Johnny S Black
Johnny S Black
Although his career had more downs than ups, songwriter andmulti-instrumentalist Johnny S. Black earned his fame with two major hits. He reaped a fortune from one, posthumous fame from the other.
Born September 30, 1891, Black was the only child of John L. and Jeanie Black. His family moved to Hamilton from St. Louis, where his father operated a music store. His father was a one-man-band vaudeville act, and by the time Johnny was 14 he played cornet, violin, piano, and drums. He performed for a while with his father and then started his own one-man band. At the age of 17, he left Hamilton for Chicago, where he scraped out a living with the one-man-band act, wowing Windy City audiences by playing two cornets at the same time.
From there, he went to New York where he also worked as a prizefighter. While there, he composed the two songs that earned him his fame (and an Ohio Historical Marker near RiversEdge Amphitheatre).
Although it wasn’t a hit until nearly 30 years later, in 1915 “Paper Doll” was the first of the two hits that he wrote, but there are conflicting stories of its origins. One story says that the woman whom Black loved at the time, possibly his first wife, announced that she was leaving him as he prepared to enter the boxing ring for a bout at Madison Square Garden. She was in love with a songwriter, she said, not a boxer. Black lost the fight and composed the song for his lost love.
The alternate story says that the song was actually written under the title “My Doll” by a show girl, Shirley, who became Black’s first wife. This story does have some credibility in that after the song became a hit, Shirley was awarded a share of the royalties in federal court.
A couple of years later, Black wrote “Dardanella,” and the song received a Tin Pan Alley polish by Fred Fisher and Felix Bernard. “Dardanella” became a national success in 1919. The song’s success was tainted by a lawsuit that Bernard filed against Black, saying he only received $100 for writing the music while Black received $50,000 in royalties and only wrote the lyrics. Bernard admitted that he was a hungry composer and took the hundred bucks because the publisher told him “Dardanella” was too hard to play and wouldn’t sell. But it sold 1.6 million times as sheet music and six million times as a recorded instrumental. Most people didn’t even know that it had words.
After Black booked a New York gig at Coney Island on a bill with Jimmy Durante and Eddie Cantor, he soon was booking prestigious clubs in Manhattan. With his success, he started throwing lavish parties which attracted the stylish Broadway ladies and his drinking escalated. Although he reportedly earned as much as $50,000 from “Dardanella,” he had nothing to show for it. A smooth talker as well as a talented performer, Black was dubbed “the mystery man of Tin Pan Alley.”
He decided to try his luck in London and was modestly successful, but he spent more than he earned and was evicted from his hotel, which held on to his luggage and all of his instruments to partly satisfy the debt. In order to make his way back home, he walked to the London docks and got a job shoveling coal for a steam ship headed for New York.
Back in New York, 1924 or so, he met the young comic Joe E. Lewis. They became “The Dardanella Boys.” Although he was again earning money, Black’s drinking habit kept him broke, and he eventually sold or pawned everything he owned.
As a last-ditch effort to revive his career, Black threw a big dinner party in his apartment and invited all of New York’s top music publishers. At an opportune time, Black pulled out a violin and with a canary on his shoulder, played a tune he called “Paper Doll,” a re-working of the tune “My Doll” that his first wife might have written for him. His ploy worked. A little. A publisher gave him $25 cash for the tune, but it was only enough for Black to pay the catering bill for the party.
A few weeks later, his drinking proved too much for Lewis, and when the Dardanella Boys took their act to Chicago and Black hit the stage too blasted to perform, Lewis decided to go it alone. He became a major star, enjoying national stardom and sold out shows across the country, while Black continued his slide.
At age 33, Black returned to Hamilton where he finally hit rock bottom. He found himself in Judge Pater’s court on an intoxication charge. Knowing Black’s history, Judge Pater offered him a choice: write three songs in the next week or pay a $100 fine.
Black was so grateful for the second chance that he wrote five songs and teamed up with Harold Hovel, organist for the Rialto Theater and noted whistler. Their first gig was at a local social club and they booked the entire month of September 1929 in a Covington, Kentucky, radio station.
Though his comeback was modest, it was enough for him to leverage enough money to open up Club Dardanella in a former speakeasy on Dixie Highway in 1935. He married a second time, but it lasted less than a year when she filed for divorce on the grounds of unspecified acts of extreme cruelty and gross neglect.
Then one Friday night in June 1936, the day before his divorce was to be finalized, two young men and two very young women, all from Mt. Healthy, were having drinks at Club Dardanella. One of the young men asked Black, who was tending bar, for nickels for the jukebox. He gave Black a quarter and Black gave him a nickel. The man asked for the other four nickels and Black said he had “nothing coming.” A little later, Black and the other man argued over 70 cents in change left on the bar.
Subsequent testimony told conflicting stories about who first made the offer to settle the matter outside, but after about 15 minutes fussing around the bar, outside they went. All witnesses did agree on one thing: Just one punch was thrown, Black on the receiving end. He went down hard, hitting his head on the concrete front steps of his club. The young man who threw the punch helped Black’s mother and stepfather carry the unconscious Black to the kitchen, where they applied cold towels and revived him.
Black slept away the next day, missed his divorce hearing, and went back to work Sunday, but lapsed into unconsciousness again that night. His stepfather took him to Mercy Hospital, where he remained comatose until Tuesday, when he died.
Police located his assailant and charged him with murder, but the grand jury refused to indict him. It wasn’t clear that Johnny wasn’t asking for trouble.
His death did not end the Johnny S. Black story.
Six years later, the tune “Paper Doll,” the possibly-stolen song that paid Black’s catering bil,l revived the late songwriter’s career for one final encore. As it turned out, the publisher did indeed release the sheet music for “Paper Doll” in 1930, but never promoted it, and it slipped into obscurity. When the popular Mills Brothers from Dayton heard a cafe singer perform it, they had a hard time tracking down the publishing rights, but once they did, they sold over a million records, remained No. 1 on the charts for twelve weeks, and a second printing of the sheet music sold over 700,000 units.