The "Late Great" Johnny Ace, perhaps the fastest-rising star in African-American music, & a orginal member of BB King's band "Beale Streeters", Memphis TN - Circa 1954

www.memphisflyer.com/backissues/issue566/cvr566.htm

 

The Late Great Johnny Ace

Forty-five years ago this Christmas, the first great rock-and-roll heartthrob passed away.

by Mark Jordan

 

Houston, Texas. Christmas night, 1954.

 

A crowd of 3,500, less than capacity but acceptable for a holiday, had come out for the concert at the Civic Auditorium in downtown Houston. Performing on the bill was Willie Mae “Big Mama” Thornton, still riding high on what would ultimately prove to be her only hit record, “Hound Dog,” released more than a year earlier.

 

But the real attraction was R&B balladeer Johnny Ace. That night, Ace was perhaps the fastest-rising star in African-American music. In less than two years he had amassed a half dozen hits and a new song, “Pledging My Love” — released three days earlier and trumpeted that very morning in the new issue of Billboard — was waiting in the wings and promised to be his biggest yet.

 

Despite his rising stock, Ace was showing signs of being perilously close to the edge of collapse. Always something of a bon vivant, booze and overeating, along with a vigorous touring schedule, had taken their toll on him. Once a country-handsome heartthrob to his legions of fans, Ace’s features were now distorted by the 40 extra pounds he had recently put on. What’s worse, his destructive side, always a force to be contended with, was beginning to affirm itself more strongly. He had always drunk too much, something which, combined with his natural recklessness, made for some harrowing misadventures. But recently his behavior had taken a darker turn.

 

While touring Florida, Ace purchased a .22 pistol — a Harrington & Richardson double-action revolver — which the singer wielded more like a toy than a weapon. Friends reported how one of Ace’s favorite new activities was to drive his “Oldsmobile 90 miles per hour, his pistol in his hand, shooting out the zeros on the roadside speed-limit signs.” Much more perilously, however, Ace had begun to find it amusing to point his gun — sometimes loaded, sometimes not — at his friends.

 

During the 15-minute intermission at the Civic Auditorium, Ace was backstage — a bottle of vodka in one hand, his beloved pistol in the other. He made his way into Thornton’s dressing room, where the big, bawdy singer was busy signing autographs. Ace was joined by his girlfriend, Olivia Gibbs; her friend, Mary Carter; and another acquaintance, John Hammond. Soon only the five remained in the room. As they talked, Ace was waving the gun around. When Thornton asked to see the pistol, she discovered only one bullet in the seven-round chamber. Ace asked her to give him the gun back. She did, telling him not to point it at anyone.

 

Almost as if in defiance, Ace leveled the pistol at Carter and pulled the trigger. The metal hammer clicked when it hit the empty chamber.

 

Gibbs was sitting in Ace’s lap, and next he put the pistol to her head. Again, he pulled the trigger but nothing happened.

 

Ace almost seemed to be laughing at his frightened companions now. “I’ll show you it won’t shoot,” he said. And then he put the gun to his own head and pulled the trigger.

 

“Johnny had looks, guts, determination, and talent,” wrote blues musician B.B. King about his onetime bandmate John Alexander in his autobiography Blues All Around Me. “But don’t ever dare Johnny to do something dangerous ’cause the boy would up and do it. Finally that did him in. … I don’t know the true story; I wasn’t there. But I loved his talent and mourned his passing.”

 

Thousands mourned the passing of 25-year-old John Alexander Jr., better known to the world as Johnny Ace, when he died on that Christmas night in 1954. Though it hardly made a ripple in the white establishment press, news of his death from a self-inflicted gunshot wound — the legend that Ace was playing a game of Russian roulette is, of course, fiction — was front-page fodder for black newspapers across the country.

 

“Johnny’s death was major news in black America,” says James Salem, a professor of American Studies at the University of Alabama and the author of The Late Great Johnny Ace and the Transition from R&B to Rock ’n’ Roll, the only in-depth study of Ace’s life and music, released earlier this year by the University of Illinois Press. “And the sensational manner in which he died even ensured some coverage in a few white papers such as The New York Times.”

 

When Ace’s body was finally brought back to his hometown of Memphis and laid to rest in Spring Hill Cemetery, eight days after his death, a reported 5,000 people crammed into the 2,000-seat Clayborn Temple AME Church for the service. (The delay, Beale Street photographer and Alexander family friend Ernest Withers told Salem, was not that uncommon in those days.) Among the mourners were such local music stars as King, Little Junior Parker, Phineas Newborn Sr., bandleader Roscoe Gordon, and saxophonist Fred Ford. Also there were his parents. John Sr. and Leslie, his eight brothers and sisters, his estranged wife, Lois Jean, and their two infant children, Glenn, 4, and Janet, 2.

