THE WIFE & DEATH OF SPADE COOLEY, HOLLYWOOD'S KING OF WESTERN SWING

THE WIFE & DEATH 

OF SPADE COOLEY, 

HOLLYWOOD'S KING 

OF WESTERN SWING

August 7, 2018

 

“Spade” Cooley was a virtuoso fiddler and Roy Rogers’ movie stand-in, who had six consecutive Top 10 hits and was considered Hollywood’s King of Western Swing. He was also a mean, jealous, paranoid, violent, alcoholic man who brutally murdered his wife in front of their daughter.

 

by Burt Kearns & Jeff Abraham

 

Donnell Clyde Cooley got the nickname “Spade” in his younger days, after he drew three consecutive hands of spades, one a straight flush, during a hot poker streak. Born one-quarter Cherokee in 1910, a decent boxer and virtuoso fiddler since he was a boy, Spade Cooley made his way from the Dust Bowl of Oklahoma to sunny California with his wife and son during the Great Depression.

 

Spade showed up at the gates of Republic Pictures in Studio City in 1934. He had his fiddle in his hand and six cents in his pocket. Cowboy movie star Roy Rogers gave him a job. Spade played with Roy’s Sons of the Pioneers western singing group and worked for three years as Roy’s movie stand-in. More roles in western movies followed.

 

In 1942, he joined Jimmy Wakely’s western swing band, which was attracting thousands of dancers every Saturday night to the Venice Pier Ballroom. Spade gained his own following with his fancy fiddling and footwork. When Wakely got a Hollywood movie contract in 1944, Cooley took over the band, turned it into the largest big band in the country, and released six consecutive Top 10 records (including the #1 hit, “Shame on You”). That led to his own music and variety television series. The show went national and was a mainstay well into the 1950s.

 

Spade Cooley was, in short, Hollywood’s King of Western Swing.

 

He was also one mean, jealous, paranoid, violent, alcoholic sonofabitch!

 

Spade Cooley was still married to his Okie high school sweetheart in 1942 when he hired, and then took up with, a singer named Ella Mae Evans. Ella Mae was about fifteen years younger. She sang okay. She was a blonde beauty. Spade took her as his second wife in 1945. Their daughter Melody was born the following year.

 

Shortly before the baby’s arrival, Ella Mae caught her husband with another woman. When she tried to pack her bags and leave, he threatened to kill her. When she ran away to Texas, he brought her back.

 

The beatings and insane jealousy continued throughout their marriage, after the birth of Donnell Jr. in 1948, and into the late 1950s as public musical tastes changed and Spade Cooley’s career cooled. The abuse got worse after Spade moved the family from their mansion on Ventura Boulevard into a palatial home on their isolated Water Wonderland Ranch, way out in the Mojave Desert in eastern Kern County.

 

In February 1960, Spade Cooley was honored with a star on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame. By this time, his television series had been canceled, he’d fired his orchestra, and he was basically semi-retired. He devoted much of his time to planning Water Wonderland, which he envisioned as a 1,000-acre amusement park with swimming pools, boat racing and a broadcast studio for a new television show.

 

He also had time to drink, stew, and blame his fading popularity and other troubles on his pretty young wife.

 

The following year, Ella Mae was in the hospital suffering from what was diagnosed as “extreme strain.” Ella Mae told her doctor more than once that she was in fear of her husband. Certain she was catting around, Spade had accused her of affairs with men, women and his former boss, Roy Rogers. From the hospital, she retained a female attorney to start divorce proceedings. She claimed her husband had beaten her, the abuse was increasing and she feared he would kill her.

 

Spade responded by harassing and beating her more.

 

On Friday, March 17, he filed for divorce in Bakersfield, citing incompatibility and seeking custody of the kids.

 

“Ella Mae has moved out and I’m heartsick,” he told reporters at his ranch. “But there isn’t a chance of a reconciliation.”

 

In reality, Ella Mae remained on the ranch, virtually a prisoner. Spade had pulled the innards out of the phone receivers so she couldn’t call out. On March 23, he administered a savage beating to Ella Mae and forced her to sign four deeds, transferring all their property from joint ownership to him alone. The next day, he called Anita Aros, a violinist in his band. Spade told Anita he was getting divorced and asked her to marry him as soon as the divorce was final. Anita agreed. She said she thought he was joking.

 

In the days to follow, Spade Cooley forced Ella Mae to call friends and confess to having an affair. He made her say the same to their daughter, Melody, now 14. He even forced her to sign a confession.

