https://deltaboogie.com/River_Shows_Blues_Ragtime_Jazz_and_Country_Music-Country_Blues/

From the upcoming book, July 2023 release: River Shows, Blues, Ragtime, Jazz and Country Music, by Matt Chaney

The ballad "Joe Turner," an early blues form disseminated around Tennessee, decried a prison marshal who delivered inmates for peonage at farms, coal mines, and railroad construction sites. The song was a snatchy folk verse but real-life besides, depicting Joe Turney, deputy warden of the Tennessee penitentiary for 20 years. Turney placed prisoners with favored businesses as captive labor, in the Southern practice of “convict lease.”

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W.C. Handy learned a Memphis version of “Joe Turner” as a youth in Florence, Ala., from musician Jim Turner. “You heard it all over the South… wherever it was sung the words dealt with a local situation,” Handy recalled. “When you speak of the story of the blues, we can’t tell it without the story of Joe Turner.”

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“I didn't invent the blues. No one invented them,” Handy said. “The blues were melodies sung by Negro roustabouts, farmers and wanderers from Missouri to the Gulf. My part in history was to introduce this, the blues form, to the general public as a medium for my own feelings.”

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