Oscar “Buddy” Woods & Black Ace

Complete Recorded Works (1930 – 1937)

Featuring the recordings of:

Jimmie Davis (white artist), vocal; accompanied possibly by “Dizzy Head” (Ed Schaffer), guitar; Oscar Woods, guitar. Shreveport Home Wreakers: Ed Schaffer, vocal / guitar / kazoo; Oscar Woods, guitar. Jimmie Davis (white artist), vocal; accompanied possibly by “Dizzy Head” (Ed Schaffer), guitar; Oscar Woods, guitar. Jimmie Davis, Oscar Woods, vocal duet; accompanied by Ed Schaffer, guitar; Oscar Woods, guitar. Jimmie Davis (white artist), vocal; accompanied possibly by “Dizzy Head” (Ed Schaffer), guitar; Oscar Woods, guitar. Oscar Woods (The Lone Wolf), vocal / guitar. Buddy Woods with the Wampus Cats: Oscar Woods, vocal / guitar; unknown, 2nd guitar; unknown, piano; unknown, stand-up bass. Kitty Gray and her Wampus Cats: Kitty Gray, piano; Oscar Woods, guitar; unknown, stand-up bass; unknown, drums. Buddy Woods (Accompanied by “Wampus Cats”): Oscar Woods, vocal / guitar; unknown, trumpet (except on 18); unknown, piano; unknown, 2nd guitar; unknown, stand-up bass; unknown, drums. Black Ace (Buck Turner), vocal / guitar; probably Smokey Hogg, 2nd guitar.

Genres: Blues, Country Blues, Louisiana Blues, Texas Blues, Jimmie Davis, Bottleneck-slide Guitar, Country Blues Guitar, Female Blues, National Guitar

Abridged from this album’s original booklet notes. Blues musicians from the Deep South tend to use the bottleneck-slide or slide guitar style more often than other “down-home” blues players, and Black Ace and Oscar “Buddy” Woods were two of the best musicians to perform in this manner. Oscar Woods, a street singer since 1925, teamed with Ed Schaffer to record two selections for Victor at their May, 1930 Memphis field session. Their record was issued as by the Shreveport Homewreckers and featured Schaffer’s gritty vocal and kazoo supported by their twin slide guitars. They returned to the studio about two years later for a session almost certainly arranged by Jimmie Davis, who was in Dallas for a session that lasted several days. The duo played on four sides: Saturday Night Stroll, Sewing Machine Blues, Red Night Gown, and Davis’s Salty Dog. Davis went on to claim authorship of You Are My Sunshine and was twice elected governor of Louisiana. In the early 1930s, however, he was a struggling hillbilly and singer with a taste for the yodelling of Jimmie Rodgers and black blues music. Sewing Machine Blues is a strangely effective, almost eerie blues performance that belies Davis’s later political and Christian song-writing career. Five years after recording with Davis, Oscar Woods travelled south to New Orleans for a solo Decca recording session that included his theme song, Lone Wolf Blues. Two more brief commercial sessions for Vocalion followed in 1937 and 1938, this time with a small band – The Wampus Cats. Nothing is known of Ed Schaffer, who seems to have drifted out-of-town in the middle 1930s. Babe Kyro Lemon Turner spent much of his life about two hundred miles due west of Shreveport in and what is now the Dallas / Fort Worth metroplex. In the early 1930s the Black Ace temporarily migrated to Shreveport and teamed with Oscar Woods. By 1936 he’d moved to Fort Worth and secured work as a musician and broadcast over a local station KFJZ from 1936 to 1941. Turner even appeared in the film “The Blood of Jesus” in 1941. Known as “The Black Ace“, Turner first came into the ARC field studio in April, 1936, but his two selections Bonus Man Blues and Black Ace Blues were never issued. Nearly one year later he returned to Dallas for a Decca field session that also included pianists Black Ivory King and Alex Moore as well as Blind Norris and Andrew Hogg. The six selections on this album, most of which are compositions based on traditional themes like alcohol, women and Santa Claus come from this session. Chris Strachwitz, during a field trip to Texas in 1960 in the company of Paul Oliver, came across the Black Ace and recorded him including, of course, his theme song, Black Ace and Mr. Turner’s unique slide guitar and vocals were introduced to a new audience of blues enthusiasts.

Kip Lornell Smithsonian Institution Copyright 1992 Document Records

DOCD-5143