 

Sometime after 6 p.m. on April 3, 1961, Spade Cooley unleashed a savage attack on his estranged wife in their home. He knocked her to the floor in the living room and beat her in the bedroom, leaving blood spattered on the floor, walls and his trousers. He choked her, stomped her, yanked the hair out of her head and, with the handle of a broom, violated her vaginally and anally.

 

In the middle of the frenzy, 14-year-old Melody walked into the house and interrupted her dad.

 

“Come here, I want you see your mother,” he said, leading the girl through the dining room, past the broken furniture, broken glass and whiskey bottle, to the bloody walls of the master bedroom. Her mother was not there. Spade walked into the bathroom.

 

“Get up, Ella Mae,” she heard him demand. “Melody is here.”

 

He dragged Ella Mae’s nude, bruised and blood-covered body from the shower into the bedroom, and slammed her head on the floor. Twice.

 

“Melody, I’ll give you three minutes to get her off the floor or I’ll kill her if you don’t get her up.”

 

Spade Cooley went into the living room and began a countdown. “One minute left!”

 

“Half a minute left!”

 

The body remained limp.

 

“Time’s up, Melody.” Spade Cooley entered the room with a rifle in his hand. “All right, Melody, you are going to watch me kill her.” With that, he stomped Ella Mae in the abdomen. He called her a “slut.”

 

Then he knelt down by her body. “We’ll just see if you’re dead,” he said.

 

He burned the nipples of her breasts with a cigarette.

After he was arrested, Spade Cooley had a pretty simple defense. He claimed that Ella Mae had slipped in the shower. When that didn’t wash, he said he’d never meant to hurt her, but blacked out after she told him she was having sex with two other men.

 

Psychiatrists found 54-old Spade Cooley legally sane to stand trial for the murder of 36-year-old Ella Mae Cooley. Even so, he pleaded innocent by reason of insanity.

 

While awaiting trial, he suffered a heart attack and was hospitalized for several days.

 

The jury trial began in Bakersfield Superior Court on July 10, 1961, and became what at the time was the longest and most spectacular trial in Kern County history. People lined up for the sixty-odd available seats in the courtroom. The testimony was lurid. One witness testified that Ella Mae told her she indeed had an affair with Spade’s archrival, Roy Rogers. (Roy’s wife Dale Evans was forced to say that the claim was “ridiculous”). Anita Aros talked about Spade Cooley’s marriage proposal and, in what was the most wrenching moment in the trial, Melody told the story of the day her mother died.

 

When Spade’s daughter took the stand on Thursday, July 27, the former Hollywood King of Western Swing wept openly. Melody testified that she arrived at the ranch to see her father drag her mother from the shower, slam her head on the floor and burn her with cigarettes. By the end of her testimony, Melody was crying like a baby, as well. When she stepped from the witness stand and paused at the defense table, father and daughter stared at each other and both began bawling.

 

The court took a recess. Spade was in a holding cell, talking with defense investigator Leonard Winters, when he became emotional again.

 

“Wasn’t she beautiful? Wasn’t she beautiful?” he said.

 

A cigarette fell from his mouth. Winters realized what was happening: Spade was having another heart attack. The private eye gave the defendant a heart pill and called for the jail physician. Spade was taken to County General Hospital. After an electrocardiogram showed no heart damage, he was brought back to his cell.

 

Spade Cooley took the stand in his defense. He testified he struck his wife after she admitted engaging in unnatural acts with two men and told him the details of a “free love” sex cult she was part of. There were to be ten “senior members” and each was to recruit ten more for a total of one hundred people.

 

“Rockets were going off in my head,” he said from the stand. “It was on fire.”

 

Spade admitted giving Ella Mae a slap (“I don’t think I would hit her with my fist”), after which he claimed they sat on the bed, she said, “Donnell, you think I don’t love you,” snatched a cigarette from his hand and burned her own breast.

 

“It wasn’t like Ella Mae at all,” Spade testified. “It was though she was an animal.”

 

On August 19, after six weeks and after 19 hours and 14 minutes of deliberation, the jury of ten men and two women announced a verdict. It was a Saturday afternoon, so most of the spectators who’d fought for seats in the courtroom each day of the trial weren’t around. There were more television, radio and newspaper reporters on hand than the public.

 

Spade Cooley was found guilty of first degree murder. He “sat almost impassively when he heard the verdict read by a clerk. At first he seemed to stare blankly at the jury,” George C. Flowers from the Long Beach Independent Press-Telegram reported. “Then his face seemed to dissolve into the handkerchief in his hand and it was obvious that he was crying, albeit quietly.”

