The People Songbag

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30947, 31 December 1965, Page 5

The People Songbag

fSpectatltf written for "Th* Press" by DERRICK ROONEY] They tell me Joe Turner's been here and gon*. Thei/ tell me Joe Turner's been here and gone, They tell me Joe Turner's been here and gone. He came with 30 links of chain. Oh Lord, Got mg man and gone. This is a blues from Tennessee—“ Joe Turner’s Blues," one of the very first ever recorded. The man who became the protagonist of the version quoted was the “long-chain man,” the prison official whose job it was to move convicts from Memphis to the Nashville gaol, and his name was not in fact Turner, but Turvey. He got the job after his brother, Pete Turvey, was elected Governor of Tennessee in 1892, and every time he came to town it meant some woman was going to be without her man. W. C. Handy, who adapted the blues to his own use, knew about Joe Turvey: “He used to come to Memphis and get prisoners to carry them to Nashville after a kangaroo court. When the Negroes said of anyone, ‘Joe Turvey’s been to town,’ they meant that the person in question had been carried off handcuffed, to be gone no telling how long." By the folk process, Turvey became Turner, and an already existing song was modified; there had been other Joe Turners, and other!

"Joe Turner Blues,” for the song's construction suggests , antiquity. The jaunty tune differs 1 from most blues melodies , and the three-line chorus is unusual among Negroes in America but not in such countries as Haiti, where the Negroes have been less Europeanised: these suggest a point of origin fairly early in the history of the Negro in America. In Mississippi, Joe Turner was a kind of all-the-year-round Santa Claus. The legend is that he was a white man, a storekeeper, who took care of Negroes when they were in need. When there was a drought and the crops died the people would come home to find their tables laden with flour, beans, and sometimes smoked ham. “Joe Turner's been here," the people would say, though they didn’t know who Joe Turner was or where he came from. Joe Turner’s identity is said to have been discovered when a general storekeeper died and the gifts stopped. His Negro helper, aiso named Joe, called the Negroes together and told them: “There is your Joe Turner you’ve been singing about and crying and dancing and praying to, and he's gone and will never return, and I don’t know what you-all Negroes gonna do because there's no.body to love you no more. So good-bye.” And he walked away and I was never seen again.