Johnny Nace - Blue Notes (Rimrock 271), 1968
Johnny Nace was a Missouri based artist that enjoyed a long career in country music during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. He was regionally well-known and had a few records that sold good regionally. He also also known to rockabilly audiences for his 1950s and early 1960s singles.
John Percy "Johnny Nace" was born in Knob Noster, Missouri, in 1934, and grew up on a farm outside of nearby Warrensburg. His father was a musician, as had his grandfather and great-grandfather been, so music was rooted deeply in the family. Naturally, Nace started playing guitar and got his first job at age 15, playing square dances with a fiddler. He then became part of the radio show “Hillbilly Jamboree” in Sedalia, Missouri. Nace also worked as a DJ on KOKO in Warrensburg, on KDRO in Sedalia, and later hosted the "Circle Six Ranch" on KMOS-TV.
By 1956, Nace was part of the Missouri Valley Boys that performed on KSIS in Sedalia. The group also included Joe Lender, Goodson Merriott, and F.D. Johnson, who became a recording artist in his own right. Nace, Johnson and the band recorded their first singles in 1958 for the local Marshall, Missouri, based Jan record label. From that point on, Nace continued to record for various labels throughout the 1960s and 1970s.
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| Johnny Nace and the Midnighters, 1960s with Nace (guitar) and Joe Greene (steel guitar) |
In the early 1960s, he formed his band called “The Midnighters” and began recording for Nashville Records in 1962, a subsidiary of Starday Records. He then switched to Topic, another Nashville company, and had a regional hit in 1966 with his first release on the label, “Midnight Train to Georgia”, selling about 20,000 copies. Country Song Round-Up called him a "promising vocal talent" in 1965: "Johnny is one of country music's most promising vocal talents. He is a former star of central Missouri's very popular television show 'The Circle Six Ranch', which was originated from the studios of KMOS-TV, channel six [...]." The promising sales also got him a guest spot on Ernest Tubb's Midnight Jamboree on WSM.
In 1968 he recorded two songs that eventually wound up on Wayne Raney’s Rimrock Records from Concord, Arkansas. Nace recorded both tracks in Kansas City with the Woodchoppers, a band that he had founded earlier that year and included Nace on vocals and guitar, Doug Mastin on steel guitar, Bill McCanally on piano, Bill Acres on bass, and Chuck Addleman on drums. The two songs were “Blue Notes” and “The Kind You Find Tonight”, which were initially released on C.A.R.S. Records – a Kansas City based label. The tracks were then leased to Rimrock and issued again the same year on that label. "Blue Notes" was co-written by Delores (or Dolores) Tolbert, who recorded around the same time for Sonny Deckelman's Van-Deck label out of Harrisburg, Arkansas. She later managed the Jonesboro, Arkansas, bluegrass band "Shady Hill".
His 1969 single on Throne Records, "Sherry Ann", was a good seller as well and Billboard predicted it to reach the Hot Country Songs - which it did not, unfortunately. Nevertheless, Nace continued to perform and record throughout the next decades. By the 1970s, his band was again called the Midnighters and performed in Missouri. His sons Dave and Jimmy also became musicians, leading a rockabilly band in the 1980s that sometimes included their father. Johnny Nace passed away from a heart attack in 1990 at the age of 56 years.
Sources
• Discogs
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