 

Sentencing took place on Tuesday. Spade’s attorney withdrew the insanity defense, and spared the state two more trials on whether Spade was sane at the time of the killing and what the sentence could be. The maximum penalty could have been death in San Quentin’s gas chamber.

 

Judge William L. Bradshaw sentenced Spade Cooley to life in prison.

"We have a somewhat sketchy story of him,” the judge said while passing sentence. “He has been a source of pleasure for a segment of people, so we can’t say he has been antisocial. There was nothing in his life to indicate he would not be amenable to rehabilitation.”

 

Spade Cooley was transferred from the Kern County jail to the state’s penal processing system in Chino. Doctors there examined him and determined he was subject to extreme mood changes and periods of depression, enough to have him classified as mentally disturbed after all, and unfit for a suitably country music-style term in a prison like San Quentin or Folsom.

 

He was sent to the California Medical Facility, a state mental hospital in Vacaville.  Instead of a cell, he had a private room. His treatment included carving violins in the Vacaville Hospital machine shop and teaching in the music department.

 

He remained in the Vacaville hospital, never having to see the inside of a prison. Due to his past heart troubles, he lived under a restricted health regimen and was spared normal prisoner duties. He played music, and wrote the song “Cold Gray Bars”, which became a hit for Ned Miller.

 

“He said he had a thing about killing animals — he couldn’t bear it, not even a mouse,” said Dr. Eugene Prout, Vacaville’s chief medical officer. “He wouldn’t eat meat at all. He didn’t have many visitors but he had lots of friends among the inmates. He was a very humble man.”

 

On August 5, 1968, the California State Adult Authority voted unanimously to parole Spade Cooley from the California Medical Facility on February 22, 1970. By then, he would have served nearly nine years.

 

In November 1969, Spade received a 72-hour furlough from the hospital to perform in a benefit concert for the Deputy Sheriffs Association of Alameda County at the Oakland Auditorium.

 

He took the stage for the Grand Ole Opry Spectacular on Sunday afternoon, November 29th. He was nervous as he walked onstage for his first performance in nine years. He thanked the deputies for “the chance to be free for awhile,” and played his fiddle.

 

The audience of 2,800 lawmen and officials cheered him throughout. It was like the glory days. When he was done, he took bow after bow.  He walked offstage to a standing ovation.

 

At intermission, the applause still ringing, Cooley stepped backstage. He was out of breath. He told an attorney named David Lucchese he was suffering chest pains, and signed a few autographs. He told some friends that he felt “today is the first day of the rest of my life.”

 

Then he dropped his fiddle and dropped dead of a heart attack. Spade Cooley was 58, three months away from real freedom.

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BURT KEARNS & JEFF ABRAHAM have written a book about performers who died on stage. It will be published in 2019.

THE LONESOME DEATH OF DANNY RAPP: THE FRONT MAN FOR DANNY & THE JUNIORS

THE LONESOME DEATH 

OF DANNY RAPP: 

THE FRONT MAN 

FOR DANNY & THE JUNIORS

Danny Rapp, the man who first sang “Rock and Roll Is Here to Stay” and “At The Hop” stumbled and fell after stardom faded

 

July 24, 2018

 

by Burt Kearns & Jeff Abraham

 

The Juvenairs were four teenagers from southwest Philadelphia who got together in 1955 to make music. They’d meet on the corner of 54th and Pentridge streets and harmonize, singing doo-wop under the streetlight. Dave White Tricker, Joey Terranova and Frank Maffei were pals at John Bartram High. Danny Rapp, who sang lead, was still a student at Shaw Junior High.

 

A little guy from a big Irish-American family, Danny was smaller and younger, but he was the leader. He’s the one who made the guys practice, and came up with some choreography and routines that would turn them into an act. Thanks to Danny, they got good. The Juvenairs performed at school parties and sock hops and made a name for themselves around Philly — and that was a good place to make a name, because Philadelphia was a center of the rock & roll industry.

 

In 1957, a local producer named John Madera got involved. He and Dave White (Dave dropped the “Tricker”) wrote a song called “Do The Bop” and then he arranged for the group to record it.  The record got into the hands of Dick Clark, who was not only the city’s most powerful deejay, but hosted an afternoon dance show on television called Bandstand. Dick Clark liked what he heard. He suggested they change the song’s title to “At The Hop” and change the band’s name to Danny & The Juniors. They did.

