Johnny Lee Schell
Johnny Lee Schell is a guitarist, singer, songwriter and engineer from Farwell, Texas, who has worked in Los Angeles since the late 1970s. He led Bonnie Raitt’s band on her 1989 tour, played on her records from Green Light to Luck of the Draw, and has been a long-time member of Taj Mahal’s Phantom Blues Band.
In the mid-1970s Schell played lead guitar, organ and harmonica and sang with Baby, a southern rock band from Amarillo, Texas, appearing on its albums of 1974 and 1976 and writing six of the songs on the second, Where Did All the Money Go? After moving to Los Angeles late in the decade he toured with Bonnie Raitt and with Ian McLagan’s Bump Band, and played on McLagan’s albums Troublemaker (1979) and Bump in the Night (1981), on Renée Geyer’s So Lucky (1981) and on Pure Prairie League’s Something in the Night (1981).
Raitt’s Green Light (1982), recorded at Shangri-La Studios in Malibu with Schell, McLagan, Ricky Fataar and Ray Ohara as her Bump Band, includes his own song “Willya Wontcha,” which he sings, and “I Can’t Help Myself,” which he wrote with Raitt, Fataar and Ohara. He also appeared on her Nine Lives (1986), Nick of Time (1989) and Luck of the Draw (1991). On the 1989 tour that ended in Park City, Utah, in November, he led her five-piece band, playing guitar and taking a few turns on trombone. In the same years he appeared on records by Etta James, John Prine, Melissa Etheridge and Buddy Guy, played lead electric guitar on “You’ve Been So Good Up to Now” on Lyle Lovett’s Joshua Judges Ruth (1992), and later appeared on Lovett’s soundtrack for Dr. T and the Women (2000). He has also toured with Ronnie Wood and John Fogerty.
Schell has worked with Taj Mahal since the early 1990s. He played guitar on Taj Mahal’s Dancing the Blues (1993), Phantom Blues (1996) and Señor Blues (1997). On Maestro (2008) he played guitar with the Phantom Blues Band, engineered several tracks and co-produced two. He co-produced, engineered and mixed Time by Taj Mahal and the Phantom Blues Band, released by Thirty Tigers in April 2026 and recorded partly at his own studio. In 1998 he played dobro on Lucinda Williams’s “Jackson,” slide guitar on “Concrete and Barbed Wire” and “Can’t Let Go,” and electric guitar on four other tracks of Car Wheels on a Gravel Road. He also appears on Loudon Wainwright III’s High Wide & Handsome: The Charlie Poole Project (2009).
He owns Ultratone Studios in Studio City, California, where he engineered Eric Burdon’s album My Secret Life (2004); he also appears on Burdon’s Soul of a Man (2006). His mixing credits include records by Barbara Blue and Little Feat’s Rooster Rag (2012). Under his own name he has released Blues Plate Special (2002) and Schell Game (2006).
