Zeke Turner

Born James Grishaw, he took the stage name Zeke Turner, and his brother William Edward Grishaw, a guitarist and songwriter from Lynchburg, Virginia, worked as Zeb Turner. The two backed singers including Hank Williams and Red Foley in the years after the Second World War. Around November 1945, at the WSM studio in Nashville, the brothers recorded as the Turner Brothers for Bullet, singing and playing guitar on “Guitar Reel” and “No One Will Ever Know.”

Both brothers were in Red Foley’s Cumberland Valley Boys at Foley’s Chicago sessions of December 1946 and January 1947, which produced “Freight Train Boogie.” Zeke stayed on for Foley’s 1947 Nashville sessions at Castle Studio in the Tulane Hotel, with Jerry Byrd on steel and Tommy Jackson on fiddle, including “Tennessee Saturday Night” on 12 August 1947. He played on Hank Williams’s second session, for Sterling at the WSM studio on 13 February 1947, which produced “Honky Tonkin’” and “Pan American,” and on the Castle Studio sessions of 21 April 1947 (“Move It on Over” and “I Saw the Light”) and 6–7 November 1947. He played on the Cincinnati session of 22 December 1948 that produced “Lovesick Blues” and the one of 30 August 1949 that produced “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” and “My Bucket’s Got a Hole in It.”

In Cincinnati he worked regularly on sessions for King Records. He played guitar with the Delmore Brothers from a November 1947 session with Grandpa Jones through their sessions of May 1949, which produced “Blues Stay Away from Me,” and of 1950 and 1951 with Wayne Raney on harmonica. From 1949 to 1951 he was lead guitarist of the String Dusters, with Jerry Byrd, Louie Innis and Tommy Jackson, behind the singer Red Kirk, and in 1953 he played electric lead guitar on Lattie Moore’s King sessions.