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Big Joe Turner (1911-1985)

The Boss of the Blues

Big Joe Turner (born Joseph Vernon Turner Jr., May 18, 1911 – November 24, 1985) was an American blues shouter from Kansas City, Missouri. Turner was born in Kansas City and first discovered his love of music through involvement in the church. He began singing on street corners for money, leaving school at age fourteen to begin working in Kansas City's club scene, first as a cook, and later as a singing bartender. He eventually became known as The Singing Barman, and worked in such venues as The Kingfish Club and The Sunset, where he and his piano playing partner Pete Johnson became resident performers. 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 entire career. His partnership with boogie-woogie pianist Pete Johnson proved fruitful. Together they headed to New York in 1936. The talent scout, John H. Hammond, invited them in 1938 to New York to appear in one of his "From Spirituals to Swing" concerts at Carnegie Hall, which was instrumental in introducing jazz and blues to a wider American audience. Due in part to their appearance at Carnegie Hall, Turner and Johnson scored a major hit with Roll 'Em Pete. The track contained one of the earliest recorded examples of a back beat. It was a song which Turner recorded many times, with various combinations of musicians, over the ensuing years. In 1939, along with boogie players Albert Ammons and Meade Lux Lewis, they began a residency at Café Society, a club in New York City, where they appeared on the same bill as Billie Holiday and Frank Newton's band. 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. In 1941, he headed to Los Angeles where he performed in Duke Ellington's revue Jump for Joy in Hollywood. L.A. became his home base for a time, and in 1945 he opened his own bar, The Blue Moon Club with Pete Johnson. Turner made lots of records, not only with Johnson but with the pianists Art Tatum and Sammy Price and with various small jazz ensembles. He recorded on several record labels, particularly National Records, and also appeared with the Count Basie Orchestra. In his career, Turner successively led the transition from big bands to jump blues to rhythm and blues, and finally to rock and roll. Turner was a master of traditional blues verses and at the legendary Kansas City jam sessions he could swap choruses with instrumental soloists for hours. 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 Ertegün, who signed him to their new recording company, Atlantic Records. Turner recorded a number of hits for them, including the blues standards, Chains of Love and Sweet Sixteen before hitting it big in 1954 with Shake, Rattle and Roll, which not only enhanced his career, turning him into a teenage favorite, but also helped to transform popular music. Although the cover version of the song by Bill Haley & His Comets, with the risqué lyrics incompletely cleaned up, was a bigger hit, many listeners sought out Turner's version and were introduced thereby to the whole world of rhythm and blues. After a number of hits in this vein, Turner left popular music behind and returned to his roots as a singer with small jazz combos, recording numerous albums in that style in the 1960s and 1970s. In 1966, Bill Haley helped revive Turner's career by lending him the Comets for a series of popular recordings in Mexico. In 1977 he recorded a version of Guitar Slim's song, The Things That I Used to Do. In the 1960s and 1970s he was reclaimed by jazz and blues, appearing at many festivals and recording for the impresario Norman Granz's Pablo label, once with his friendly rival, Jimmy Witherspoon. He also worked with the German boogie-woogie pianist Axel Zwingenberger. It is a mark of his dominance as a singer that he won the Esquire magazine award for male vocalist in 1945, the Melody Maker award for best 'new' vocalist in 1956, and the British Jazz Journal award as top male singer in 1965. His career thus stretched from the bar rooms of Kansas City in the 1920s, on to the European jazz music festivals of the 1980s. In 1983, only two years before his death, Turner was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame. He died in Inglewood, California in November 1985, at the age of seventy four of a heart attack, having suffered the earlier effects of arthritis, a stroke and diabetes. Big Joe Turner was posthumously inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1987. (quoted from wikipedia.org)

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Home → Overview → Blues Artists → Big Joe Turner