Known variously as 'the Boss of the Blues' and 'Big Joe Turner' (due to his 6'2", 300+ lbs stature), Turner was born in Kansas City and first discovered his love of music through involvement in the church. Turner's father was killed in a train accident when Joe was only four years old. He began singing on street corners for money, leaving school at age 14 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 honour and sang it throughout his entire career.
At that time Kansas City was a wide-open town run by 'Boss' Tom Pendergast. Despite this, the clubs were subject to frequent raids by the police, but as Turner recounts, "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."
His partnership with boogie-woogie pianist Pete Johnson proved fruitful. Together they headed to New York in 1936, where they appeared on a bill with Benny Goodman, but as Turner recounts, "After our show with Goodman, we auditioned at several places, but New York wasn't ready for us yet, so we headed back to KC." Eventually they were spotted by the talent scout, John H Hammond in 1938, who invited them back 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. He appeared as a singing policeman in a sketch called He's on the Beat. LA became his home base for a time, and in 1945 he opened his own bar, the Blue Moon Club with Pete Johnson.
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 favourite, 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. Elvis Presley showed he needed no such introduction. His version of 'Shake, Rattle and Roll' combined Turner's lyrics with Haley's arrangement but was not successful as a single release.
Amidst the rock songs he found time to cut the classic the Boss of the Blues album.
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 (at the age of twelve when he performed with a pencilled moustache and his father's hat), on to the European jazz music festivals of the 1980s.
In 1983, only two years before his death, Big Joe was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame. He died in Inglewood, California in November 1985, at the age of 74 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.
Most Famous Recordings:
Roll 'Em, Pete - 1938 (available in many versions over the years. Used for the million-dollar first scene in Spike Lee's film, Malcolm X).
Chains of Love - 1951 (this was Turner's first million seller. The song was written by 'Nugetre' Ahmet Ertegün, Van Wallis (music), and the disc reached the million by 1954).
Honey Hush - 1953
Shake, Rattle and Roll - 1954
Flip Flop and Fly - 1955 (has sold a million through the years. The song was written by Charles Calhoun and Turner, although credited to the latter's wife, Lou Willie Turner).
Cherry Red - 1956
Corrine, Corrina - 1956 (The fourth million seller, with adaption by J Mayo Williams, Mitchell Parish and Bo Chatmon in 1932. This disc was number 41 and spent ten weeks in the Billboard chart.)
Wee Baby Blues - 1956 (A song Turner had been singing since his Kingfish Club days.)
Love Roller Coaster - 1956
Midnight Special - 1957