Introduction
Flexible in his dress code, he performed first as a hat-check man, then bartender, and later as a bouncer at local clubs. His projection and powerful voice started to attract attention when Big Joe and the pianist Pete Johnson started performing together.
Their Carnegie Hall performance in 1938 was their big break and Turner’s career took off. Big Joe was a prolific vocalist who had numerous hits in the 1950s, including ‘Shake, Rattle, and Roll’. These songs bridged blues to rock ’n’ roll, earning him designation as an ‘early rock and roll pioneer’.
During the 1950s, artists including Elvis Presley and Bill Haley emulated Turner’s vocal style as he learned it from the early blues and jazz performers. Eventually referred to as ‘The Boss of the Blues’, he never stopped touring until he died in 1985.
Big Joe Turner’s Early Life
Big Joe Turner was born on 18 May 1911 as Joseph Vernon Turner Jr in Kansas City, Missouri. His dad, a railroad worker, was killed in a train accident when Big Joe was just four years old, and his mother, Rosa Lee, a hotel cleaner who would shape Big Joe’s upbringing, raised him and his sister.
Turner was steeped in the nightlife of Kansas City, whose nightclubs, juke joints, and honky-tonks were the bedrock of the jazz and blues scene. He sang his first lead in church, cultivating his rich, strong voice, and by the age of 13, he was gigging in neighborhood nightclubs. At age 14, he took up the job of singing bartender at the Sunset Club, where he met the boogie-woogie and jump-blues pianist Pete Johnson. This partnership was to become legendary.
Turner’s first jobs included working in clubs and speakeasies around town, which exposed him to almost every genre of popular music, along with people who loved and practiced it with flair and passion. That early testing ground helped create a stunningly charismatic young man, instantaneously at home in front of an audience. Turner absorbed the fervor and expressive energy of Kansas City’s music scene, which colored his early style and performances.
Big Joe Turner’s Bartending Days
Joseph Vernon – aka Big Joe Turner – can trace his lineage back to the dirt roads of Kansas City where he was born in 1911 as a ‘singing bouncer’ in a black and tan club, serving drinks and entertaining patrons over a 15-year period from the mid-1920s. His unique kind of blues style came from growing up around live music and ‘colorful’ crowds.
His time bartending taught him the art of addressing crowds that would later serve him well as a performer – and he learned his keen sense of showmanship by honing his skill as an entertainer. Turner had developed the voice and stage presence that would become hallmarks of his career. Singing at a bar makes for a good warm-up. It likely inspired his shifts into blues and boogie-woogie.
Yet in the early 1930s, Turner found a new gig with another pianist, Pete Johnson, at the Sunset and other Kansas City clubs (and, in 1938, at Carnegie Hall, in John Hammond’s ‘From Spirituals to Swing’, a smash concert in the legendary hall that brought Turner onto the national stage).
Being a bartender and partial side-line blues performer in Kansas City clubs helped to shape Turner’s musical style as one of manic energy and a true appreciation of legacy, especially within the blues. It was also the entry point for a career that propelled him to worldwide fame as a pioneer in rhythm and blues.
Big Joe Turner’s Breakthrough in Music
Big Joe Turner was born in Kansas City in 1911, as a bartender and bouncer at local clubs. He’d make a few dollars on the side, singing when asked, until he ‘soon realized that his voice could carry, so I decided to start singing out loud’. Two decades into his working bar life, the pianist Pete Johnson befriended Turner. The pair famously painted the wall of the club they worked in. Turner’s wide, powerful voice was perceived nationally in 1938 when he and Johnson performed on stage at John Hammond’s landmark ‘From Spirituals to Swing’ concert in Carnegie Hall in New York City.
In his first records, such as ‘Roll ’Em Pete’ and ‘Cherry Red’, Turner also demonstrated his style of blues shouting. His collaborations with famous musicians such as Count Basie and Meade Lux Lewis would cement his reputation before hit songs such as ‘Honey You Know That I Love You’ (1952) demonstrated his ease and comfort with the emerging amalgam of blues with the new form of rock and roll that would define music throughout the 1950s.
One of his epiphanies came with ‘Shake, Rattle and Roll’ (1954), a hit that helped provide a conduit between blues and rock and roll, passing it on to legends such as Elvis Presley and Bill Haley. With that ever-bulging voice and fierce dancing style of his 1954 version, his performances caused black and white patrons alike to throw caution (and on occasion each other) to the wind.
He continued to record and perform throughout his career. In his work, we can see the development of American music until his death. From his beginning, a juke-joint bartender, to the music raconteur, he blazed a path that we still follow with some joy.
Big Joe Turner’s Rise To Fame
Big Joe Turner is one of the lions of the blues and, indeed, at the very heart of rock and roll. He had a distinctive rough-edged singing style and a dynamic stage presence. Turner began performing in the 1920s in small clubs and bars in Kansas City and surrounding areas. His earliest periods in the music business included stints working with the pianist Pete Johnson.
Turner’s big breakthrough came in 1938 when he performed at John Hammond’s ‘Spirituals to Swing’ concert at Carnegie Hall – he was already thought of as a great blues singer – and at that concert, he recorded ‘Roll ‘Em Pete’ with Johnson, which became a hit and a classic, one of the first boogie-woogie tracks.
