Joseph Vernon "Big Joe" Turner Jr. (May 18, 1911 – November 24, 1985) was an American blues shouter from Kansas City, Missouri.[3] According to songwriter Doc Pomus, "Rock and roll would have never happened without him". Turner's greatest fame was due to his rock and roll recordings in the 1950s, particularly "Shake, Rattle and Roll", but his career as a performer endured from the 1920s into the 1980s.[4]
Turner was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1987, with the Hall lauding him as "the brawny voiced 'Boss of the Blues'".[4]AllMusic called Turner "the premier blues shouter of the postwar era".[3]
Career
Early days
Turner was born May 18, 1911, in Kansas City, Missouri, United States.[5] His father was killed in a train accident when Turner was four years old. He sang in his church, and on street corners for money. He left school at age fourteen to work in Kansas City's nightclubs, first as a cook and later as a singing bartender. He became known as "The Singing Barman", and worked in such venues as the Kingfish Club and the Sunset, and would frequently perform at these venues alongside his friend Pete Johnson on piano.[4] The Sunset was managed by Piney Brown. It featured "separate but equal" facilities for white patrons. Turner wrote "Piney Brown Blues" in his honor and sang it throughout his career.[6]
At that time Kansas City nightclubs were subject to frequent raids by the police; Turner said, "The Boss man would have his bondsmen down at the police station before we got there. We'd walk in, sign our names and walk right out. Then we would cabaret until morning."[7]
His partnership with Johnson proved fruitful.[4] Together they went to New York City in 1936,[5] where they appeared on a playbill with Benny Goodman, but as Turner recounted, "After our show with Goodman, we auditioned at several places, but New York wasn't ready for us yet, so we headed back to K.C."[8] Eventually they were seen by the talent scout John Hammond in 1938,[5] who invited them back to New York to appear in one of his From Spirituals to Swing concerts at Carnegie Hall, which were instrumental in introducing jazz and blues to a wider American audience.[4]
In part because of their appearance at Carnegie Hall, Turner and Johnson had a major success with the song "Roll 'Em Pete".[4] The track was basically a collection of traditional blues lyrics. It was a song that Turner recorded many times, with various musicians, over the ensuing years.
1939 to 1950
In 1939, along with the boogie-woogie pianists Albert Ammons and Meade Lux Lewis, Turner and Johnson began a residency at Café Society, a nightclub in New York City, where they appeared on the same playbill as Billie Holiday and Frankie Newton's band.[4] Besides "Roll 'Em, Pete", Turner's best-known recordings from this period are probably "Cherry Red", "I Want a Little Girl" and "Wee Baby Blues". "Cherry Red" was recorded in 1939 for the Vocalionlabel, with Hot Lips Page on trumpet and a full band in attendance.[3] During the next year Turner contracted with Decca and recorded "Piney Brown Blues" with Johnson on piano.[3]
In 1941, he went to Los Angeles and performed in Duke Ellington's revue Jump for Joy in Hollywood.[6] He appeared as a singing policeman in a comedy sketch, "He's on the Beat". Los Angeles was his home for a time, and during 1944 he worked in Meade Lux Lewis's Soundies musical movies. He sang on the soundtrack recordings but was not present for filming, and his vocals were mouthed by the comedian Dudley Dickerson for the camera. In 1945 Turner and Pete Johnson established the Blue Moon Club, a bar in Los Angeles.
Turner was a significant figure in the development of rhythm and blues. According to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, Turner and Louis Jordan laid the foundation for R&B in the 1940s, "cutting one swinging rhythm & blues masterpiece after another".[14]
In 1951, while performing with the Count Basie Orchestra at Harlem's Apollo Theater as a replacement for Jimmy Rushing, he was spotted by Ahmet and Nesuhi Ertegun, who contracted him to their new recording company, Atlantic Records.[4] Turner recorded a number of successes for them, including the blues standards, "Chains of Love"[17] and "Sweet Sixteen".[3] Many of his vocals are punctuated with shouts to the band members, as in "Boogie Woogie Country Girl" ("That's a good rockin' band!", "Go ahead, man! Ow! That's just what I need!" ) and "Honey Hush" (he repeatedly sings, "Hi-yo, Silver!", a famous command used by the Lone Ranger on his popular radio show, to his horse named Silver). Turner's records reached the top of the rhythm-and-blues charts. Some of his songs were so risqué that some radio stations refused to play them, but they received much play on jukeboxes.
