New Books In Music

It’s Christmas Eve at the Houston City Auditorium, 1954, and Big Mama Thornton is belting out “Hound Dog,” her hit from the previous year. It’s the years just before Elvis, before rock and roll, when white and black musics were still segregated, officially at least. But the white kids were catching on to the Rhythm and Blues sounds of cats like Fats Domino, Bobby “Blue” Bland, and, up in his dressing room waiting for his turn on stage, Johnny Ace. Tragically, however, Ace wouldn’t make it to perform. A favorite hand-gun mixed with a tough-guy attitude, a couple of pretty women, and an arch-nemeses lead to death by his own hand; Johnny Ace shot himself this night in a game of Russian Roulette. In The Death of Johnny Ace (Dancing Traveler Publishing, 2012), Steve Bergsman gives a fictionalized account of the years leading up to Ace’s demise: his humble beginnings in Memphis, his mercurial rise to stardom on Duke-Peacock Records, and his final hours in Houston. Joh