Bessie Smith Passed Away Today

On 26 September 1937, the day before John Hammond was to leave for Mississippi to take Bessie back to New York to record, she and her lover were driving on Route 61 just north of Clarksdale, Mississippi, when their car had an accident. They ran off the road and down a steep embankment created by the Yazoo flood plain. Bessie broke her ribs in the crash and as she lay by the side of the road a truck ran over her right arm, nearly severing it.

For many years the rumour circulated that her life could have been saved, if she had not been refused treatment at a "whites only" hospital in Clarksdale – 14 miles from the crash site.  Much of the blame for this story must be attributed to John Hammond. He wrote an article in Downbeat magazine claiming Bessie died after being denied admission to a hospital because of her colour; Hammond later admitted his article was based on hearsay. Bessie was in fact treated by a white doctor, at the blacks only hospital on Sunflower Avenue in Clarksdale, but her injuries were too severe, and she had lost too much blood, and she died.

Black Ace

Has there ever been a better pseudonym than Black Ace, the nom de record of Babe Kyro Lemon Turner?   Born on a farm in Hughes Springs, Texas sometime around 1907, Turner, like many contemporaries, first performed in church. It was in the late 1920s that he began playing guitar, often at parties and local dances in and around Greenville, Texas.

He worked with bluesman Smokey Hogg and later with Oscar Buddy Woods, who recorded for Vocalion around the same time as Turner recorded for the first time in April 1936. It was Woods that introduced Turner to the lap steel Hawaiian guitar and it is this instrument that Turner used to great effect on the six sides he made for Decca in February 1937.

No one is sure how he got his sobriquet but it would be fair to assume that it’s in recognition of his superb slide guitar playing. On Whiskey and Women he uses a bottle as a slide, as he does on the other Decca recordings that included the self-publicising Black Ace he did at the same session. Turner was popular around the Dallas Forth Worth area, appearing on radio and playing live until he was drafted early in World War 2.

After the war ended he gave up on music and worked in a variety of jobs including picking cotton. He was rediscovered in the 1960s and did record again and had a short-lived resurgence in his career before he passed away in 1972. The Black Ace is an example of how a really good musician could simply not quite make it for reasons that have nothing to do with talent. All too often bluesmen from the pre-war period had careers, or did not, as a matter of pure chance.