Episode 23: “Pledging My Love” by Johnny Ace

A History of Folk Music and 500 Songs

by Andrew Hickey.

Episode 23

Pledging My Love by Johnny Ace

A content warning.

This episode contains a description of a death by gunshot.

I am not using any of the more explicit descriptions of this death, though I do describe some aspects of it.

But talking about that subject at all can be upsetting, so if you're likely to be disturbed by that, please turn off now.

If you're unsure whether you'll be upset, remember that there are blog posts at 500songs.com 500 the numbers songs.com containing the full text of every episode, and you can read the text there before listening if you wish.

Johnny Ace was born John Alexander Jr.

He used a stage name because his mother didn't approve of secular music, and he was part of a group of musicians called the Beale Streeters.

To understand the importance of this group of people, you have to understand Memphis and why it was was important.

American regional musical culture could be incredibly specific, and different cities had different specialities.

That's changed somewhat now, as transport and communications have got so much better.

But certainly, in the first half of the 20th century, you'd find that cities a hundred or so miles apart had taken a lot of the same musical influences, but put them together in radically different ways.

And Memphis, in particular, was an unusual city for the southern US.

It was still an intensely racist city by any normal standards, and it was segregated, and thus still home to countless horrors and crimes against humanity.

But for the southern US, black people led comparatively comfortable lives, simply because Memphis was very close to fifty per cent black in the early decades of the twentieth century, and was actually majority black in the late nineteenth.

In eighteen seventy eight there was a plague.

Yellow fever swept the city, and it took an immense toll.

Before the eighteen seventy eight plague, there were fifty-five thousand people living in Memphis.

Afterward, there were fourteen thousand, and 12,000 of those were black.

The plague killed 75%

of the white people living in Memphis, but only 7% of the black people.

Even though white people moved back into the city and eventually became the majority again, and even though they had all the institutional power of a racist state on their side, there was still less of a power imbalance in Memphis, and the white ruling classes simply couldn't keep black people down as thoroughly as in other southern cities.

Memphis' regional speciality is the blues, and its first great musical hero was W.C.

Handy.

Even though Handy only lived in Memphis for a few years, having been born in Alabama, and later moving to New York, he is indelibly associated with Memphis and with Beale Street in particular.

Handy claimed to have invented the blues, though his blues wasn't much like what we'd call the blues these days, and often had an element of the tango about it.

And he was certainly the first person to have any kind of hit with blues songwriting, back in a time when hits in music were measured by sheet music sales, before recorded music had become more than an interesting novelty.

So Memphis was, as far as the wider world was concerned, and certainly as far as anyone in Memphis itself was concerned, the birthplace of the blues.

And Beale Street, more than any other part of Memphis, was the blues area.

Everyone knew it.

Beale Street was the center of black culture, not just for Memphis, but for the whole of Tennessee, in the late 40s and early 50s.

It wasn't actually called Beale Street on the maps until 1955, but everyone referred to it as Beale Street anyway.

By 1950, people were already complaining about the fact that the old Beale Street had gone.

Beale Street was where Lansky's was, the place where the coolest people bought their clothes.

There was Schwab's Dry Goods store, where you could buy everything you wanted.

And there was the Beale Street Blues Boys, or the Beale Streeters.

Accounts vary as to what they actually called themselves.

They weren't a band in a traditional sense, but there were a few of them who got together a lot, and when they would make records, they would often play on each other's tracks.

There was the harmonica player, Junior Parker, who would go on to record for every Memphis-based label, often recording in the Sun studios, and who would write songs like Mystery Train.

There was the piano player Roscoe Gordon, who had a unique off-beat way of playing that would later go on to be a massive influence on scar and reggae music.

There was the singer Bobby Blue Bland, one of the most important blues singers of all time.

And there was guitarist Riley King, who would later be known as the Blues Boy, before shortening shortening that and becoming just BB King.

And there was Johnny Ace, another piano player and singer.

But the Beale Street Blues Boys slowly drifted apart.

Riley King went off and started cutting his own records for RPM, one of the myriad tiny labels that had sprung up to promote RB music.

And Bobby Bland got drafted, but before he had to go off to be in the armed forces, he went into Sam Phillips' studio and cut a few sides which were released on Duke Records, backed by the Beale Streeters.