 

But though Johnny Ace was dead, his music had not died with him. Posthumously, “Pledging My Love” became his seventh and biggest-selling R&B hit. It stayed 10 weeks at the top of the R&B charts and went as high as number 17 on the white-dominated pop charts. The first album collection of Ace hits, Memorial Album: Johnny Ace, performed similarly as well. And his younger brother, St. Clair Alexander, even enjoyed a brief career founded on his brother’s fame as did a faux relative, Buddy Ace, offered up as an heir by Ace’s label.

 

Alexander had become the superstar Ace partly through his persona. Charismatic, blessed with a strong appetite for fun, and perhaps more than a little dangerous, Ace wooed thousands of women with his looks as well as his sexy tenor. And then there was that music. As typified by his posthumous single “Pledging My Love,” Ace sang a sophisticated kind of R&B that was an extension of Charles Brown and Nat King Cole and presaged Sam Cooke and Jackie Wilson. It was a mix of blues and crooner pop that gave “race” music its first real shot at crossover because it appealed to white people who may have secretly loved the blues but were in search of a more socially acceptable form in which to digest it.

 

“Johnny Ace was the first solo black male R&B star in the postwar era to attract a white audience with material outside the novelty song tradition,” says Salem. “Ace may even have started the trend that celebrated youthful rebelliousness and romantic self-destruction.

 

John Marshall Alexander Jr. was born in the family home at 899 Fisher Street in South Memphis on June 9, 1929, just yards away from LeMoyne-Owen College and Elmwood Cemetery. His father John Marshall Alexander Sr. worked for the Plough Chemical Company and was a Baptist preacher on the side. The entire family, in fact, was religious, but Johnny, the Alexanders’ second boy, exhibited a slightly wicked side early on.

 

Alexander was funny and gregarious, and he liked to wrestle and otherwise play rough. He discovered a gift for the piano at a young age. The family, not rich but doing better than many of Memphis’ black poor, had a piano in the house. Whenever his parents would leave the house, Alexander would take control of the keyboard, toss out the hymns that were the only music allowed in the house, and start pumping out the forbidden blues music he had heard on the streets.

 

Despite his mischievousness, as a youngster Alexander was a diligent student. At Booker T. Washington High School, however, he began to lose interest in his studies and more and more felt the pull of music, something that was recognized and encouraged by the school’s science teacher, Nat D. Williams.

 

Williams was not just Booker T’s science teacher, he was one of the most prominent members of the city’s African-American community. He hosted a popular program on WDIA and also hosted talent contests at Beale Street’s Palace Theatre, through which he encouraged young talents such as Rufus Thomas.

 

Spurred on by Williams, the Alexanders tried to encourage their son’s artistic tendencies, but young John couldn’t find a focus for his energies. Without much of an interest in regular school activities, in 1947 he dropped out of high school in the 11th grade and joined the Navy. Full of wanderlust, Alexander’s only reason for enlisting was to satisfy his yen for travel, and he wasn’t going to let the Navy’s rules and regulations get in his way.

 

Alexander was reportedly AWOL for much of his short tour of duty. MPs were frequent visitors to the Alexander home in Memphis. When the authorities did track him down he was usually playing piano in some small bar somewhere. After only a few months, perhaps weeks, Alexander was discharged.

 

“The Navy thought so little of Alexander’s stint of service that they apparently never bothered to keep the official record of his time in uniform,” says Salem, whose own accounts of Alexander in the Navy are based solely on family recollections.

 

Out of uniform and back in Memphis, Alexander bummed around for more than a year before settling into the life of a Beale Street musician. The epicenter for music life on Beale in the late ’40s and early ’50s was the Mitchell Hotel. Andrew “Sunbeam” Mitchell and his wife, Earnestine, had a reputation for nurturing young musicians. In an upstairs performance room they would host jam sessions that would last well into the night, and then they would put up those players who had no place to stay.

 

Haunting the clubs on Beale by night, Alexander spent part of his days back at Booker T. Washington. He visited, ostensibly, to see his mentor Nat D. Williams, but Alexander was also gaining a reputation as a talented and charismatic musician, a status that put him in good standing with impressionable high school girls.

 

One such girl was 9th-grader Lois Jean Palmer.

 

“All the girls liked him,” she says. “He was funny. He was really outgoing. And he was handsome, too.”

 

Of all the girls at Booker T. Washington, the petite Lois Jean Palmer was the one that caught Alexander’s eye. The two dated behind their parents’ backs for several months until Lois Jean got pregnant. Then on July 17, 1950, Alexander and Lois Jean crossed the river to Earle, Arkansas, and got married.

 

“We were almost never together after that,” says Lois Jean.

