Born Joseph Vernon Turner Jr., on May 18, 1911, Big Joe Turner was a relevant 
figure in the history of music. Known as both 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. His popularity spanned the blues, boogie-woogie, and even went 
into the first wave of rock & roll. He was a product of the swinging, 
wide-open Kansas City scene in the early '30s and even in his teens, he 
looked mature enough to get into the various K.C. night clubs. During this 
time, Turner was tending bar and singing when he met up with boogie-piano 
master, Pete Johnson. The pair performed together for the next decade plus, 
and appeard with the likes of Big Bill Broonzy, Sonny Terry, the Golden 
Gate Quartet, Meade Lux Lewis, Albert Ammons, and Count Basie, to name a few.

As 1938 came to a close, Turner and Johnson recorded the thundering "Roll 
'Em Pete" for the Vocalion label. It was an up-tempo number anchored by 
Johnson's piano. Over the years Turner would re-record it many times over 
almost always changing the words. 

Turner ventured out to the West Coast during the war years, building quite a 
following while making the L.A. circuit. In 1945, he signed on with National 
Records and cut a few small combo records under Herb Abramson's supervision. 
Turner remained with National through 1947, recording the popular, "My Gal's 
a Jockey" that became his first national R&B smash. 

In 1947, despite his contract with National, Turner made an incredibly 
risqué song, "Around the Clock," for the Stag label. He billed himself as 
 Big Vernon. There were also sessions for Aladdin records that year that 
included a wild vocal duel with one of Turner's principal "rivals," Wynonie 
Harris, on the ribald, two-part "Battle of the Blues." Of course neither of 
these two songs were given any radio time, however, the songs 
received heavy play on jukeboxes in clubs.

Most of the songs that Turner recorded on the West Coast weren't selling 
particularly well so Turner went back to the East Coast, and New York, to 
try to get something going. It was sheer luck that when Atlantic Record's 
owners/bosses, Abramson and Ahmet Ertegün dropped by the Apollo Theater 
one night to check out Count Basie's band, they discovered that Turner had 
temporarily replaced Jimmy Rushing as the Basie band's frontman. They 
liked him and Atlantic picked up his spirits by 
picking up his recording contract.

Turner hit it big in 1954 with "Shake, Rattle and Roll," which not only 
enhanced his career, turning him into a teenage favorite, but also helped to 
transform popular music. The song is fairly raw, as Turner yells at his 
woman to "get outa that bed, wash yo' face an' hands" and comments that 
she's "wearin' those dresses, the sun comes shinin' through!" He sang the 
number on film in the 1955 theatrical feature Rhythm and Blues Revue. 

After a number of hits in this vein, Turner left popular music behind and 
returned to his roots as a singer with small jazz combos, recording numerous 
albums in that style in the 1960s and 1970s. In 1966, Bill Haley helped revive 
Turner's career by lending him the Comets for a series of popular recordings in 
Mexico (apparently no one thought of getting the two to record a duet of "Shake, 
Rattle and Roll," as no such recording has yet surfaced). In 1977 he recorded a 
version of Guitar Slim's song, "The Things that I Used to Do."

In the 1960s and 1970s he was reclaimed by jazz and blues, appearing at many 
festivals and recording for the impresario Norman Granz's, Pablo label, once 
with his friendly rival, Jimmy Witherspoon. He also worked with the German 
boogie-woogie pianist Axel Zwingenberger.

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, 
Turner 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.