Johnny Ace

The Rev. Johnny Ace

Excerpts from Johnny Ace, An American Genius by Terry Hammons, Ph.D.

“I met Johnny Ace twenty years ago when I caught him stealing the battery from my car. Suffice it to say that we developed a friendship based on our mutual interest in American pop culture in general and popular music in particular. I’ve watched his work evolve and I’ve come to know him as well as anyone can. Often inarticulate and always paranoid, Ace reveals little about his personal history. This much is known. He was born in the early 1930s in east Texas. There was trouble as a boy and he took to the road. At some point he picked up the rudiments of the guitar and harmonica. In 1954, Ace was released from prison in Oklahoma and migrated to St. Louis to resume his life as a pick-up player. That brought him into the emerging rock’n’roll business. For the next decade he was consistently at its fringe. Ace was disfigured in a prison riot in the 1970s and has been reclusive since then. On the positive side, he took part in an art-based rehab program for recovering addicts and began seriously developing his interest in the visual arts. Ace’s technique is unusual, but sophomoric. He conceives a picture, decoupages the photos on a board and proceeds as if it were a coloring book. Everything but flesh gets painted and laminated with multiple coats of polyurethane, an effect that creates what one critic called “a Coney Island on acid” sense. As Ace says, “any fool can do it.” In short, it is Ace’s message, not the medium, that invites serious interest.”