 

Danny & The Juniors recorded “At The Hop” and it became a local hit. That same summer, Dick Clark’s television show was picked up by ABC and went national as American Bandstand.  After Clark invited Danny & The Juniors onto the show in December, “At The Hop” took off nationally and sold millions of copies.

 

Danny Rapp was all of 16 years old.

 

Well, you can swing it you can groove it


You can really start to move it at the hop


Where the jockey is the smoothest


And the music is the coolest at the hop


All the cats and chicks can get their kicks at the hop


Let’s go

 

Danny & The Juniors, with their white bucks and sweaters, looked like their audience.  They were approachable teen idols, and only got more popular after they released their follow-up single a few months later.  This song was a genuine teen anthem, a manifesto, a confident yet confused call to arms.  Before “My Generation,” “I’m Eighteen” or “Rockaway Beach” was “Rock & Roll Is Here To Stay.”

 

Rock ‘n roll is here to stay,


It will never die


It was meant to be that way,


Though I don’t know why


I don’t care what people say,


Rock ‘n roll is here to stay.

 

Of course, the boys didn’t see money from the records. Teenage stardom in 1958 meant television appearances, spots in a few exploitation flicks like the Julius LaRosa movie Let’s Rock, and life on the road. The Juniors hooked up with Alan Freed’s travelling rock ‘n’ roll show, riding a bus with fifteen other acts and getting out to play theatres, nightclubs and halls around the country. The headliner at each stop depended on whose record was where on the charts.

 

Danny & The Juniors recording 1958

 

Danny & The Juniors’ record company kept churning out the singles. They charted with a few, even hitched a ride on the Twist train, but never again reached the Top 20. In 1962, Dave White quit the group and moved west. He and John Madera wrote more hits for other people, like “You Don’t Own Me” for Lesley Gore and Len Barry’s “1-2-3.”

 

Danny & The Juniors soldiered on as a trio, and when the American teen idol rock & roll scene was destroyed by Beatlemania in 1964, went their separate ways for a while. They stayed close to Philadelphia. They took a shot at civilian life. Danny had a wife and kids. He got a job as assistant manager in a toy factory. For a while, he drove a cab.

 

Then, in 1969, in the middle of Vietnam War protests, drug culture and the Nixon administration, something called the “Oldies format” caught on at a radio station in New York City, and spread through the country. All of a sudden, the old groups from the Fifties were getting back together or reforming around whoever was still alive, and starring in rock & roll revival shows. Fifteen or more acts who’d had hits at least fifteen years earlier were trotted out the way they were on the old Alan Freed tours. Danny & The Juniors came along with their two hits. They hired Bill Carlucci to make it a foursome again, dusted off those stage moves and were back on the road.

 

I was 16 when I saw Danny & The Juniors perform at one of those shows. It was Saturday night, January 20, 1973 at the New Haven Veterans Memorial Coliseum. They were squished in the middle of a bill that included Ben E. King and a version of The Drifters, The Five Satins, The Ronettes and Jay & The Americans. The emcee (and the reason I bought a ticket) was Don Imus, then the hottest thing in radio.

 

Danny & The Juniors did their two or three songs, opening strong with “Rock & Roll Is Here To Stay,” closing with “At The Hop.” To me, all of the acts except for Imus were from a different era. I was a toddler when Danny Rapp was in the Top 20. I was looking forward to Thursday, when Neil Young would be playing the Coliseum.

 

Danny Rapp at 31 had bigger things to look forward to. Somebody had the bright idea of filming some of the big oldies shows and turning it into a movie. Let The Good Times Roll was released in May 1973. Chuck Berry, Little Richard and Fats Domino were the stars, but Danny & The Juniors were squished in the middle somewhere and that was good enough. The movie was a hit that summer, and in August came American Graffiti, George Lucas’s movie about teenagers, cruising and rock & roll in 1962, with a soundtrack filled with oldies.

 

American Graffiti was a boost but still a kick in the nuts to Danny Rapp and the Juniors. They didn’t make the soundtrack or the movie, but “At The Hop” made it to both. The song was performed in a sock hop scene by the retro rock 'n' roll band, Flash Cadillac & The Continental Kids. Kim Fowley produced the track, which was also released as a single. Flash Cadillac’s “At The Hop” didn’t intrude on the Billboard charts. Neither did Danny & The Juniors when they re-recorded the song that same year.

