He come wid forty links of chain,
Oh Lawdy!
Come wid forty links of chain,
Oh Lawdy!
Got my man and gone.

My dad loves jazz and blues. When I was a kid, I remember hearing Coltrane, Muddy Waters, Mississippi John Hurt, etc… I didn’t appreciate their artistry at the time. I only came to enjoy the music when I became an adult.

I remember one song though that my father played often. It was called “Joe Turner’s Blues.” I didn’t learn until about 20 years ago, what that song was really about.

In the late 19th century, a man named Joe Turney became well-known in the South. He was the brother of Pete Turney who was the governor of Tennessee. Joe Turney had the responsibility of taking black prisoners from Memphis to the Tennessee State Penitentiary in Nashville. It is said that Joe would make a habit of distributing some of the prisoners to convict farms along the Mississippi River, where employers paid commissions to obtain laborers.

According to Leon F. Litwack in his terrific book Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow:

“Most of the prisoners had been rounded up for minor infractions, often when police raided a craps game set up by an informer; after a perfunctory court appearance, the blacks were removed, usually the same day, and turned over to Turney. He was reputed to have handcuffed eighty prisoners to forty links of chain. When a man turned up missing that night in the community, the word quickly spread, ‘They tell me Joe Turner’s come and gone.” Family members were left to mourn the missing (p.270).”

Joe Turney was the embodiment of the convict leasing system. Litwack writes: “By the 1890s, the distribution of black prisoners, most of them arrested on minor charges, and their use (and abuse) as convict laborers had become a way of life in the New South — a source of immense profits for the states and employers, and a source of extraordinary suffering for black men who were all too often worked to death (p.270-71).”

It is important to understand that we can trace the beginnings of the systematic imprisonment of black people to this era. During slavery, plantation justice prevailed. Few if any slaves were put in jails or prisons. Their labor was too valuable. “Punishment” for any perceived offenses were carried out by slaveholders themselves. Right after emancipation, things changed drastically and whites sought to exert social control over blacks who they no longer officially owned by law.

Litwack points out that blacks were forced to serve long terms at hard labor for minor offenses. For example, a black person could “serve up to five years in prison for stealing a farm animal or any property valued at $10 or more.” Blacks labored on chain gangs, were leased out as convicts to work where they labored in coal and iron mines, in sawmills and turpentine camps, laid railroad tracks, built levees, etc…

Basically the convict lease system served as a way to re-enslave black people who had only recently been “freed” through Emancipation.

Somehow Joe Turney became Joe Turner in the many versions of “Joe Turner’s Blues.” Here is Mississippi John Hurt’s version of the song as sung by Art Linton:

Here are the lyrics:

JOE TURNER BLUES – Mississippi John Hurt

Joe Turner, he’s the man I do despise

Joe Turner the man I do despise

Goin’ around trying to take men’s wives

Joe Turner, drove him from my door
Joe Turner, drove him from my door
Hope to God that he won’t come back no more

Policeman, you better not let him ’round
Policeman, you better not let him ’round
If you don’t arrest him, I’m gonna shoot him down

Joe Turner, drove him from my door
I drove Joe Turner, drove him from my door
May steal my good girl all I know

Oh they tell me Joe Turner’s in this town
They tell me
Well they tell me Joe Turner’s in this town

He’s a man I hate, I don’t want him hangin’ around
He’s a man I hate, don’t want him hangin’ around
If you don’t arrest him, I’m gonna shoot him down

I saw Joe Turner runnin’ down the road,
I saw Joe Turner
Don’t care where he’s headed, don’t care where he goes.

And I hope to God that he won’t come back no more
And I hope to God that he won’t come back no more

He’s here to steal my high teasin’ brown
He’s here to steal my high teasin’ brown
If you don’t arrest him, I’m gonna shoot him down

For those who are interested in learning more about the Convict Lease System, I encourage you to read the following books:

Blackmon, Douglas A. (2008). Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II.

Oshinsky, David M. (1996). “Worse Than Slavery”: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice.