Big Joe Turner - The Boss Is Back Extended Liner Notes
Microphones were an unnecessary extravagance whenever Big Joe Turner stepped up to belt the blues. His booming pipes could knock down even the best-built wall like a sonic earthquake. Blessed with a permanently ingrained stockpile of interchangeable lyrics that seemed to work just fine for any occasion, Big Joe could effortlessly sing a few dozen stanzas of a rollicking jump blues, top them off with an infectious round of “Bye-byes” or “Hi-ho Silvers,” and leave his crowd eagerly wanting more.
Turner was the unlikeliest rock and roll star to emerge within the genre’s initial vanguard, more than holding his own beside Fats Domino, Chuck Berry, and Little Richard on the airwaves and on barnstorming package shows aplenty. Past 40 years of age during the mid-‘50s and decidedly heavy-set, Big Joe was no matinee idol. He didn’t move around much onstage either. With pipes like his, he didn’t have to.
Turner was a proud product of the fertile pre-war Kansas City jazz circuit, which boasted some of the greatest big bands of the era—endlessly swinging organizations headed by piano giants Bennie Moten, Count Basie and Jay McShann and featuring a wealth of saxophone immortals whose mighty ranks included Charlie Parker, Ben Webster, and Lester Young. Agility and a handsome visage weren’t everything when it came to sending a crowd straight into orbit. All Big Joe needed to raise the roof of any gin joint was an accompanying pianist steeped in boogie-woogie. During his early career, he had one of the best in Pete Johnson.
During what amounted to the second phase of his amazing career during the 1950s, Big Joe enjoyed an incredible run on Atlantic Records, scoring one smash after another. He was seldom absent from the R&B hit parade for long. But the revered blues shouter’s hitmaking heyday isn’t what this compilation is all about. Disc one largely consists of stellar examples of his pre-Atlantic postwar output; four relatively contemporary performances are positioned at the close of the CD. The second disc presents Turner live and in concert over a span of three full decades. His commitment to shouting the blues never wavered; no matter what the musical flavor of the moment, Big Joe just reared back and let fly. He could shout the blues all night, and when he was standing at the mic, the good times never seemed to end.
Born May 18, 1911 in K.C., Joe’s massive physique came in handy whenever he wanted to slip into jazz clubs as a wet-behind-the-ears age teenager; he could simply pencil in a mustache on his upper lip and slip past the doorman at the Backbiter’s Club without a solitary protest from management. Johnson, born March 25, 1904 in the same jazz-steeped metropolis, admittedly possessed more experience when the two teamed up at Piney Brown’s Sunset Café on 12th Street, but Big Joe certainly knew the ropes—he could belt the blues and effortlessly toil at as a bartender or a bouncer at the same time. Their partnership was unbeatable, seemingly meant to be, and it thrived indigenously.
The two had already performed in New York a couple of times prior to taking the city by storm when they co-starred on John Hammond’s historic From Spirituals to Swing concert at Carnegie Hall in December of 1938, co-starring with Pete’s boogie-woogie peers Albert Ammons and Meade Lux Lewis, guitarist Big Bill Broonzy (subbing for the recently murdered Robert Johnson), gospel powerhouse Sister Rosetta Tharpe, and whooping blues harpist Sonny Terry. That acclaimed introduction to high society had the effect of jump-starting Turner’s recording career. A week later, Joe and Pete were in a studio laying down their debut 78 for Vocalion: their signature duet “Roll ‘Em Pete,” a tour de force of locomotive-level boogie piano with a voice to match riding atop the fray.
All of a sudden, boogie pianists were the rage amongst the cognoscenti. Johnson, Ammons, and Lewis were billed as the Boogie Woogie Trio when they starred at Barney Josephson’s Café Society in Greenwich Village, Big Joe stepping up to deliver some lusty blues couplets whenever the mood struck. He kept on making records for Vocalion and then Decca during the pre-war years, the highlights including “Cherry Red” in 1939 and “Piney Brown Blues” the next year. Johnson often served as his trusty studio accompanist, but occasionally other ivories aces stepped in to fill the same role—Sammy Price, Freddie Slack, Willie “The Lion” Smith, even the astounding jazz virtuoso Art Tatum.
Joe and Pete journeyed out to Los Angeles for awhile during the ‘40s, even operating their own nightclub in the City of Angels at one point. When the war ended and independent R&B record labels proliferated, Turner signed with Al Green’s National imprint, working in the studio with future Atlantic Records co-founder Herb Abramson as his A&R man. Big Joe scored his first R&B hit for National in 1946 with a typically ribald “My Gal’s A Jockey.”
Turner moonlighted on shellac in November of 1947 under a different sobriquet altogether when he cut the earliest inclusion on this collection, “Around The Clock Blues Part 1,” in San Francisco under the odd alias of Big Vernon. It hit the shelves on the aptly named Stag imprint, its eye-catching black-on-yellow label picturing a smug-looking tuxedoed elk smoking a stogie and bearing the slogan “for laughing purposes only.” With only Johnson rattling the ivories behind him, Turner roared a double-entendre ode to his own lovemaking prowess, providing earthy hour-by-hour commentary (could Chuck Berry have encountered this 78 prior to writing his own similar “Reelin And Rocking” a decade later?).
