check & Reflection

Sources & Further Reading

A LOT of material about Jesse Welles, his history, and creative work is available online. We can't provide a comprehensive list of these sources, but the following (including any that are quoted in or specifically referenced in this module) provide a useful starting point:

Updated on Nov 6, 2025