 

After they wed, Alexander moved his bride into the family home on Fisher, but Mrs. Alexander still disapproved of her son’s musician lifestyle and forbade him from living there with her.

 

Unable to afford a place of his own, Alexander took up residence in the Mitchell Hotel. Separated from his wife, he easily slid into the wild lifestyle of late nights, cheap whiskey, and, to the heartbreak of his young bride, pliant women.

 

“I always knew he was messing around with other women,” says Lois Jean, “but what could I do about it? I was young and having a baby. He was the kind of person he was, and I was the kind of person I was.”

 

Salem concurs, adding that womanizing was a consistent trait throughout Alexander’s short life.

 

“Supposedly, he could just charm any women who crossed his path,” he says. “I think he loved [Lois Jean] at one time in his own way. But he couldn’t reciprocate. He only lived in the moment, and if you couldn’t live in the moment with him, he was gone. He was incapable of returning that love. I think she realized that pretty quickly, but — and his sister Nora talked about this as well — women just couldn’t help themselves around him.”

 

Alexander, for his part, had other concerns besides his romantic life. He had begun backing up a young guitar player from Itta Bena, Mississippi, named Riley B. King, better known by his WDIA on-air name: B.B. King. King put together a small group to help him gig and record. Eventually, a group consisting chiefly of King, Alexander, Earl Forest on drums, Billy Duncan on saxophone, and Bobby Bland on vocals began to coalesce around the Mitchell Hotel. They went by different names, including Bee Bee’s Jeebies, but the one that stuck was the Beale Streeters.

 

The band stuck together until King scored a national hit on the Flair label with “Three O’Clock Blues,” a side he had cut on the cheap with the Beale Streeters at the YMCA at Lauderdale and Vance. When King started joining package tours to support his record, he was backed by an orchestra of sidemen, so the Beale Streeters were left behind in Alexander’s hands.

 

Focused on his own career now, Alexander came to the attention of David Mattis, the white program director at WDIA. Mattis had started his own record label, Duke, and was conducting a session at WDIA’s studios in the summer of 1952 which featured Alexander as a sideman on piano. Not enthused about what he had on tape so far, Mattis decided to cut a track with the piano player when he heard him diddling around with Ruth Brown’s “So Long.” Fifteen minutes later, after inventing a new melody and adding new words, the pair had written and recorded “My Song,” a fairly traditional R&B ballad but with Alexander’s trademark soulful voice already evident.

 

Mattis renamed Alexander Johnny Ace, after Johnny Ray and the group the Five Aces. Already, someone had recognized Alexander’s pop appeal. “My Song” became a regional hit, and now Mattis’ Duke label had gained the attention of David Robey, a onetime Houston taxi company owner with reputed mob connections.

 

Robey had turned his Houston-based Peacock label into a successful national independent specializing in gospel and such blues artists as Louis Jordan and Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown. As Sam Phillips would do a few years later with Elvis Presley, Mattis heard tremendous crossover appeal in Alexander. This was not a typical Delta blues moaner but a crooner in the Nat King Cole style. And his piano playing and musical taste likewise drifted toward a sophistication that would be easier to sell as pop.

 

Robey re-released “My Song” nationally, and the song shot straight to the top of the national R&B charts and stayed there for nine weeks. From now on, Ace would live out of hotel rooms and tour buses.

 

“These guys played 330 to 340 dates a year, because that’s how you made money,” says Salem. “You certainly weren’t going to make it off records, because the label executives were going to get by giving you as little as possible. … In the last two years of his life, I don’t think Ace even had a home. He lived out of a suitcase. Earnestine Mitchell [of the Mitchell Hotel] said that when Ace died she still had a lot of his possessions in the hotel.”

 

By 1953, Ace had essentially abandoned his family, though he fathered a second child, a daughter named Janet, before he left. Over the next year-and-a-half, he cut 19 more songs for Robey, four of which were hits — “Cross My Heart,” the slightly gimmicky but no-less-tender ballad “The Clock,” “Saving My Love for You,” “Please Forgive Me,” and “Never Let Me Go.”

 

“The Clock,” almost as much as his death, marked Ace’s place in the memory of his fans. A simple and earnest ballad, Salem says “The Clock” is a candidate for the first rock-and-roll song.

 

“Back then it was common for white artists to remake proven R&B songs,” he says. “The thing about that record was that it was the first black record that couldn’t be replicated by white artists. It was its own unique, indelible performance. Audiences wouldn’t have stood for it. I still hear from people who say that song was the one that most sticks with them.”

 

In the months before his death, Ace’s behavior was getting more and more out of hand. He still made his shows and recording sessions, but his leisure hours were full of cars, booze, women, and his new toy — the .22 pistol.

