Credit: Dangerous Minds / Album Cover

God, you never want to speak ill of the dead, but Johnny Ace really pushes that sentiment to its absolute limit.

Born John Marshall Alexander Jr in Memphis, Tennessee, Johnny Ace is to this day one of the biggest what-ifs in the history of rock and roll.

A firebrand R&B singer with charisma for days, musical chops for weeks and pipes for years, Ace came up in the same Beale Street band that gave the world BB King and Bobby Bland. Originally a pianist, Ace was called up to the big leagues when notable prick Ike Turner spotted the makeshift band and signed them to play back up for other acts on his record label, Modern Records.

When King and Bland were poached from the group to enter the big leagues, Ace was moved from pianist to lead singer. This was the move Johnny Ace needed to get properly noticed, and it worked like gangbusters, as he signed a solo record deal with Duke Records in 1952. Over the next two years, Johnny Ace became one of the most exciting names in pop music, touring any chance he got and scoring eight of his singles on the R&B charts in 1952 alone.

However, as well as Ace’s professional life was going, his personal life was an utter mess.

In 1949, he met Lois Jean Palmer, a high school freshman five years his junior. Within months, Palmer was pregnant. Ace moved Palmer into his parents’ house (one that he was barred from for playing blues music, natch) while he stayed on the road. The couple would have another child, but Ace was a deadbeat, leading a womanising lifestyle on the road and having at least two other kids out of wedlock, that we know of.

One would assume that it was the mental strife of his personal life that led him to take his own life in 1954 at the tender age of 25. It wasn’t. It was, in fact, him being a colossal idiot.

How did Johnny Ace take his own life?

So, according to many sources, the three things in life that Johnny Ace liked were music, women and guns. Possibly in that order, who can say?

Many of the people who toured with him said that his favourite tour bus pastime was shooting road signs as they passed by. One can only imagine how scandalised he’d be by modern musicians whiling away the hours on their Steam Deck, but at the very least, a band can take their video games into the venue without putting people in immediate danger the way that Johnny Ace did.

There are actually a few different reports on how Ace took his own life, but they all boil down to the same basic story. Backstage at the Civic Auditorium in Houston, Texas, Ace and his band were taking a break in between sets, and Ace himself was winding down in his usual manner. His usual manner was playing with a .32 calibre revolver. I prefer Marvel Snap, but to each their own. It changes with each telling, but someone in Ace’s party says something ridiculous like “John, for fuck’s sake, stop waving that gun around!”

Ace takes umbrage with this and, in a scene that could literally be picked out of a Coen brothers film, goes “Relax, it’s not even loaded, look!” Before aiming the gun at his head and pulling the trigger. Reader, it was loaded. In a truly ghoulish manner, his death made Johnny Ace one of the biggest names in music. His posthumous single ‘Pledging My Love’ became a massive hit and inspiring musicians like Bob Dylan, Paul Simon and Luther Vandross in the years to come.

And all it took was a death that could easily have ended up on the Darwin Awards had it happened a few decades later. C’est la vie, I guess. Or, I suppose, c’est la mort.