That has B.B.

King on guitar and Johnny Ace on piano, along with George Joyner on bass, Earl Forrest on drums, and Adolph Billy Duncan on the saxophone.

Shortly after this, Ace's first single came out almost by accident.

He was playing piano at a session for Bobby Bland, and Bland couldn't get the lyrics to his song right.

In the session downtime, Ace started singing Ruth Brown's hit So Long.

Hope we'll meet again someday.

Hope that maybe then you'll say

Darling,

I was wrong.

Dave Mattis, Duke Records owner, thought that what Ace was doing sounded rather better than the song they were meant to be recording, and so they changed it up just enough for it to count count as an original, with Ace coming up with a new melody and Mattis writing new lyrics.

And My Song by Johnny Ace was created.

Told me

that you would leave me here until

now you're gone and hours

This would be how all Ace's records would be created from that point on.

They would take a pop standard of another song that Ace knew, someone would write new lyrics, and then Ace would come up with a new melody while keeping the chord progression and general feel the same.

It was a formula that would lead to a string of hits for Ace.

My song might not sound very rock and roll, but the B-side was a jump boogie straight out of the big Joe Turner style.

Follow the rules.

that I can't take.

If you wanna be my baby, gotta make up your mind.

If you wanna be my baby, gotta make love your mind.

The A side went to number one on the RB charts and was the first of eight hits in a row.

Aces singles would typically have a ballad on the A side and a boogie number on the B side.

This was a typical formula for the time.

You might remember that Cecil Gant had a similar pattern of putting a ballad on one side and a boogie on the other.

The idea was to maximise the number of buyers for each single by appealing to two different audiences.

And it seemed to work.

Ace became very, very popular.

In fact, he became too popular.

Duke Records couldn't keep up with the demand for his records, and Don Roby, the owner of Peacock Records, stepped in, buying them out.

Don Roby had a reputation for violence.

He was also, though, one of the few black businessmen in a white-dominated industry, and it might be argued that you can only get to that kind of status with a certain amount of unethical practices.

Roby's business manager and unacknowledged partner, Evelyn Johnson, was by all accounts a far nicer person than Roby.

She did the day-to-day running of the businesses, drew up the business plans, and basically did everything that an owner would normally be expected to, while Roby took the money.

Johnson did everything for Roby.

When he decided to put out records, mostly to promote the blues singer Clarence Gatemouth Brown, who he managed, Johnson asked him how they were going to go about this, and Roby said, Hell, I don't know, that's for you to find out.

So Johnson figured out what to do.

You called the Library of Congress.

They had all the forms necessary for copyright registration, and whenever they didn't have something, they would give her the details of the organization that did.

She got every copyright and record-related form from the Library of Congress, BMI and other organizations, and looked over them all.

Everything that looked relevant, she filled out.

Everything that didn't, she kept in case it was useful later, in a file labelled, it could be in here.

Johnson ran the record label, she ran the publishing company, and she ran and owned the booking agency.

The booking agency started the model that companies like Motown would later use.

Cleaning the acts up, giving them lessons in performance, buying them clothes and cars, giving them spending money.

She lost money on all the artists that were recording for Roby's labels, where the performances turned into a loss leader for the record labels.

But she made the money back on artists like B.B.

King or Icantina Turner, who just turned up and did their job.

and didn't have to be groomed by the Johnson-Roby operation.

She never got the credit because she was a black woman while Don Roby was a man, but Evelyn Johnson pretty much single-handedly built up the careers of every black artist in Texas, Tennessee, Mississippi or California during the early part of the 1950s.

From this point on, Duke became part of the Don Roby Empire, run by Evelyn Johnson.

For a while, Dave Mattis was a silent partner, but when he noticed he was getting neither money nor a say, he went to see Roby to complain.

Roby pulled a gun on Mattis, and bought out Mattis, for a tiny fraction of what his share of the record company was actually worth.

Once Roby had bought Duke, Ace started working with Johnny Otis, as many of the other Duke and Peacock artists did, and his records from then on were recorded in Houston, usually with the Johnny Otis band, and with Otis producing, though though sometimes Ace's own touring band would play on the records instead.