 

Nevertheless, the Seventies was the decade to cash in on rock & roll nostalgia. There was Happy Days, Laverne & Shirley, Grease the musical and then Grease the movie (on that soundtrack, “Rock & Roll Is Here To Stay” was performed by  Sha Na Na).  Danny & The Juniors stayed on the road, playing lounges, hotels — class joints. Only now they weren’t fresh-faced kids in sharp suits. They were men heading to middle age, with lacquered, sprayed comb-overs and matching polyester outfits with big collars. Danny Rapp didn’t dig it. His marriage busted up and it ate at him. His fear of flying got worse. After the shows, spent, he turned off the charm. He kept to himself, he and a bottle. He wasn’t fun to be around.

 

So what was the breaking point? The twentieth anniversary of singing the same two songs? Looking through the windshield at another endless highway and seeing only more of the same Holiday Inns, afternoons waking up hungover next to the same middle-aged female fans? Near the end of the decade, maybe it was Danny & The Juniors’ latest and strangest trip: another package tour, traveling by bus with another collection of acts. Only this time it wasn’t rock & roll.

 

It was vaudeville.

 

In 1978, Danny & The Juniors were booked into another version of Roy Radin’s Vaudeville Revue. Radin had hit on the vaudeville idea during the Summer of Love, back when he was a teenage publicist for the Clyde Beatty Circus. He saw how they raked in big bucks touring backwater towns with old clowns and tired elephants, so he copied the model. Radin assembled a troupe of jugglers, magicians, dancers and ventriloquists, convinced old comedian Georgie Jessel to headline, and sent them out in a bus. It worked.

 

Roy Radin’s Vaudeville Revue rolled through the Seventies, with tours featuring forgotten old stars like Cab Calloway, Gloria DeHaven and Milton Berle, comics like Jackie Vernon and Stanley Myron Handelman, and oldies groups like the Shirelles. On that 1978 tour, Danny & The Juniors would bound onto the stage following a knockout set by Tiny Tim. They’d perform “Rock and Roll Is Here to Stay” and “My Prayer” and close with “At The Hop”. Emcee Frank Fontaine — Crazy Guggenheim from the old Jackie Gleason Show — would usher them off and introduce the star, “Mr. Show Business.” That was the cue for Donald O’Connor to come out and do a soft shoe to “Mr. Bojangles.”

 

With Donald O’Connor.

 

Around this time, twenty years after Danny & The Junior’s season at the top, Roy Radin was heavy into cocaine and intent on becoming a Hollywood movie producer. He and bigtime producer Robert Evans established a production company to make a film about the legendary Harlem venue The Cotton Club. On June 10, 1983, Radin was found dead in a ditch, shot up and blown up with dynamite by hitmen hired by the woman who’d arranged the Evans deal.

 

When the vaudeville tour ended, Danny & The Juniors blew up, as well. Like a couple of Philly mob bosses, Danny Rapp and Joe Terry had a sit down and divided up the group and the territories. Joe Terry and Frank Maffei got the East Coast. Danny Rapp took the South, Midwest and West. He hired a couple of other guys and called the group Danny & The Juniors.  Terry and Maffei hired Maffei’s brother Bobby. They called their group Danny & the Juniors.  The two Danny & The Juniors went their separate ways. They did all right. They played the classy clubs. The two outfits did not overlap or collide.

 

Danny Rapp- The last ad March 9, 1983

 

There was Danny Rapp, not yet forty, living on the road and dead tired of it, driving by car from town to town with his little band, playing nightclubs and hotel lounges. He’d made decent money all those years, but he never invested or saved any. He could not see an end to the grind.

 

Twenty-five years after his summer at the top of the charts, Danny Rapp was behind the wheel, on the road with his latest version of The Juniors: a four-piece band, a singer who called himself Bobby C, and another singer, a young woman. 

 

On March 7, 1983, the group opened a month-long engagement in the brand-new Pointe Tapatio Resort overlooking Phoenix, Arizona. The place was so new they were still finishing off the last of the five hundred rooms.  Danny and his band were following a successful four-week run by a version of The Platters (that contained no original members!) in the Silver Lining Lounge of the Different Pointe of View Restaurant. Danny & The Juniors were advertised as “light-hearted nostalgic entertainment,” two shows a night, excluding Sundays. Danny would pull down about a grand a week, with a free room and half-price food and drinks, but he was feeling anything but light-hearted and nostalgic.

