From a blues battler to The Best
FROM a one horse town to the top of the charts, there was little probable about the life of Tina Turner.
As Anna Mae Bullock, the youngest daughter of a sharecropper who helped pick cotton from an early age, global fame would have seemed impossible. But singing the right song in the right place at the right time transformed Bullock into Tina Turner, a renowned performer whose death on May 24 aged 83 caused music fans worldwide to grieve.
Little was easy about Turner’s life. She endured childhood poverty, spousal abuse, bereavement and in later life illhealth, but in the middle she enjoyed one of the most remarkable comebacks in music industry history and found happiness in a stable second marriage.
Bullock was born on November 26, 1939, in the rural Tennessee community of Nutbush, where her father, Floyd, worked as an overseer on a farm.
In her autobiography, Turner wrote that she received no love from either her father or mother, who left the family when the singer was 11 years old.
Young Anna moved around Tennessee and Missouri, living with various relatives, before rejoining Zelma in St Louis.
Although a standout singer in various church choirs, it was the blues clubs in St Louis which entranced Bullock, and in particular the regular headlining act Ike Turner and his Kings of Rhythm.
Rebuffed when she asked to sing in his band, Bullock then took her chance during an intermission in one of Ike’s shows.
He was playing B B King’s You
Know I Love You to himself on the keyboard, Bullock recognised the song and grabbed a microphone and sang along.
Ike immediately recognised her ability and cajoled her, despite Zelma’s objections, into joining his group.
Ike changed her first name to Tina, inspired by the comic book heroine Sheena, Queen of the Jungle, and then changed her last name by marrying her, in 1962.
That was not to be the only control the newlynamed Tina Turner was to have exerted over her by Ike.
An abusive and manipulative man, Turner suffered bruised eyes, busted lips, a broken jaw and other injuries at his hands which made her a regular visitor to the emergency room.
Until she left her husband and revealed their back story, Turner was known as the voracious onstage foil of the steadygoing Ike, and as the leading lady of the Ike and Tina Turner Revue.
Ike was billed first and ran the show, choosing the material, the arrangements, the backing singers.
They toured constantly for years, in part because Ike was often short on money and unwilling to miss a concert. Tina Turner was forced to go on with bronchitis, with pneumonia, with a collapsed right lung.
Other times, the cause of her misfortunes was Ike himself.
As she recounted in I, Tina, Ike began hitting her not long after they met, in the mid1950s, and only grew more vicious. Provoked by anything and anyone, he would throw hot coffee in her face, choke her or beat her until her eyes were swollen shut, then rape her. Before one show, he broke her jaw and she went on stage with her mouth full of blood.
Terrified both of being with Ike and of lasting without him, she credited her emerging Buddhist faith in the mid1970s with giving her a sense of strength and selfworth and she finally left in early July 1976.
The Ike and Tina Turner Revue was scheduled to open a tour marking the country’s bicentennial when Tina snuck out of their Dallas hotel room, with just a Mobil credit card and 36c, while Ike slept. She hurried across a nearby highway, narrowly avoiding a speeding truck, and found another hotel.
‘‘I looked at him (Ike) and thought, ‘You just beat me for the last time, you sucker’,’’ she recalled in her memoir.
Turner was among the first celebrities to speak candidly about domestic abuse, becoming a heroine to battered women and a symbol of resilience to all. Ike Turner did not deny mistreating her, although he tried to blame Tina for their troubles.
When he died, in 2007, a representative for his exwife said simply: ‘‘Tina is aware that Ike passed away.’’
Ike and Tina’s fans knew little of this during the couple’s prime. The Turners were a hot act for much of the 1960s and into the ’70s, evolving from bluesy ballads such as A Fool in Love and It’s Going to Work Out Fine to flashy covers of Proud Mary and Come Together and other rock songs that brought them crossover success.
In November 1967, Tina Turner became the first female artist and the first black artist to appear on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine.
Although a regular fixture on the R&B charts, it was a 1965 meeting with famed music producer Phil Spector, who attended a Turner Revue Sunset Strip show, which aided the group to cross over to a wider audience.
Their first single on Spector’s label, River Deep — Mountain High, was considered by the producer to be one of his finest efforts.
While it did not enjoy chart success in the US it helped secure the band a support spot on The Rolling Stones’ 1966 British tour. They again supported the Stones on the band’s 1969 US tour and featured performing Otis Redding’s I’ve Been Loving You Too Long in the band’s 1970 documentary film Gimme Shelter.
The same year Workin' Together, the band’s most successful album, charted at 25 and its hit single, Proud Mary,
went on to win a Grammy.
Two years later the group released the almost as successful Nutbush City Limits,
— the title track was strongly autobiographical and was a signature tune in Tina Turner’s concerts for decades to come.
After Tina’s dramatic 1976 split from Ike — they divorced two years later — she was physically battered, emotionally devastated and financially ruined.
Many a person would have failed to rise again, but few had Tina Turner’s determination, or her connections.
Turner released her first solo album aged 40 — a flop. Its poor sales meant she was forced to play small cabaret shows and accept any gig going to survive, including a much regretted tour of South Africa at a time when the country was widely boycotted because of its racist apartheid regime.
Turner’s friends helped her back into the limelight. Rod Stewart convinced her to sing Hot Legs with him on Saturday Night Live, and Stones lead singer Mick Jagger brought her along on the band’s 198182 world tour to duet on Honky
Tonk Women.
Inspired and back in the studio again, her cover of Al Green’s Let’s Stay Together
caught fire and charted across Europe.
On the strength of that,
Capitol Records signed her and presented a range of songs for Turner to consider, including a reflective popreggae ballad already rejected by Cliff
Richard and Donna Summer and eventually recorded but initially unreleased, with a male vocal, by Bucks Fizz.
Turner, too, dismissed the song, calling it ‘‘wimpy’’.
‘‘I just thought it was some old pop song, and I didn’t like it,’’ she later said of What’s Love Got To Do With It?, the song which made her a star all over again and gave Turner her only US No 1 hit.
Released on the 1984 Private Dancer album, it and other hits, such as the title track and Better Be Good To Me, propelled the record to sell more than
8 million copies and enabled Turner to tour the world.
The following year, Turner added movie star to her resume, appearing opposite Mel Gibson in Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, and scoring another hit with the theme song.
Her own life was eventually to be filmed as the Oscarnominated What’s Love Got To Do With It?, starring Angela Bassett and Laurence Fishburne.
However, Tina said that reliving her years with Ike was so painful that she could not bring herself to watch the movie.
Her life also became a stage hit. Tina: The Tina Turner Musical was a hit in London’s West End and later on Broadway, where it is still running.
Turner’s second attempt at marriage was much happier. In 1985, she met German music executive Erwin Bach, who became her longterm partner. She moved to Europe to be with him and they eventually married in 2013, Turner relinquishing her US citizenship and taking up residence in Switzerland.
In 1989, Turner embarked on one of her most successful and unlikely collaborations, becoming the face and voice of Australian rugby league. Propelled by performances of What You Get Is What You See and The Best, the campaign was a hit, redeemed the game’s battered reputation and restored its mainstream appeal.
After a farewell world tour in 200809, Turner retired from show business and settled down with Bach.
However, tragedy was never far away in the Tina Turner story. Her oldest son, Craig, took his own life in 2018, and her younger son, Ronnie, died in December 2022.
Turner is survived by Bach and two sons of Ike’s whom she adopted. — Agencies