Handy writes quite a bit about Joe Turner in his autobiography Father of the Blues (first published in 1941):

"Still another story is Joe Turner Blues. Here you get folklore with a bang. It goes back to Joe Turney (also called Turner), brother of Pete Turney, one-time governor of Tennessee. Joe had the responsibility of taking Negro prisoners from Memphis to the penitentiary at Nashville. Sometimes he took them to the "farms" along the Mississippi. Their crimes when indeed there were any crimes, were usually very minor, the object of the arrests being to provide needed labor for spots along the river. As usual, the method was to set a stool-pigeon where he could start a game of craps. The bones would roll blissfully till the required number of laborers had been drawn into the circle. At that point the law would fall upon the poor devils, arrest as many as were needed for work, try them for gambling in a kangaroo court and then turn the culprets over to Joe Turney. That night, perhaps, there would be weeping and wailing among the dusky belles. If one of them chanced to ask a neighbor what had become of the sweet good man, she was likely to recieve the pat reply, "They tell me Joe Turner's come and gone."
      Repeat this line three times and you get what I've called folk blues. Living in a world of such amazing cruelty, bewildered by the doings of such men as Joe Turney, this simple people either sang or played whatever came into their minds.

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

    Joe Turney had a way of handcuffing eighty prisoners to forty links of chain, and from this situation grew many kinds of verses, all fitting the same musical mold. In Kentucky they call it Goin' Down the River 'Fore Long. There it was a steamboat song, but for the tune it was Joe Turner right on. In Georgia you heard the same melody when they sang Goin' Down That Long Lonesome Road. You heard it all over the South, for that matter, but wherever it was sung the words dealt with a local situation.
    Following my frequent custom of using a snatch of folk melody in one out of two or three strains of an otherwise original song, I wrote Joe Turner Blues and adapted the twelve bars of old Joe Turner as one of its themes. Here Joe Turner himself was no longer the long-chain man; he was the masculine victim of unrequited love just as the singer in St. Louis Blues was the feminine, and he sang sadly and yet jauntily such thoughts as:

You'll never miss the water
Till your well runs dry;
Till your well runs dry.
You'll never miss Joe Turner
Till he says goodbye.
Sweet babe, I'm goin' to leave you
An' the time ain't long.
If you don't believe I'm leaving,
Count the days I'm gone.

It was difficult to get Joe Turner recorded. I came to New York for that purpose and while walking down Broadway I met my old friend Wilbur Sweatman - a killer-diller and jazz pioneer. He invited me home with him, and his wife Nettie prepared a lovely dinner, While dining she turned on the phonograph and lo and behold it played Joe Turner Blues which Sweatman had recorded not only on the Pathe but the Emerson records also."
(145-147)