"Get out of that bed and wash your face and hands," came bellowing through the radio I'd stashed under the covers once my parents thought I was asleep. I was never to be the same. I had no clue back then who Big Joe Turner was or that he was a one-man link in the transition from blues to big band to R&B, and I certainly had no way of knowing that all these years later I'd be writing a movie about his old labelmate on Atlantic Records, Ray Charles. But if my mother wanted a reason why her first-born wound up in show biz instead of being a doctor, writing movies about Earl "The Goat" Manigault, Buddy Holly, and Ray instead of wearing a stethoscope, it wouldn't be wrong to blame it on that night that I first heard Joe Turner's "Shake, Rattle And Roll," courtesy of Danny "The Catman" Stiles on WNJR, Newark, New Jersey. 

It wasn't 'til many years later, when Big Joe's legs were failing him, that my friend Ian Whitcomb introduced me to the man known as the Boss of the Blues. By then I knew his work with people like Pete Johnson and Count Basie, plus all the great sessions with Ahmet Ertegun, and I'd worn out my copy ofThe Trumpet Kings Meet Big Joe Turner. But I couldn't resist asking him about "Shake, Rattle And Roll," which had been wildly influential, if not wildly commercial due to the Bill Haley cover version. In contrast to others who'd been covered -- The Chords with "Sh-Boom"; Fats Domino, whose "Ain't It A Shame" was redone by Pat Boone; or anyone whose would-be hit was pilfered by Georgia Gibbs -- Big Joe had no bitterness whatsoever. In fact, he and Haley had gotten to know each other on an early rock 'n' roll tour, and he was pleased to report that they wound up good friends. Big Joe Turner was big in size and big in voice, but it was his spirit that was the biggest part of him. Listen for it as you enjoy his tunes. It's hard to miss.

by Alan Swyer

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Alan Swyer is a writer/producer whose films include Rebound, The Buddy Holly Story, and the forthcoming Ray Charles Story. As a youth he was led astray by R&B and has not been the same since. 

It seems that everybody has at least one Joe Turner story. I have a few of my own. I got to play with him on a couple of occasions -- the last time, in Los Angeles, toward the end of his life. By that time, Joe must have weighed in the neighborhood of 400 pounds and had to walk with a cane and sit on a (very strong) chair while he sang. Not far from belting out his last earthly note, he was still the loudest singer I've ever heard. I had seen him sing with pianist Lloyd Glenn, who was subbing for Joe's recently deceased old Kansas City friend Pete Johnson at Barney Josephson's Cookery in Greenwich Village. The two held forth, much as Turner and Johnson must have three decades earlier in the same part of town at the same owner's Café Society. 

I got to know Joe on an early '70s rock 'n' roll revival tour. Our bus picked him up at his Los Angeles home, and I saw his wife, Pat, hand him a gigantic jug filled with some head-busting alcoholic concoction, which he shared with his old friend Bill Haley in the front row of the bus as they reminisced until all four of their ears turned "cherry red."  Joe was born on May 18, 1911, in what is arguably the greatest city the world has ever known for jazz and blues -- Kansas City. It was a town that was wide open to all kinds of vice and corruption: gambling, liquor, narcotics, sex-for-hire, and murder-on-demand. Kansas City would even eventually beget a U.S. president: Harry S.Truman. The fact that "Old Harry" came out of the same environment as Count Basie, Charlie Parker, Jay McShann, and Joe Turner has always made him aces in my book.

Tall for his adolescent age, Joe would take his mother's eyebrow pencil and draw a mustache above his lip to sneak past bouncers, so he could hear the music in the Vine Street clubs. When he couldn't fool the bouncers, he'd stand on top of garbage cans and scrape the paint off the windows so he could peep inside. Eventually he not only got in, but he got a job singing, bartending, bouncing, and carrying crates full of booze. "They didn't have no microphones," Joe recalled. "They used them pasteboard things. Wha'cha call 'em, megaphones? I didn't have one, didn't need one. You could hear me ten blocks away."

