Wells ranks as the sixth-most successful female vocalist in the history of the Billboard country charts, according to historian Joel Whitburn\'s book The Top 40 Country Hits. In 1976, she was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame. In 1991, she became the third country music artist, after Roy Acuff and Hank Williams, and the eighth woman to receive the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award.\n', '

Wells was born Ellen Muriel Deason on August 30, 1919, one of six siblings, to Charles Cary Deason and his wife, Myrtle, in Nashville, Tennessee. (She is one of the few well known country performers to have been born in Nashville.) She began singing as a child, learning guitar from her father, who was a brakeman on the Tennessee Central Railroad. Her father, Charles, and his brother were musicians and her mother, Myrtle, was a gospel singer. As a teenager, she sang with her sisters, who performed under the name the Deason Sisters on a local radio station beginning in 1936.\n', '

At the age of 18 she married Johnnie Wright, a cabinet-maker who aspired to country-music stardom (which he\'d eventually achieve as half of the duo Johnnie & Jack).\n', '

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