Turner had great success during 1954 with "Shake, Rattle and Roll", which significantly boosted his career, turning him into a teenage favorite, and also helped to transform popular music.[4] During the song, Turner yells at his woman to "get outta that bed, wash yo' face an' hands" and comments that she's "wearin' those dresses, the sun comes shinin' through! I can't believe my eyes, all that mess belongs to you."[18] He sang it on film for the 1955 theatrical feature Rhythm and Blues Revue.
Although the cover version of the song by Bill Haley & His Comets, with the risqué lyrics partly omitted, was a greater sales success, many listeners sought out Turner's version and were introduced thereby to rhythm and blues. Elvis Presley's version of "Shake, Rattle and Roll" combined Turner's lyrics with Haley's arrangement, but was not a successful single.
The song "Corrine, Corrina" was another great seller during 1956.[3] In addition to the rock music songs, he released Boss of the Blues album in 1956.[15] "(I'm Gonna) Jump for Joy", his last hit, reached the US R&B record chart on May 26, 1958.[4]
He won the Esquire magazine award for male vocalist in 1945.
He won the Melody Maker award for best "new" vocalist of 1956.
Returning to Jazz
After a number of successes in popular music, Turner resumed singing with small jazz combos, recording numerous albums in that style during the 1960s and 1970s.[4] In 1966, Bill Haley helped revive Turner's career by lending him the Comets for a series of popular recordings for the Orfeón label in Mexico.[3]
In 1965, he toured in England with the trumpeter Buck Clayton and the trombonist Vic Dickenson, accompanied by Humphrey Lyttelton and his band.[20] Part of a studio concert was televised by the BBC and later issued on DVD. A sound recording of a club appearance made during this tour is not thought of sufficient sound quality to justify commercial issue. He also toured Europe with Count Basie and his orchestra. He won the British Jazz Journal award as top male singer of 1965.
In 1983, two years before his death, Turner was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame.[21] That same year, the album Blues Train was released by Muse Records; the album featured Turner with the band Roomful of Blues.[4]
Turner's career endured from the barrooms of Kansas City in the 1920s (when at the age of twelve he performed with a pencilled moustache and his father's hat)[22] to European jazz festivals of the 1980s.
Death and tributes
Turner died of heart failure in November 1985, at the age of 74, in Inglewood, California, having suffered from effects of arthritis, a stroke and diabetes.[23] His funeral included musical tributes from Etta James and Barbara Morrison.[24] He was buried at Roosevelt Memorial Park in Gardena, California.
The New York Times music critic Robert Palmer wrote of "his voice, pushing like a Count Basie solo, rich and grainy as a section of saxophones, which dominated the room with the sheer sumptuousness of its sound." In announcing Turner's death, the British music magazine NME, in its December 1985 issue, described him as "the grandfather of rock and roll".[25]
According to the Blues Hall of Fame, Turner "was a king of the jump blues genre, a boogie woogie belter, progenitor of rhythm & blues and rock 'n' roll, and a respected performer in jazz circles.[26]
Dave Alvin wrote a song about an evening he spent with Turner, entitled "Boss of the Blues", for his 2009 album, Dave Alvin and the Guilty Women. Alvin discussed the song in issue 59 of the Blasters Newsletter.[27] Alvin later collaborated with his brother and former Blaster Phil Alvin on a second reunion album, Lost Time, released in 2015, containing four covers of songs by Turner, including "Cherry Red", "Wee Baby Blues" and "Hide and Seek". The brothers met Turner in Los Angeles, where he was playing in clubs on Central Avenue and living in the Adams district between tours in the 1960s. Phil Alvin opened for Turner a few times with his first band, Delta Pacific. Turner continued mentoring the Alvin brothers until his death in 1985. He is pictured on the back cover of Lost Time.[28][29][30]