Ace's formula owed a lot to Charles Brown's sophisticated West Coast blues.

For those who haven't heard the Patreon-only bonus Christmas episode of this podcast, Brown was the missing link between the styles of Nat King Cole and Ray Charles, and his smooth lounge blues was an important precursor to a lot of the more laid-back kinds of soul music.

Here's a clip of Merry Christmas Baby by Johnny Moore's Three Blazers with Drown on Lead Vocals, so you can see what I mean about the resemblance.

Merry Christmas, baby!

You should

treat me nice.

Merry Christmas, baby,

you should treat me nice.

Gave me a diamond ring for Christmas

Now I'm living in paradise

There is a very important point to be made here and that is that Johnny Ace's music was extremely popular with a black audience.

He didn't get a white audience until after his death and that audience was largely only interested in one record, Pledging My Love.

It's important to point this out, because for much of the time after his death, his music was dismissed by white music critics precisely because it didn't fit their ideas of what black music was, and they assumed he was trying to appeal to a white audience.

In fact, there's a derogatory term for the smooth-sounding blues singers, which I won't repeat here, here, but which implies that they were white on the inside.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

As Johnny Otis said, Ace was too smooth for the white critics and white writers for a long time.

He pointed out that this was white arrogance, suggesting that black people are not the best judge of what was the best art to come out of the community, but the white writers are.

Otis's point, which I agree with, with, was that, in his words, you have to take your cue from the people of the community.

They know better than you what they like and what is black artistry.

Ace's music, yearning ballads about unrequited love, sung in a smooth, mellow voice, didn't fit with white preconceptions about the proper music that black men should be making, and so for decades his work was more or less airbrushed out of history.

It was inconvenient for the white myth-makers to have a black man playing sophisticated music.

But that music was hugely popular among black audiences.

The clock, for example, went to number one on the RB chart and stayed on the charts from June through October 1953.

If you hear me,

please come back real soon

cause the clock and I

are so lonely in this room.

His follow-ups to the clock weren't as big, and there was a sign he was entering diminishing returns, but his records stayed on the charts for longer than most, and as a result his releases were also less frequent.

Don Roby stockpiled his recordings, putting out just one single every six months, waiting for the previous single to fall off the charts before releasing the next one.

This stockpiling would prove very lucrative for him, because while Ace was a sophisticated performer, he lived a less sophisticated life.

One of his hobbies was to drive at top speed, while drunk, and shoot the zeros out of road signs.

With a lifestyle like that, it is probably not all that surprising that Ace didn't live to a ripe old age, but the story of his death is still one that might be shocking or upsetting, and one that is still sad, even though it was probably inevitable.

The last song Johnny Ace played live was Yes Baby, a duet with Big Mama Thornton, who had been his regular touring partner for quite a while.

The two would tour together, and Thornton would be backed by Ace's band, with another pianist.

Ace would take over from the pianist for his own set, and then the two of them would duet together.

love me.

Oh, sweetheart.

I love you, baby.

As you can hear, that wasn't one of his mellow ballads.

Ace's live shows were a big draw.

Evelyn Johnson said on several occasions that Ace was so popular that she used his popularity to make deals on less popular acts.

If you wanted to book Johnny Ace, you had to book B.B.

King or Bobby Blue Bland as well, and those acts built their own followings through playing those gigs, often on the same bill as Ace and Big Mama Thornton.

By all accounts, the show in Houston on Christmas Day was a massively enjoyable one, right up until the point that it very suddenly wasn't.

The rumour that went round in the days after his death was that he was killed playing Russian Roulette.

That's still what most people who talk about him think happened.

This would have been a tragic way to go, but at least he would have known the possible consequences, and you have to think that no one is going to play Russian Roulette unless they have some sort of death wish.

And there were other rumours that went around.

One that persists to this day, and that I inadvertently repeated in episode 10, is that little Esther was present.

She wasn't, as far as I can tell.

And the darkest rumours, repeated by people who like to sensationalise things, claim that it was a hit from Don Roby, that Ace was planning on changing record labels.

But that's not what actually happened.

What happened is much more upsetting and even more pointlessly tragic.

