Chart position: #1 R&B (for 10 weeks), #17 Pop
Category: R&B
Writers: Ferdinand Washington, Don Robey
Label and number: Duke 136, Houston, Texas
Flipside: "No Money"
When and where recorded: January 27, 1954, in Los Angeles
When released: December 2, 1954
Why Important: It was one of the first major R&B pop hits to outsell
the white cover versions; it was also one of the first records to sell more
as a 45-rpm disk than as a 78-rpm platter, signaling a significant demographic
change in the record buying market.
Influenced by: Nat King Cole, Leroy Carr, the traditional melody of "Down
in the Valley"
Influenced: A spate of answer songs and tributes
Important cover versions: Teresa Brewer (#17 Pop), Louis Armstrong, the
Four Lads
Important remakes: Jesse Belvin (1958), Roy Hamilton (#45 Pop, 1958),
Johnny Tillotson (#63 Pop, 1960), Aretha Franklin (1969), Kitty Wells (#49 C&W,
1971), Oscar Weathers (#31 R&B, 1972), Elvis Presley (1977), Emmylou Harris
(#9 C&W, 1984)
The story behind the record: In early 1955, a bluesy ballad called "Pledging
My Love" lodged in the number one position of the R&B charts for two and
a half months and even reached number seventeen on America's pop charts. The
artist was twenty-five-year-old Johnny Ace, a troubled man who sang in a melancholy,
conversational voice that was almost haunting. What made his performance even
more poignant was that Ace never lived to see the success of "Pledging My Love."
He had shot himself to death several months earlier, on Christmas Eve.
Though the death of Johnny Ace wouldn't reach legendary proportions around the world until years later, it was an instant shock to black America. Ever since his first record shot to number one on the R&B charts in 1952, Ace had been a superstar on the chitlin circuit. Everything he recorded-"My Song," "Cross My Heart," "The Clock," "Saving My Love for You," "Please Forgive Me" and "Never Let Me Go"-hovered near the top of the Harlem Hit Parade. His direct, plaintive delivery appealed to both men and women.
Ace was primarily a balladeer. His up-tempo material was routine, and his performances tended to be introspective at a time when black artists worked hard to blow each other off the stage. He'd sit at the piano and sing to the microphone, oblivious of the audience. Variety came down hard on him after his "stiff and wooden" performance at Harlem's Apollo Theater. Yet women reacted strongly, often hysterically, to the handsome baritone's deadpan blues, and wept as they listened to his recordings.
John M. Alexander, Jr., was born in Memphis on June 9, 1929, the son of a minister. He and nine brothers and sisters grew up in a strict, religious home, and the experience left him an introverted adult. Like most kids brought up in a preacher's household, he learned to play the piano and sing spirituals. But early in his life he received another calling: the music of Nashville-born singer-pianist Leroy Carr, probably the first popular urban bluesman, best known for his song "in the Evening (When the Sun Goes Down)." Before his early death from acute alcoholism in 1935, at age twenty-nine, Carr set the mold for the top-selling blues crooners of the'40s and early'50s, including Charles Brown, Ray Charles and Jesse Belvin. But John Alexander was probably Carr's most tragic disciple-the one who followed so closely in his footsteps.
After returning to Memphis from a short, disappointing stint in the navy, John Alexander played around town. He made his first recordings with Ike Turner in 1951 for Modern Records out of Los Angeles, but his own vocal performances were rambling and unfocused, devoid of his later magic.
David Mattis, a white executive at Memphis's top R&B station, WDIA, began his own recording label, Duke Records, and made a couple of early tapes with Roscoe Gordon, a local pianist who went on to pound out many exciting records throughout the'50s. In those days, R&B celebs like Gordon often traveled with an entourage that included a "valet," or "chauffeur," usually a singer or musician willing to be a go-fer in order to get close to an artist. Gordon's valet was a young singer named Bobby Bland. Mattis set up a recording session with Bland, gave him the lyrics for a couple of songs he wanted him to learn, and brought in several musicians that he dubbed the Beale Streeters, named after Memphis' notorious main drag where the black clubs jumped all night. The pianist was John Alexander.