By the 1940s, Turner had moved to New York City and was a fixture at the legendary Café Society nightclub. His appearances there helped to solidify his reputation within the jazz and blues worlds. In 1951, Turner signed with Atlantic Records. The next year, King and Atkinson released his first major hit for Atlantic: ‘Chains of Love’ – ‘Rocket 88’, in other words, had a direct descendant.
And one can’t underestimate Turner’s place in general musical history, as he charted new territory for a generation or two of musicians and music. His 1954 song ‘Shake, Rattle and Roll’ was a key factor in the process of transition from the blues to rock ’n’ roll, as it prefigured, almost exactly, a major innovation in early rock – the classic strut-and-swerve ‘n’ roll groove. This ‘boogie-woogie’ foundation contained in that one song united the blues and jazz with early rock in just two minutes and 45 seconds. The same can be said to some extent of ‘Flip, Flop and Fly’ (1953).
Big Joe Turner’s booming vocal style and implacable stage personality inspired almost every post-war blues and rock musician. If someone had ever needed to provide a definition of rock’n’roll, anywhere in the world, it would instantly and adamantly have pointed towards Turner’s signature line, ‘shake, rattle, and roll.’ His work with Atlantic Records and other labels made him a landmark in the development of popular music, thereby ensuring his legacy into infinity.
Big Joe Turner’s Challenges and Triumphs
There were so many obstacles for Big Joe Turner to overcome: growing up a Black man in Jim Crow America; earning a living in a cut-throat business with slim prospects for a person of color; and, as an artist, demanding respect in an industry that routinely denied any kind of recognition to anyone but white musicians.
Starting out in clubs close to home, trying to eke out a living gigging for $15 a night, he built a repertoire that met with a great deal of resentment from mainstream audiences and music-industry gatekeepers before a series of hits, including ‘Shake, Rattle and Roll’ in 1949-50 helped make him a star. Even then, there was always the need to make space for new styles, and the next breakout band of the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s.
One of his most famous shows came when he was booked to play the Apollo in Harlem where he alienated the audience with his blues sounds. He later won them over with his loud, powerful voice and showman style, eventually receiving a standing ovation. Nearly everyone at the show sensed this would be the beginning of a legendary run for the singer.
Turner’s personal life mirrored his career: he battled obesity and related health problems, and his underperformance foreshadowed his 1930s arrests for public-order offenses as well as a career troubled by pursuits that kept him out of town. Even when he could no longer enjoy success, he moved to California and performed there until the 1980s, when failing health left him limited options.
To the end, Turner seemed like a gift that wouldn’t quit, someone who turned personal and professional defeats into both a professional career and a legacy. His legacy has impacted the next generations, and his story of resiliency, reinvention, and endurance is well worth telling.
The Legacy and Influence of Big Joe Turner.
Big Joe Turner – ‘the Boss of the Blues’ as he is often called – was born in Kansas City in 1911 and, beginning in the 1920s, left behind an immense musical legacy. Turner’s baritone voice and energetic and often comedic presence contributed to his reputation.
He was an early innovator of jump blues, a precursor to rock ’n’ roll. His signature song, ‘Shake, Rattle and Roll’ (1954), bridging blues and rock and roll, became a classic, setting the standard for others, including Elvis Presley and Bill Haley, while Turner’s ecstatic style and raw intensity shaped the template for rock and roll.
Future artists looking to jazz up the blues, for example, tapped into Turner’s sway over rhythm and blues, a basis of popular music and rock ’n’ roll from the 1950s. Ray Charles eventually paid tribute to Turner with the salute ‘for Little Walter’ at the end of his song ‘Ain’t Nobody Here But Us Chickens’ in 1950, but many others had done the same in various ways. Chuck Berry called his ‘Beautiful Delilah’ (1955) ‘my version’ of a song that ‘Little Walter handed to me’. In a 1957 recording, bluesman Big Joe Williams namechecks Turner on a song entitled ‘Junior Parker Has a New Pair of Shoes’. Little Richard did both, as he did on his 1957 LP Little Richard’s Greatest Hits.
Turner won a Grammy Award in 1984 for his album Blues Train and was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1987. Turner’s musical influence is still recognized in blues and rock.
Big Joe Turner’s legacy will live on but for now, he was the man who helped shape the sound of American music that influenced blues and rock and roll and helped the future creators pave the way to inventive music-making for generations to come.
Conclusion
Big Joe Turner first cut his teeth as a blues shouter in local blues and jazz clubs. Using his monster-sized voice, Turner became a regional sensation in the 1930s and developed a reputation touring the US with boogie-woogie piano men such as Pete Johnson. His 1954 party song ‘Shake, Rattle and Roll’ managed to fuse boogie-woogie and jump blues, and nicely bridged the gap between blues and rock ’n’ roll.
Turner recorded until his death in 1985 and he often said he made a living for more than 50 years performing his music. Unsurprisingly, due to his broad musical influences and range, Turner was known as ‘Boss of the Blues’, and was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1987.
Turner’s appeal wasn’t confined to underground blues fans alone. He appealed to many, and his movie appearances such as soundtrack contributions to Stormy Weather (1943), the franchise film The Big Bopper (1965), and a small role in the Rodney Dangerfield comedy Easy Money (1983) all suggest Turner was a popular player. Turner’s manic performance style greatly inspired many rock artists of future generations, with his peak years being the 1950s and ’60s.