 

“I’ve known people who have great talent like that but it’s like they can’t control it and it has to come out somehow, so it does through extreme behavior,” Salem says. “If Ace were alive today we’d probably say he had Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder because no one could control him.”

 

When the news finally came on the morning of December 26th, while a shock, it couldn’t have come as that big a surprise to those who knew his self-destructive ways. Over the Thanksgiving weekend, a month earlier, a rumor spread among Ace’s friends that he had died. And on Christmas morning a fraudulent telegram arrived at Fisher Street informing Mrs. Alexander that her son was dead.

 

A day later, it would be a phone call that would convey the awful truth. Lois Jean Alexander, no longer living with her in-laws, found out about her husband on the morning of the 26th.

 

“Someone from the Alexanders’ house came over to tell me the news,” she recalls. “I think of him because of the kids, but after he died — I know it sounds strange — but it was like a peace had come over me.”

 

Five months before Johnny Ace’s death, back in Memphis, Elvis Presley had gone into Sun Studio to record his first sides for Sun Records. On December 25, 1954, the day Ace put the bullet in his brain, Elvis was spending the holiday at home in Memphis with his parents. He was already a regular performer on the Louisiana Hayride radio program. Just two months earlier Colonel Tom Parker had sold his young client’s contract to RCA. But though the young singer was obviously a star on the rise, no one then could have predicted the worldwide hysteria he and his new brand of music would create in just a few more months. Nor could anyone have spotted the tidal wave of rock-and-roll artists to follow that would eventually sweep Johnny Ace and those like him away to obscurity.

 

(It is one of the great ironies of rock-and-roll that the last single Ace released before his death was “Pledging My Love,” and the last Elvis single, released just weeks before his death, was “Way Down” b/w “Pledging My Love.” To be fair, though, dozens of artists have covered “Pledging My Love” over the years — Jerry Lee Lewis, Diana Ross, and Marvin Gaye among them — without dying as a result.)

 

Today, the late great Johnny Ace is a footnote in American music history whose tragically short life is often summed up in books on the subject in a single sentence — a member of the Beale Streeters with B.B. King and Bobby “Blue” Bland, who enjoyed a brief successful solo career before dying in a game of Russian roulette.

 

Sadly, such summary dismissal ignores the important role Ace played in bridging white and black music styles in those days just before rock-and-roll.

 

Nor does it elucidate his position as a model of an essential rock-and-roll archetype, the romantic martyr. Taking a cue from Byron and Keats, his brilliant, seductive, self-indulgent, self-destructive life bridged the myths of Robert Johnson with those of James Dean and Buddy Holly.

 

And, of course, nothing that has been written about him since can do justice to his greatest legacy — his music, especially the haunting, sensitive ballads he was able to conjure almost in spite of himself. Though his recordings are available (if hard to find) on CD and despite the best scholarly efforts of Salem to put him in his proper context, Ace is in danger of vanishing into history.

 

Still, for a generation of music lovers, Ace is a permanent and precious part of their lives. In the introduction to his book, Salem writes about delivering a seminar on black music and playing “Pledging My Love” before a group of female middle-aged African-American teachers.

 

“They not only knew all the words to “Pledging My Love,” but also sang them out loud, with their peers, in the middle of my formal presentation,” Salem writes. “Ace had been dead for more than 35 years by this time, and I had at least 40 cued up that day to play, but the seminar stalled on ‘Pledging My Love.’ When I made a movement toward the cassette player, one woman said, in a voice teeming with authority: ‘Don’t you dare stop that song.’ Southern black women of their generation, I learned, have the kind of affection for Johnny Ace that Southern white women have for Elvis Presley.”

 

But for younger generations, he is not even a memory

 

“No one asks me about him anymore,” says Lois Jean Alexander. “The younger people don’t know who he is, and the older people are all dying.”

 

Alexander herself doesn’t think of her late husband often. Though she went on to have two more children, Alexander never could bring herself to marry again. Photos of her four children, two grandchildren, and three great-grandchildren pepper the walls and tables of her tiny South Memphis apartment, but Johnny Ace is nowhere to be seen.

 

The gradual effacement of Ace has been hard for his two grown children, Glenn Alexander and Janet Alexander McClora, who had to grow up in the shadow of a father they never really knew.

 

“They’re real proud of their dad,” says Lois Jean. “I never talked about him very much unless they asked. They never knew the bad things about him until [Salem’s] book came out. But even still, they love him.”

 

McClora, who like her parents attended Booker T. Washington High School, grew up hearing stories about her father from her teachers. But her strongest connection to him remains through his music.

 

“I’m probably the way I am because of him. I always reach out to the underdog and try to extend love to that person,” McCora says. “I often think my dad’s not here because nobody reached out to him and gave him the love that he was always singing about.”

Done