 

You couldn’t tell when he was performing. Onstage, Danny was a pro. After twenty-five years, he could do it on his head. Offstage, he was all too often off his head, buying too many of those half-price drinks in an attempt to erase a mistake he made by hiring his latest girl singer a few months earlier. The mistake was having sex with her. Lonely Danny fell hard for her. It was a real romance for a while, but now she wanted to keep things businesslike. Danny would see her after the show, flirting with the yokels in the bar, and it made him crazy. He drank more and his mood got darker. A couple of times, when some hick made a move on her, Danny staggered over, all five-foot-five of him, and things got ugly. Hotel security had to step in to break it up.

 

Fighting with the hotel guests didn’t sit well with the owners of this classy joint. The last week of the engagement, the girl singer told them that Danny had threatened her. She said she was afraid of him. With three shows to go, she stuffed all her things in a suitcase and flew the coop.

 

The resort’s vice president scheduled a meeting with Danny at 4:30 the following afternoon, Friday, April 1st. Ken Nagel also had booking agent Charlie Johnston in his office when he read Danny the riot act.  Johnston wasn’t happy. He’d booked Danny & Juniors to play Pittsburgh the following week.

 

“We wanted to make sure we had a quiet ending of an engagement that wasn’t so quiet during the four weeks,” Johnston said.

 

Nagel recalled that although Danny had been drinking before the incidents in question, he seemed completely sober when he showed up in his office. Yet it wasn’t as if he was paying attention. “I had to repeat things three, four times. It was as if he never quite understood,” Nagel said.

 

“He was completely out of it,” Johnston said. “Ken was reading the security reports and Danny just said, ‘That wasn’t me.'”

 

“He kept saying he was not responsible,” Nagel said. “I said, ’Danny, if you’re not responsible for your behavior, who is?’”

 

Danny responded by changing the subject. He asked for a pay advance so he could get his truck fixed.  Nagel gave it to him. April Fools. Now it was Danny’s turn to fly the coop. He packed his bags and drove away. He did not return to the Silver Lining Lounge.

 

What was left of the band, four musicians and singer Bobby C, performed that night and the next, without their star. “The show is built around him,” Bobby C said. “We pulled it off, but it wasn’t the same show.”

 

On Saturday, April 2nd, Danny Rapp wound up in the middle of the desert, about 140 miles from Pointe Tapatio. In the tiny town of Quartzsite, Arizona, he checked into one of the mobile homes that make up the Yacht Club Motel. According to La Paz County sheriff Ray Evans, he bought a .25 caliber automatic weapon that day or the next. He was seen drinking heavily at The Jigsaw, one of the town’s two bars.

 

On the afternoon of Monday, April 4, a maid at the Yacht Club Motel found Danny Rapp dead of a gunshot to the right side of his head. At least the cops were pretty sure it was Danny Rapp.  They couldn’t make a positive identification at first because the corpse’s face was blown off.  The sheriff said the shot was self-inflicted. He said bottles of booze and some money were found in the room, but no drugs. There was no suicide note, either, but there were notes on several calendars. The sheriff would not reveal the contents.

 

“It never dawned on me that he would kill himself,” Nagel said after Danny Rapp’s death was official. “He had been having quite a bit of trouble, personal problems, and we wanted to talk to him.  He just wasn’t acting like a mature adult.”

 

“It’s really too bad,” added Johnston, the booking agent. “To think he had reached the pinnacle of stardom in the 1950s and ends up in a little motel in Quartzsite, Arizona. He obviously was really despondent. I don’t know over what.”

 

Danny Rapp was 42.

 

They shipped his body the 2,300 miles back home to Philadelphia. About three dozen people showed up for his funeral at St. Agnes Roman Catholic Church. Danny Rapp was buried in New Saint Mary’s Cemetery in  Bellmawr, New Jersey, about ten miles from where he grew up.

 

When Joe Terry was asked about his former bandmate, he wasn’t very nostalgic. “Danny was an alcoholic,” he said. “He had some problems… He had trouble getting a grip.”

 

Thirty-five years after Danny Rapp shot himself in the head, sixty years since “At The Hop” went to Number One, Joe Terry and the Maffei brothers are still out there, performing as “Danny & The Juniors featuring Joe Terry.” They’re available for corporate and outdoor events, concerts, and shows in casinos and clubs. DannyndtheJuniors.com

 

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BURT KEARNS wrote the book TABLOID BABY and produces nonfiction television and documentary films. JEFF ABRAHAM is a comedy historian and public relations executive who has represented comedians from George Carlin to Andrew Dice Clay. The two of them wrote a book about performers who died on stage. It will be published in 2019.