Johnny Ace was backstage in Houston with a bunch of people.

Big Mama Thornton and the band's bass player Curtis Tillman were there, as were Ace's girlfriend and some other people.

It was Christmas Day, they were killing time between sets, and they'd been drinking.

Ace was waving a gun around and making people nervous.

He was in a bad mood because he had a toothache and he was feeling tired and annoyed.

Accounts vary slightly as to what happened next, but Big Mama Thornton's was given as a legal deposition only a couple of hours after his death before exaggeration set in.

Johnny was pointing this pistol at Mary Carter and Joe Hamilton.

He was kind of waving it around.

I asked Johnny to let me see the gun.

He gave it to me, and when I turned the chamber, a twenty-two cow bullet fell out in my hand.

Johnny told me to put it back in where it wouldn't fall out.

I put it back and gave it to him.

I told him not to snap it to nobody.

After he got the pistol back, Johnny pointed the pistol at Mary Carter and pulled the trigger.

It snapped.

Olivia was still sitting on his lap.

I told Johnny again not to snap the pistol at anybody.

Johnny then put the pistol to Olivia's head and pulled the trigger.

It snapped.

Johnny said, I'll show you that it won't shoot.

He held the pistol up and looked at it first, and then put it to his head.

I started towards the door and heard the pistol go off.

I turned around and saw Johnny falling to the floor.

I saw that he was shot, and I run on stage and told the people in the band about it.

According to Evelyn Johnson, Ace's hair stood on end from the shock, and he died with a smirky little grin on his face, and his expression was, what did I say?

He was only 25, and he'd been the most successful rhythm and blues singer of the previous year.

When Cashbox, the trade paper, polled disc jockeys in December 1954, to find out who the most played artist of 1954 had been, Ace was the clear clear favourite.

Shortly after his death, Duke Records announced that he had had three records top one and three-quarter million sales the previous year.

That is, to put it bluntly, a ludicrous amount.

Almost nothing sold that much, and one is tempted to believe that Duke was slightly manipulating the figures.

But that it's at all plausible says a lot about how popular Johnny Ace was at the time.

After Ace's death, Pledging My Love instantly became his biggest hit.

Keeping you is my goal.

I'll forever love you

the rest of my days.

I'll never part from you

and your loving

way.

Pledging My Love is credited to Fats Washington, the lyricist behind many of B.B.

King's songs from this period, and Don Roby as songwriters.

But it's safe to say that Ace himself wrote the music, with Roby taking the credit.

Roby apparently never wrote a song in his life, but you wouldn't believe it from the songwriting credits of any record that was put out by Duke or Peacock Records.

There, Don Roby, or his pseudonym Diedrich Malone, would appear to be one of the most prolific songwriters of all time, writing in a whole variety of different styles.

Everything from Love of Jesus to Baby Watch Your Pants Doing Wet.

In total, he's credited as writer for twelve hundred different songs.

Pledging My Love was released only days before Ace's death, and the initial expectation was that it would follow the diminishing returns that had set in since the clock, becoming a modest but not overwhelming hit.

Instead, it became a massive smash hit and his biggest record ever, and it gained him a whole new fan base.

White teenagers who had previously not been buying his records in any large numbers.

Black people in the 50s mostly still bought 78s, because they tended to be poorer, and so not buying new hi-fi equipment when they could still use their old ones.

45s in the R ⁇ B market were mostly for jukeboxes, but for the first time ever, the pressing plant that dealt with Duke's records couldn't keep up with the demand for 45s.

So much so that the record was held back on the jukebox charts because the label couldn't service the demand.

The records were being bought by young white teenagers instead of his previous older black audiences, although that other audience still bought the record.

Acer's death came at a crucial transition point for the acceptance of rhythm and blues among white record buyers, and Pledging My Love acted as a catalyst.

Until a couple of years earlier, songs owned by ASCAP, the performing rights society that dealt only with respectable composers for the Tin Pan Alley publishing houses, made up about eight times as many hits as songs owned by BMI, who dealt with the blues and hillbilly musicians.

But in early 1955, eight of the ten biggest hits were BMI songs.

Pledging My Love came at precisely the right moment to pick up on that new wave.