Although he stuck to using his own moniker on wax after that, Turner’s loyalty to a solitary record label during the immediate postwar era was fleeting at best. He cut for Aladdin, National, and RPM in rapid succession before waxing a solitary session for Jack Lauderdale’s Los Angeles-based Down Beat Records on June 28, 1948. Johnson was there to roll the 88s, but a five-piece horn section was also in attendance to make the results more inviting to jump blues enthusiasts, along with bass and drums (identical twin brothers Art and Addison Farmer manned the trumpet and bass respectively). Swinging fare was the order of the day as Big Joe blasted through “Radar Blues,” “Wine-O-Baby Boogie,” and “Christmas Date Boogie.”
After a meaty stint with the major M-G-M logo that spawned a series of 78s and the briefest of dalliances on the Rouge label, Turner landed on Solomon Kahal’s Freedom imprint in Houston. On December 22, 1949, in the good company of young T-Bone Walker-influenced guitarist Goree Carter, whose Freedom waxing “Rock Awhile” that same year seems to have wielded a sizable influence on Chuck Berry, Turner nailed his second R&B chart entry.
The elegant treatise “Still In The Dark” climbed to #9 on Billboard’s “Juke Box” listing and #12 on the same publication’s “Best Seller” chart in March of ’50, the enthusiastic response no doubt delighting Kahal. Chicago blues guitarist Freddie King would revive Joe’s easy-riding “After ‘While You’ll Be Sorry” more than a decade later (and claim co-writer’s credit along with his producer, pianist Sonny Thompson), while “Jumpin’ At The Jubilee” and “Feelin’ Happy” were perched right there on the precipice of rock and roll about half a decade early. Turner recut the latter number for Atlantic in 1956, in the midst of his extended bout with latter-day rock and roll stardom.
Despite his chart flirtation on Freedom, Turner had a surprisingly difficult time sustaining anything resembling commercial success, even as his leather-lunged peers Wynonie Harris, Bull Moose Jackson, Roy Brown, and Jimmy Witherspoon stole his thunder by racking up one major R&B hit after another. Big Joe hit rock bottom while doing his best to fill in for Jimmy Rushing with Count Basie’s band during a 1951 engagement at the Apollo Theatre in Harlem. Basie’s patented arrangements were a bit on the tricky side, a lot more complex than the free-wheeling 12-bar themes Turner was accustomed to, where he could bellow “Blow, Joe” anytime he wanted the sax player to give him a brief breather and he could improvise behind the mic at will. His all-too-obvious timing mistakes were eliciting laughter from the rude balcony denizens, and Big Joe was down.
Atlantic Records co-founder Ahmet Ertegun caught one of those less-than-immaculate Apollo performances when Turner was serving as the Count’s front man. Tracking the dejected performer down at Braddock’s Bar for a pep talk, Ahmet offered him $500 to do a session for Atlantic. The label was then riding high on the R&B front, thanks to mammoth hits by both Ruth Brown and the Clovers. Ertegun’s gesture ignited a solid streak of major R&B hits for Turner and Atlantic.
“Chains Of Love” and “The Chill Is On” were sailing up the charts for Joe before the year was over. “Sweet Sixteen” (the same after-hours blues that B.B. King later became eternally associated with) and “Don’t You Cry” followed suit the next year, and Turner’s first R&B chart-topper, the hard-driving New Orleans-cut “Honey Hush,” arrived in 1953 (the anthem was later revived by the Johnny Burnette Trio on Coral and Jerry Lee Lewis for Sun).
Turner journeyed to Chicago to wax the delightfully raunchy “TV Mama” with Elmore James supplying slippery slide guitar. It was a solid seller at the beginning of 1954, but its commercial impact paled in comparison to Big Joe’s Jesse Stone-penned blockbuster “Shake, Rattle And Roll,” another #1 R&B smash that summer that just missed cracking the pop Top 20—an incredible feat considering its uncompromising blues ambiance and Stone’s splendidly bawdy lyrics. When Bill Haley and His Comets covered the number for Decca and enjoyed a major pop seller, those lyrics underwent a thorough sanitizing prior to their version vaulting up the pop hit parade.
Rock and roll was in its precocious birth stages as white kids began to pick up on the revolutionary sound, and Big Joe Turner was one of its proud progenitors, even if he’d been doing what basically amounted to the same thing for decades. “Flip Flop And Fly,” “Hide And Seek,” “Morning, Noon And Night” and its charming Jerry Leiber/Mike Stoller-scribed flip “The Chicken And The Hawk (Up, Up And Away),” “Corrine Corrina” (a cleaned-up 1956 remake of a 1928 chestnut by bluesman Bo Carter, who knew a thing or two about double-entendre fun himself)—Big Joe and his Atlantic producers Ertegun and Jerry Wexler had it all down to a swinging science. Turner’s new legion of fans snapped up every one of them and hungered for more.