On one of his periodic trips to Kansas City, John Hammond heard Joe singing with boogie-woogie pianist Pete Johnson. This led to Hammond booking Johnson and Joe on Hammond's first "Spirituals To Swing" concert at Carnegie Hall in New York on December 23, 1938. From there, the two hooked up with two more boogie masters, Albert Ammons and Meade Lux Lewis, as The Boogie Woogie Trio. This act recorded for Vocalion and played Café Society on a bill with Billie Holiday that packed houses for a year. Joe said he wrote Billie's biggest blues hit, "Fine And Mellow," for her as a gift during this time. He and Johnson also had a hit with "Roll 'Em Pete," the success of which led to a full session, featuring some Kansas City pals like "Hot Lips" Page and "Buster" Smith and the classic "Cherry Red."

Joe recorded for Decca, accompanied by musicians as varied as Willie "The Lion" Smith, Art Tatum, and Oscar Moore. Duke Ellington chose him to sing "Rocks In My Bed" in his stage show Jump For Joy at Los Angeles' Mayan Theater. Future Atlantic cofounder Herb Abramson, who started in the business with an A&R gig at National Records, brought Joe in on his first assignment, a cover of Saunders King's "S.K. Blues." But after a series of jukebox best-sellers for the label, Joe's career began to parallel that of Frank Sinatra. Both found themselves losing their audiences by the end of the '40s. During his cold spell, Joe made sessions here and there on small labels like Down Beat, Aladdin, and Freedom with little commercial success.

By early 1951 Abramson, along with Ahmet Ertegun, had made their label, Atlantic Records, a going concern, making stars out of Ruth Brown and The Clovers and income producing acts like Joe Morris and "Stick" McGhee. One night, the partners went uptown to the Apollo Theater to catch Count Basie. Basie's longtime blues singer, the great Jimmy Rushing, had taken ill, and a poorly rehearsed Joe Turner was subbing for him. Joe came in at the wrong place in the chart, and he and the band finished at different times. After the show, Ahmet and Herb stopped by the nearby Braddock Bar, where a despondent Joe Turner was nursing a large drink. To cheer Joe up, the two suggested that they record the bluesman for Atlantic. He agreed, and a major comeback was about to begin.

With blues pianist Harry Van Walls, Ertegun wrote "Chains Of Love," which was to become not only a smash, career-reviving hit, but also a blues standard. The poorly recorded horn section betrays an affinity for modern jazz that leads one to surmise that the players may have been some of the Lionel Hampton sidemen who often adorned early Atlantic dates. For the next date, Joe recorded "Sweet Sixteen," an Nugetre (Ertegun spelled backwards) tune. The song became another hit and another blues standard-to-be that would score a second time for B.B. King. More New York jazzmen turned up on this session, augmented again by the unmistakable Van Walls on the 88s. In later years, Joe would tell people he liked to sing only up-tempo, "happy" songs (I can tell you, he also only liked to sing in the key of C), but, interestingly, those first two Atlantic hits, the ones that brought him back, were both very slow, sad blues.

By 1953 Joe was occasionally living and working in New Orleans. In May of that year he cut a session-producing it himself- that provided him with his first #1 R&B hit,"Honey Hush." That day he also cut an early version of "Oke-She-Moke-She-Pop" that, unissued at the time, has been the standard heard up until now on all CD reissues. Here you will enjoy, for the first time on CD, the original single release version, cut in Chicago that October with the band of slide guitar master Elmore James.

Also from the Chicago date is Joe's "TV Mama," for which he naively, and much to his regret, assigned writer's credit to his then-wife Lou Willie Turner. Having never seen the former Mrs. Turner, who for years received quarterly checks for "writing" several of Joe's songs, I have no idea if she is the "TV Mama" with the big, wide screen" in the song, but what a great thing it is to have Big Joe and Elmore James together on one recording.

Looking at the session details for Joe's February 15, 1954, recording date, one is amazed to note that, on the same day he recorded his proto-rock 'n' roll classic, "Shake, Rattle, And Roll," he also recorded the old Sinatra hit "Time After Time" and Irving Berlin's "How Deep Is The Ocean." Neither has ever been released, nor probably ever will be. But what insights can be gained by this simple fact, especially as to what the Atlantic honchos had in mind at this early juncture. One thing it certainly proves is that the music was definitely not yet being contrived with teenagers specifically in mind.

