Black Ace

Texas-born Babe Kyro Lemon Turner, aka "Black Ace", was a blues guitarist who taught himself how to play the guitar on his family farm and began playing in east Texas in the late 1920s. He hooked up with Smokey Hogg and Oscar Woods, who played a Hawaiian-style guitar on his lap, and the group's style of music soon became known as "Hawaii meet the Delta". In 1937, he recorded six numbers for Decca Records, including a song called "Black Ace". That year he began his own radio show on KFIZ in Fort Worth. He used that song as his theme song, and eventually started calling himself Black Ace. In 1941, he appeared in the low-budget The Blood of Jesus (1941), a musical made for the African-American market (theaters at the time, especially in the South, were strictly segregated). In 1943, he was drafted into the US Army, and soon gave up playing music entirely. In 1960, Chris Strachwitz, the owner of Arhoolie Records, got hold of him and persuaded him to record an album for the label. The result was "I'm the Boss Card in Your Hand". Two years later he made an appearance in the documentary, The Blues (1962), which was his final performance. He died of cancer in Fort Worth, TX, in 1972.