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.
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