"Shake, Rattle, And Roll" went on to become one of the first anthems of the new teenage music -- one later recorded by Bill Haley and Elvis -- as well as being Joe Turner's best-known number. "Well All Right," from the same date, also charted in the R&B Top 10 and marked the end, for a time, of Joe Turner, blues singer, and the beginning of Joe Turner, world's oldest rock 'n' roller. Like Fats Domino, Joe projected the same large man's warmth and good humor. These traits, combined with a completely nonthreatening demeanor, utterly charmed kids as well as adults. It appears that there was a conscious effort to "groom" Joe for teenage consumption with the idea to cop some of Domino's fan base. To this end, in the wake of "Shake, Rattle, And Roll," titles by Atlantic session master Jesse Stone, under his nom de BMI, Charles Calhoun, began to pop up. Joe's "Flip Flop And Fly" being the most obvious. "Hide And Seek," which Joe cut on the same January 1955 session, is one of the first songwriting efforts by Paul Winley, brother of The Clovers' bass vocalist Harold Winley and later owner of the record company that bears his last name.

Songwriters Jerry Leiber & Mike Stoller began producing records for Atlantic around this time, as their label, Spark, had been purchased by the larger company, giving Atlantic first dibs on the duo's many songs. One of the first Leiber/Stoller Atlantic dates produced the Top 10 hit "The Chicken And The Hawk (Up, Up And Away)," which was yet another version of "Shake, Rattle, And Roll." The boys would, of course, go on to make great contributions to Atlantic's success via their productions for The Coasters, The Drifters, and other artists. "Boogie Woogie Country Girl," one of Joe's best-remembered B-sides, came from this same session.

By February 1956, when "Corrine Corrina" was recorded, Atlantic was attempting to make a slicker, more professional product with Joe, one that would hopefully appeal to the broadest audience possible. Higher tech recording facilities, a band filled with top big band veterans and, for the first time, female background voices, made for a record designed to "cross over" from the R&B to the pop marketplace. "Midnight Special Train," like "Corrine Corrina," comes from the early blues canon. However, it lacked the chart success of its predecessor, despite being what was termed in those days a "turntable hit," meaning it received substantial radio play but didn't fare as well in terms of record sales.

By 1956, when jazz fans were discovering the long-playing album form, Atlantic felt Joe had enough visibility that they could record him in this format for an older audience that would remember his Kansas City roots. To this end, Nesuhi Ertegun and Jerry Wexler, both huge fans of '30s-era K.C. jazz, gathered K.C. legends Pete Johnson, Freddie Green, and Walter Page and put them together with contemporary Basie sidemen Joe Newman and Frank Wess for an album titled The Boss Of The Blues: Joe Turner Sings Kansas City Jazz. From this album we have chosen "You're Driving Me Crazy," the basis for the Kansas City anthem, "Moten Swing," which was essentially a set of riffs set to the changes of the former tune. Arranger Ernie Wilkins cleverly utilized those "Moten Swing" riffs to back Joe's singing here.

In the latter part of 1959, Atlantic was having a couple of their older artists rerecord their earlier hits in newer, more professional-sounding circumstances. Ruth Brown redid "Mama (He Treats Your Daughter Mean)" and others, while Joe cut new versions of "Chains Of Love" and "Honey Hush." At the same session, Joe recorded an homage to one of his early heroes, Lonnie Johnson. "Tomorrow Night," a 1948 surprise hit for Johnson, who was well into his long career, became his theme song. Here Big Joe does a heartfelt tribute of this poignant precursor to The Shirelles' "Will You Love Me Tomorrow." After his hits stopped coming, Atlantic held on to Joe for a while, for old times' sake, but, business being business, Joe ultimately moved on. A couple of tired sounding singles for Coral filled time during the '60s, but for the most part, Joe was an live act throughout the British Invasion era. Maybe the Brits didn't dig him because he didn't play guitar. In this country, his name was kept alive by "jump music" preservationists, such as New England's Roomful of Blues and others. By 1967 all three of The Boogie Woogie Trio of Johnson, Ammons, and Lewis had passed.

Joe was seen in the 1974 documentary of Kansas City music, The Last Of The Blue Devils, along with Jay McShann and Count Basie, with whom Joe recorded an album for Norman Granz's Pablo label. On November 24, 1985, Joe's big heart gave out, ending the life and career of the greatest blues shouter of them all. Let it roll like a big wheel! Well, allreet then.

-- Billy Vera