There were plenty of national tours to be navigated between recording sessions, and no one was laughing at Turner now when he hit the proscenium. Los Angeles saxman Jackie Kelso was a member of drummer Roy Milton’s Solid Senders when they backed Big Joe at a gala New Year’s Eve concert for L.A. deejay Gene Norman’s Blues Jubilee. The big man’s exciting renditions of “Flip Flop And Fly” and “Chains Of Love” that kick off disc two likely derive from that very show. Kelso did some traveling with Turner too.
“We did a tour. I remember it was called the Weinberg Tour,” remembered the late Kelso. “Little mining towns in Kentucky, West Virginia. I’ll never forget that, because I was just amazed how he could be just almost totally blind drunk, he would just get up and create new verses to the songs. You could hardly tell what he was saying, but you could recognize that he was rhyming things.” Sounds like Big Joe was a rock and roll pioneer in more ways than one.
Turner was no stranger to appearing in motion pictures. He’d filmed live versions of “Shake, Rattle And Roll” and “Oke-She-Moke-She-Pop” with baritone saxman Paul Williams’ combo backing him for a couple of Willie Bryant-hosted mid-‘50s musical productions, Rhythm and Blues Revue and Rock ‘n Roll Revue (they were reedited for TV under the title Showtime at the Apollo). Nonetheless, it must have been a thrill when he was chosen as one of the musical stars along with Fats Domino in the ‘56 film Shake, Rattle & Rock, one of the first rock and roll flicks to hit the drive-in circuit. Mike “Touch” Connors, much later the star of the long-running TV detective series Mannix, portrayed the host of a televised rock and roll program; Turner guested on his show to mime “Lipstick, Powder\ And Paint” and the Atlantic remake of “Feelin’ Happy” in front of saxist Choker Campbell’s combo. The well-scrubbed white teenagers swooned, just as they did when Fats pounded the ivories elsewhere in the film.
As rock and roll steadily softened and its lusty pioneers were relegated to the back
burner in favor of non-threatening teens with carefully sculpted pompadours mostly named Bobby that wouldn’t dare bound onto any stage “blind drunk” (even if they might have wanted to), Turner’s unlikely bout of stardom ultimately diminished. Fittingly, “Jump For Joy,” Big Joe’s final Atlantic hit in 1958, was the very same song that Turner had debuted with a full two decades earlier. Back then, it was titled “Roll ‘Em Pete,” though King Curtis’ glistening sax solo and a vastly fattened arrangement rendered it reasonably new to the world-at-large.
Disc two of this collection also contains a muscular rendition of Big Joe’s pre-war classic “Cherry Red” culled from a Paris concert. These revivals of “Roll ‘Em Pete” and “Feelin’ Happy” hail from the Berlin edition of the ‘66 American Folk Blues Festival, Chicago southpaw guitar great Otis Rush giving each a unique spin while veteran Windy City pianist Little Brother Montgomery and drummer Fred Below—harmonica genius Little Walter’s former timekeeper with the Aces--keep things moving briskly underneath.
Big Joe treated the gathered throng at Atlanta’s Super Blues Festival in 1969 to a laidback treatment of “I’ve Been Up On The Mountain” (which he’d recently released on Stan Lewis’ Shreveport-based Ronn imprint), and he reached back for “Honey Hush” and “Low Down Dog” when he starred in Baden-Baden, Germany the next year. Turner returned to Paris on April 19, 1971, his set list featuring the ironic slow blues “I Got A Pocket Full Of Pencils,” “Mad Blues,” boisterous reprises of his Atlantic classics “Shake, Rattle And Roll,” “The Chicken And the Hawk (Up, Up And Away),” and “Corrine Corrina,” and a decidedly downbeat treatment of the beloved warhorse “Everyday I Have The Blues.”
A 1985 engagement at the spacious Mount Baker Theatre in Bellingham, Washington with the Barney McClure Quartet is the source for the down-in-the-alley “Call The Plumber” and a storming “Kansas City.” Turner died that November 24 at the age of 74 after suffering for years with failing health.
This deluxe overview of Big Joe Turner’s groundbreaking career underscores just how essential he was to the rise of boogie-woogie, jump blues, and rock and roll’s first wave, one after another as he refused to allow time to pass him by and render him yesterday’s news. Idiomatic shifts mattered not to this bigger-than-life musical titan; as long as it swung, Turner could navigate it just fine. He was right at home.
No wonder they called Big Joe the Boss of the Blues!
--Bill Dahl
SOURCES
Blues & Gospel Records 1902-1943, by Robert M.W. Dixon and John Godrich (Essex, UK: Storyville Pubs. and Co. Ltd, 1982)
Blues Records 1943-1970, Volume Two L to Z, by Mike Leadbitter, Leslie Fancourt, and Paul Pelletier (London: Record Information Services, 1994)
Joel Whitburn’s Top R&B Singles 1942-1988, by Joel Whitburn (Menomonee Falls, WI: Record Research, Inc., 1988)
Wikipedia website: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Joe_Turner