Hi Liam, here is the interview and Big Bill's rendition of the song. I'm pretty sure you can get any of the Folkways stuff on cassette (and CD in some cases)as a custom order from Smithsonian/Folkways.

TERKEL: Bill , we think of blues all the time as sad and mournful songs, yet you sang a couple of uptempoed, humorous blues. In the blues, isn't there always a feeling somehow that tomorrow things'll be better – or am I just imagining things?

BROONZY: Well, all people, all blues singers, feel that way. They sing because they figure there's gonna be a change in something – that people, that it's not gonna be the same. It is the same way with you: you don't think tomorrow is gonna be just like today.

TERKEL: I'm referring, Bill, to a blues that you once mentioned as the earliest you ever heard – dealt with a man named Joe Turner.

BROONZY: Joe Turner – oh yeh, I know that one. Why Joe Turner was a man that all the people in the South, they really believed in him. They really believed there was a man like that – and which it was. And nobody knowed who he was until he died. And the word Joe Turner, that was 2 people – because Joe was a negro and Turner was a white man. And Turner was a man owned a big store there and people that got drought, caught in drought, got caught in storms and big floods and things – they'd lose their stuff. Why old man Turner would put Joe on a mule and put a sack of groceries or whatsoever he had and send it to these people's houses. And they never did see nobody that bring it and they never did know who brought it – nuthin'. So they figured that that was the guy – that was all.

TERKEL: Sort of a Good Samaritan.

JOE TURNER No 1

Spoken (with guitar accomp):
This song was written back in eighteen and ninety-two
It was a terrible flood that year
Lot of the people lost most everything they had
Their crops, their potatoes and corn, cotton and everything
And most of their livestock – horses, mules, cows, chickens, ducks, geese
And the only man they know that could help them was a guy by the name of Joe Turner
And they would start cryin' and singin' this song

(Short guitar intro)

Sung (with guitar):
They tell me Joe Turner been here and gone
Lord, they tell me Joe Turner been here and gone
They tell me Joe Turner been here and gone

Spoken (with guitar):
And they would go out huntin', lookin' for rabbits, coons and possums - anything they could catch to eat
Some would go fishin', some would go in the woods lookin' for nuts of all kinds – anything they could get to eat
And a lot of times they would come home and find food and stuff in their homes
And they would know that Joe Turner had been there
And they would start cryin' and singin' this song

(Short guitar intro)

Sung (with guitar):
They tell me Joe Turner been here and gone
Lord, they tell me Joe Turner been here and gone
They tell me Joe Turner been here and gone

Spoken (with guitar):
And they would go out, look in their yards and they would see wood
And they would find axes to cut the wood with, that Joe Turner had brought there and left for them
Joe Turner was a man was known to help all poor people – black and the white
And they would start singin' this song – sometimes they would do a little boogie too with this song

Long guitar instrumental.

Source: 'Big Bill Broonzy: Interviewed by Studs Terkel' Folkways FG 3586.