THE LATE GREAT JOHNNY ACE

THE LATE GREAT JOHNNY ACE

Burt Kearns

June 27, 2018

 

Johnny Ace died at 25, allegedly during a game of Russian Roulette. The legend of his death not only obscures his talent but is built upon a misreading of what really happened backstage that Christmas night in 1954

 

by Burt Kearns & Jeff Abraham

 

 

Johnny Ace. The name doesn’t get much more rock & roll than that, and neither does his story. Even those who aren’t familiar with his music — Memphis R&B from the early 1950s — have heard the name, and most likely the legend attached to it. Paul Simon referenced him in his 1983 song “The Late Great Johnny Ace” (a song in which John F. Kennedy and John Lennon were made honorary “Johnny Aces”). Dave Alvin offered a more straightforward recitation of his early exit in “Johnny Ace Is Dead.” Johnny Ace was one of those tragic legendary rock & roll figures who’s remembered less for the way he played than for the way he left the building.

As legend has it, Johnny Ace went out in a most romantic way on Christmas Day 1954 — romantic like the love scene between Robert De Niro and Christopher Walken in The Deer Hunter. Johnny Ace died at 25, playing Russian Roulette, the game in which you load a bullet into one chamber of a revolver, spin the cylinder, then pull the trigger while pointing the gun at your head. It’s said to be quite a rush if you only hear “click.”

 

There’s one small catch to the legend of the late great Johnny Ace: It wasn’t Russian Roulette, and it was only a matter of luck that it wasn’t a murder-suicide.

 

Johnny Ace was born in 1929 as John Marshall Alexander Jr., the son of Baptist preacher. He served time in the Navy and a bit more in a Mississippi prison before he washed up on Memphis’s Beale Street, the bubbling cauldron of southern urban blues, in 1949. He played and toured with Bobby “Blue” Bland and B.B. King in a band called the Beale Streeters before going solo and signing with Duke Records in 1952. There, he was christened Johnny Ace and out of the box went to #1 with “My Song.”

 

That was the first of eight chart hits in a row, and the beginning of a long slog of touring, much of it with Willie Mae Thornton (also known as “Big Mama” Thornton, enshrined in rock & roll history as the first to record Leiber & Stoller’s “Hound Dog”), a trajectory that blasted him into immortality on Christmas Day, 1954.

 

Johnny Ace’s last day began the day before. He played a Christmas Eve show in Port Arthur, Texas and drove to Houston for a show on December 25th. At 9 a.m. Christmas morning, he arrived at Olivia Gibbs’ apartment. Olivia was twenty-two years old. She’d attended the University of Wisconsin, but worked as a waitress at the Club Matinee, a blues showcase nicknamed “The Cotton Club of The South.” She was Johnny’s girlfriend. She considered herself his fiancée, and hoped to marry Johnny the following June — if his divorce from his wife and mother of his two kids came through by then.

 

Olivia later told a reporter that Johnny had invited his band to her place for Christmas dinner.  Johnny, she said, wasn’t a doper and he wasn’t a boozer and he wasn’t mean. He was a prankster, always acting foolish, and well, truth be told, he was something of a boozer, after all. Johnny was drinking on Christmas morning, guzzling vodka and playing with his gun. It was the little pistol he carried, a .32 caliber number he’d bought off another musician in Florida. He was always playing with his gun. He liked to shoot at road signs and show off, “just like a little boy,” Olivia said.

 

When Olivia told Johnny to knock it off and put the weapon away, he did. Then he showed everybody the gold and three-stone diamond ring she’d bought him for Christmas. When it was time for dinner, Johnny Ace used a big knife to carve the Christmas turkey.  He was in the Christmas spirit.

 

“I loved Johnny and he loved me,” Olivia said.

 

That evening, a crowd of 3,500 showed up for the “Negro Christmas Dance” at the City Auditorium. Johnny Ace was a featured act on a bill that included Big Mama Thornton, Johnny Otis and the headliner, B.B. King. Johnny capped off the first half of the show as usual, by inviting Big Mama onstage and then driving the crowd wild with a duet on his rollicking, rocking hit “Yes, Baby.”

 

Hey-ay-ay, tell me, baby!


Yay-hey, tell me, baby,


What is wrong with you?