On the day of the session in WDIA's studios, however, Mattis learned that Bland couldn't read and therefore hadn't prepared himself to sing Mattis's songs. At this point, Mattis was desperate to record anything. "I heard Johnny fiddling around, playing and singing this Ruth Brown song ["So Long"], he sounded pretty good," Mattis told writer George Moonoogian. "I listened through the amplifier and said, 'Let's cut something right here,' so I went back and got on the damned typewriter and wrote it all out so that 'So Long' became 'My Song.' We just changed it-the melody-enough to get by the damned copyright thing." They cut the song that day.
Despite the recording's muddy sound, Mattis was impressed with Alexander's hypnotic delivery. He later described it to George Moonoogian as a "funny vocal surrounded by soft purple sounds, a la Nat King Cole." In many ways Alexander resembled Sonny Til or one of the other dreamy lead balladeers of the current vocal groups, but instead of soft voices behind him, he had raw Memphis bluesmen.
Alexander didn't want to use his real name because he felt it would embarrass his father, so Johnny Ace was born. Within black culture an "ace" was someone you could depend on, someone who'd guard your back, but Mattis claims he called him Johnny Ace for another reason. "I named him after two of the biggest stars at the time: Johnnie Ray and the Four Aces."
The record made an impression on listeners wherever Mattis could get it played and distributed, but as he admitted later, he was severely undercapitalized. He went looking for a partner who had already established a distribution network. What he found was a forty-nine-year-old entrepreneur in Houston named Don Robey.
A light-skinned black man with Irish and Jewish heritage, Don Deadric Robey was one of Houston's millionaires in the 1950s, thanks to the nightclub empire he'd set up after the war. He held the Texas leg of the chitlin circuit in an iron grip. Robey ran a taxi company, Houston's top black nightclub, a record store, a booking-and-management agency and a record company called Peacock. What Mattis didn't know was that Robey was also a gangster who traveled with armed bodyguards.
When Robey took over half-interest in Duke in July 1952, he was able to give "My Song" the push it needed. "My Song" went to number one and every label covered it. Dinah Washington, Hadda Brooks, Marie Adams (on Robey's own Peacock label) and Savannah Churchill all made it their song. Mattis, unfortunately, wasn't able to cash in on his half of the prize. When he drove to Robey's Erastus Street office in Houston to "exercise my partnership," Robey told him, " 'There'll be nothing like that.' That's when the.45 came out on the desk." Mattis sold out his half of Duke Records at a fire-sale price.
In summer 1953 Robey sent Johnny Ace to Los Angeles to join Peacock's major artist, Big Mama Thornton, who was having a huge R&B hit with "Hound Dog" [see #32]. Ace and Thornton toured together off and on for the next eighteen months and even recorded a duet. In January 1954 Ace and Thornton returned to Los Angeles, where Johnny Otis was recording marathon sessions with half a dozen artists. Ace did a sold-out show at the 5-4 Ballroom at the corner of Central and 54th Street. A day or two later he recorded four songs with Otis, including what would be his two major posthumous hits, "Pledging My Love" and "Anymore."
"Pledging My Love" begins with Johnny Otis's vibes and Ace's plinking piano blending together high in the balance, in funeral time. The melody sounds very much like a traditional tune called "Down in the Valley," which had been a hit for both the Andrews Sisters in 1944 and the Weavers in 1951. The lyrics are like what a young man might whisper into a woman's ear: "Forever my darling, my love will be true, always and forever, I'll love just you. Just promise me, darling, your love in return, make this fire in my soul, dear, forever bum." The word forever is repeated like a mantra throughout the song, the perfect sentiment for young love. An interesting mystery of Ace's "Pledging My Love" is what happened to the master tape during the last verse: "I'll forever love you the rest of my days, I'll never part from you and your kind loving [break] ways." Clearly something was cut and spliced together here, but the ear struggles to disregard it.
One of the two "composers" of the song was Robey himself, but he was a thug, not a tunesmith. The other half was a young black, wheelchair-bound disk jockey from Shreveport, Louisiana, named Ferdinand "Fats" Washington, who was also responsible for two other songs on the session, "Still Love You So" and "Anymore." "He wrote 'Pledging My Love' as a poem," said Betty Washington, Ferdinand's widow, who still lives in Shreveport. "And Joe Scott, Robey's studio arranger, put music to it. He wrote the music to all of Fats's things. Don Robey never wrote a note." Nonetheless, Robey ended up owning the entire song. "This was something new for Fats, he didn't know about copyrights. He lost all of his mechanical rights because the contract, down at the bottom, said 'sold to.' The only money Fats and I ever saw was what he got from BMI [which pays songwriters for radio plays]." Fats Washington later had better luck with "I'll Be Home," a 1955 R&B hit (number five) for the Flamingos and a pop hit (number four) for Pat Boone, and he wrote many songs for B. B. King during the 1960s.