There were white cover versions of the record, but people wanted the original, and Johnny Ace's version made the pop top twenty.

What none of this did was give Ace's family any money.

Don Roby told them, after Ace's death, that Ace owed him money rather than the other way around.

And Ace and his family didn't receive even the songwriting royalties Ace was owed for the few songs he was credited with.

While Roby was registered with BMI and registered the songs with them, he had a policy of keeping his artists as ignorant as possible of the business side of things, and so he didn't let Ace know that Ace would also have to register with BMI to receive any money.

Because of this, his widow didn't even know that BMI existed until James Salem, Ace's biographer, told her in the mid-90s, and it was only then that she started to get some of the songwriting royalties she and her children had been entitled to forty-plus years worth of sales and radio play.

Roby wasn't the only one making money from Ace.

Cash-in tribute records were released, including two separate ones by Johnny Moore's Blazers, and records by Johnny Fuller, Venetta Dillard, The Five Wings, and The Rovers.

All of these records were incredibly tasteless, usually combining a bunch of quotes from Ace's lyrics to provide his last letter or a letter from heaven or similar, and backing them with backing tracks that were as close as possible to the ones Ace used.

This is a typical example: Why Johnny Why by Linda Hayes with Johnny Moore's Blazers.

you're gone,

we'll meet again soon.

It won't be long

in heaven,

I'll be with you.

And after Don Moby had completely scraped the barrel of unreleased Ace recordings, he tried to sign Johnny Ace's brother, Sinclair Alexander, to a record deal, but eventually decided that Alexander wasn't quite good enough, though Alexander would spend the next few decades performing a tribute show to his brother, which many people thought was quite decent.

Instead, Roby persuaded a blues singer named Jimmy Lee Land to perform as Buddy Ace, in the hope of milking it some more, and put out press releases claiming that Buddy was Johnny Ace's brother.

Buddy Ace's first record was released simultaneously with the last tracks from Johnny that were in the vault, putting out adverts talking about the last record on the immortal Johnny Ace to complete your collection, and the first record on the versatile Buddy Ace to start your collection.

Buddy Ace actually made some very strong records, but it didn't really sound much like Johnny.

You know I'm gonna make you love me, it's a nothing in this world I do

Now tell me what can I do

to make you love me true

What can I do

to prove that I love you

Cause I'm gonna make you love me

Buddy Ace did not duplicate Johnny's success, though he continued as a moderately successful performer until the day he died, which was, rather eerily, while performing in Texas 40 years to the day after Johnny Ace died.

But Roby wanted to milk the catalogue and tried in 1957 to resuscitate the career of his dead star by getting the Jordan Ayers, famous for backing Elvis Presley, to overdub new backing vocals on Ace's hits.

Making you happy is my desire.

Keeping you is my goal.

I'll forever love you

the rest of my days.

I'll never part from you

and your loving

way.

This musical grave-robbing was not successful, and all it did was sour Johnny Otis on Roby, as Roby had agreed that Otis' productions would remain untouched.

Even 40 years afterwards, and 20 years after Roby's death, it would still infuriate Otis.

But probably the most well-known of all the posthumous releases to do with Johnny Ace came in 1983, when Paul Simon wrote and recorded the late great Johnny Ace, a song which linked Ace with two other Johns who died of gunshot wounds, Lennon and Kennedy.

And they signed it on the bottle from the late great Johnny Ace.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

That's from Simon's Hearts and Bones, an album that was steeped in nostalgia for the music of the period when rhythm and blues was just starting to turn into rock and roll.

The period defined by the late great Johnny Ace.

A history of rock music in 500 Songs is written, produced, and performed by Andrew Hickey.

Visit 500songs.com

to see transcriptions, liner notes and links to other materials including a mixed cloud stream of all songs accepted in this episode.

A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs is supported by the backers on my Patreon.

Visit patreon.com slash Andrew Hickey to support it.

Patreon backers also get early access to my books and also support my blog and my other podcasts.

If you've enjoyed this episode, please by all means subscribe in iTunes or your favourite podcast app and rate it, but more importantly, please tell just one other person about this podcast.

Word of mouth is the best way to get information out about any creative work, so please, if you like this, tell someone.

Thank you very much.