 

Intermission began around 11 p.m. Johnny was still pranking around in the dressing room backstage at the City Auditorium, drinking vodka, but not in as fine spirits as he’d been earlier in the day. Now he was grousing about a toothache that was killing him.  Despite the fact that thousands of fans were in the auditorium waiting for the second half of the show, he said he didn’t think he could go on.

 

There were four other people in and out of the room. Olivia Gibbs was there, along with her friend Mary Carter. So was another singer named Joe Hammond and Big Mama Thornton. Olivia crawled up onto Johnny’s lap to try to make him feel better. All the while, Johnny Ace was playing with his little .32 caliber pistol, pointing it at people in the room and pulling the trigger. With no bullet in the firing chamber, every time he pulled the trigger, the gun made a snapping sound.  Snap! Snap! He was really getting on people’s nerves.

 

Willie Mae Thornton

 

Big Mama Thornton, all six feet of her, finally had enough. “Hey, man! What the heck you doin’ with that gun? Don’t you know it might go off?”

 

“It ain’t got but one bullet in it,”  Johnny replied.

 

“Hell, it don’t take but one bullet to kill you!” Big Mama snatched the pistol, turned the chamber and a bullet tumbled into her hand. She took a swig of 100 proof Old Granddad and headed out toward her second set.

 

“Gimme the gun!” Johnny demanded as she neared the door. She handed it over. 

 

“You ain’t gonna play with it no more, is you?”

 

“Where’s the bullet?” She threw it at him.

 

Snap! Now Johnny pointed the gun at Joe Hammond.

 

Snap! Snap!

 

Now he’d gotten on Joe Hammond’s last nerve. “Damn!” Joe spat. “You snapped it at everyone else! Try it on yourself!”

 

“Now watch me,” said the prankster. “Show you it won’t shoot.” Johnny Ace had his arm around Olivia. He placed the gun to his temple. He pulled the trigger once more.

 

‘Crack!’ Johnny Ace fell to the floor.

 

Big Mama stopped dead in her tracks. She swore that when the gun went off, “that kinky hair of his shot straight out.”

 

“I thought he was just up to his usual playing until I raised his head and saw the blood,” Olivia recalled.

 

Olivia Gibbs was lucky that Johnny Ace was playing with a small-caliber revolver and that the bullet didn’t pass all the way through his brain. When he pulled the trigger, he was hugging her close. Her head was pressed right up against his.

 

None of the thousands of dancers in the auditorium heard the gunshot, because Johnny Otis and his band were onstage, playing at the time. They were in the middle of a number when Big Mama came running onto the stage in tears and grabbed the microphone. “The concert is canceled! Johnny Ace has just been killed! There ain’t gonna be no music tonight! Johnny Ace has been killed!”

 

The Associated Press story was carried in newspapers around the country the following day:  “A Memphis, Tenn. bandleader was shot to death playing Russian Roulette last night…

 

“According to the detectives, Alexander would spin the cylinder, put the gun to the head of one of his companions and pull the trigger. Each time, the bullet failed to come into the chamber. The last time Alexander tried it, however, he sat down and pulled the girl on his lap and put the gun to his head after spinning the cylinder, police said. When he pulled the trigger, the hammer clicked on the bullet, which went smashing into his head.”

 

The report was not accurate, but the story stuck.

 

Meanwhile, they carried Johnny Ace’s body back to Memphis. The Reverend Dwight “Gatemouth” Moore, a former blues singer himself, preached over the casket.

 

Duke Records, Johnny Ace’s label, didn’t waste time crying once word of the tragedy got back to Memphis. Johnny’s next single was released within days of his death, before the new year. “Pledging My Love” was produced by Johnny Otis and featured the Otis band. The opening lines were, “Forever my darling, my love will be true, always and forever, I’ll love just you.”  The record became Johnny Ace’s biggest hit, balanced at the top of the Billboard R&B charts for ten weeks beginning February 12, 1955.

 

The magazine stated that the death of Johnny Ace “created one of the biggest demands for a record that has occurred since the death of Hank Williams just over two years ago.”

 

Olivia Gibbs, the girlfriend who just missed joining Johnny Ace on his final journey, said the song had been dedicated to her. “I’ll miss those nightly phone calls,” she said. “He called me every night when he was on the road, as if he wanted to hear me for inspiration before he went on the stage.”

 

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BURT KEARNS wrote the book TABLOID BABY and produces nonfiction television and documentary films. JEFF ABRAHAM is a comedy historian and public relations executive who has represented comedians from George Carlin to Andrew Dice Clay. The two of them wrote a book about performers who died on stage. It will be published in 2019.