Despite the power of "Pledging My Love," Robey for some unknown reason kept it in the can for most of the year. Ace was touring on the strength of his latest hit, "Never Let Me Go," which had been recorded at a July session with J. Board's band, when the cavalcade returned to its home base in Houston. On Christmas Eve he was sitting backstage at the Houston Civic Auditorium with several people, including Big Mama Thornton and a young lady sitting in his lap. A week or so earlier he had purchased a .22 pistol, and his bandmates complained about him playing with it all the time and pointing it at people. On this particular evening, perhaps to impress the woman in his lap, he playfully put the barrel up to his head and pulled the trigger. The bullet shattered his brain. "The hair on his nappy head just stood straight up," Big Mama remembered later.
He had not been a happy man. In his last months he overindulged with women, food and liquor, and his activities with the former hadn't worked off enough calories from the latter. He had gained forty pounds. A candid photo taken near the end of his life shows a different person from the handsome young man in his promotional photos. David Mattis told George Moonoogian, "Johnny Ace was the nicest, sweetest, quietest little guy, and when he died, I went down to the funeral parlor . . . And I saw this great big fat bloated elephant."
"Pledging My Love," which had been languishing since its early December release, immediately benefited from the sensation and public grief caused by Ace's death, which the press attributed to a game of Russian roulette. Irving Marcus of Peacock Records reported to Billboard: "For the first time juke box operators have been calling me direct on this disk, as they are having trouble filling their machines through the distributor. This is because the deck has taken off so fast we are temporarily behind in deliveries. In almost every case the demand from the operators is for 45s." His words were echoed in the January 15 Billboards "Pick o' the Week," which heralded the song as "almost as popular with pop customers as with R&B.°' The preponderance of sales in the 45 format was significant because it signaled a new trend in the R&B market. The little 45 record had caught on primarily with young, white record buyers and, secondarily, with black teenagers, who had less disposable income. Adults were still attached to the ten-inch 78s they'd grown up with. Clearly "Pledging My Love" on 45 had found a new, much wider audience.
Over the next few weeks, a dozen lugubrious Johnny Ace tributes were rushed onto the market, much like the spate of eulogies that came out after singer-pianist Leroy Carr's death twenty years earlier. Johnny Moore's Three Blazers went to number fifteen on the R&B charts with "Johnny's Last Letter," a suicide note begging for understanding, grafted onto the melody of Ace's earlier hit, "Please Forgive Me." A pregnant Varetta Dillard lamented, "Johnny Has Gone" (number six), as her label, Savoy Records, put out the (false) rumor that she was carrying his baby. Linda Hayes pleaded, "Why, Johnny, Why?" Johnny Ace's own "Anymore," another Ferdinand Washington song recorded at the same time as "Pledging My Love," dominated the charts for months. After Don Robey emptied his vaults of every Johnny Ace recording, he tried to launch a new singer, Buddy Ace, but the young man lacked the melancholy magic of his predecessor.
In 1958, as the rock 'n' roll market softened up, Robey took the original tape of "Pledging My Love" back into the studio and overdubbed it with strings and the voices of the Jordanaires, but mercifully not too many people heard it. In 1983 pop singer Paul Simon wrote and recorded "The Late, Great Johnny Ace" for his Hearts and Bones album.
"Pledging My Love" has been recorded by dozens of artists, but the most ironic version, perhaps, was by another shy Memphis boy who'd also overindulged and grown isolated from the people around him. Elvis Presley cut "Pledging My Love" in Graceland's Jungle Room during his last session. It was the B-side of "Way Down," climbing up the charts when he died in August 1977.
"The music of the late '50s and early '60s-when music was at that root level that for me is meaningful music. The singers and musicians I grew up with transcend nostalgia-Buddy Holly and Johnny Ace are just as valid to me today as then!"-Bob Dylan