Joe Turner
Channel: Stephen Griffith
Date: 16/08/2020

Day 153 of the American Songbag Stay-at-Home Series"

Sandburg writes: "W. C. Handy refers to Joe Turner as a grandaddy of blues. "In some sections it was called Going Down the River For Long, but in Tennessee it was always Joe Turner." Joe was a brother of Pete Turner, once governor of Tennessee, and clothed with police powers Joe Turner took prisoners from Memphis to Nashville," handcuffed, to be gone no telling how long." Thus Handy explained the song to Dorothy Scarborough.....

"Handy used the old theme for building Joe Turner blues with such interesting lines as:

Sweet Babe, I'm goin to leave you,
And the time ain't long,
No, the time ain't long,
If you don't b'lieve I'm leavin'
Count the days I'm gone."

More info from The Traditional Ballad Index: Scarborough tells a variant on the same story: Joe Turner was the brother of one-time Tennessee governor Pete Turner, and seems to have been an enforcer of Jim Crow laws, grabbing Blacks seemingly at random and subjecting them to prosecution in kangaroo courts.

Sone often regard this as the archetypal folk blues -- perhaps even the ancestor of the entire genre. The former statement may arguably be true; the latter I must seriously doubt. It seems more like the ancestor of the popular blues.