Luckily she’s being born again: Tina Turner, who died on Wednesday at the age of 83, was a practicing Buddhist – and it’s easy to imagine how she sounded while chanting. Because this voice carried everything, withstood everything, could express everything.
Turner was born Anna Mae Bullock in November 1939 in Nutbush, a town in Tennessee that hardly anyone would talk about without the song “Nutbush City Limits” she sang in 1973. When she wrote the Nutbush lyrics, Tina Turner was – still – in a toxic relationship with her composer and husband Ike. Sixteen years earlier, at the age of 17, she had met the highly gifted but violent musician. And thus repeating a well-known pattern: Tina Turner’s mother fled from her own abusive husband and left the family when Tina was eleven years old.
Tina’s voice was recorded for the first time in 1958 on the Ike Turner song “Boxtop” – her young, lively organ asserted itself clearly in the 1950s boogie sound. Turner’s label boss later said of her singing on the 1959 song “A fool in love”: “All the blues singers sounded dirty. But Tina could scream dirty—that was funky.”
That’s when Tina started wearing wigs – allegedly after a disastrous attempt at bleaching at the hairdresser’s. In the ’60s, Tina toured with Ike’s Kings of Rhythm and the backing band The Ikettes, whose names reflect the hubris of their ‘creator’. The spectacular, long and sweaty live shows were valid competition to the equally exciting shows by the “hardest working man in show business”, James Brown.
In 1966 the strenuous collaboration of the couple, who had been married since 1962, culminated in the furious Phil Spector song “River Deep – Mountain High”, for which Ike had not lifted a finger (it was written by Spector together with Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich, who came from the guitar among others by the great jazz guitarist Barney Kessel), who nevertheless acted under the name “Ike & Tina Turner”. With Spector, Tina Turner met an almost even greater despot: “I had to sing the song about 500,000 times, and in the end I was standing in my bra, sweating, in front of the microphone,” she told ROLLING STONE in 2003, on whose cover she appeared in 1967 – as the first woman and as the first black artist. A milestone in the racist rock music history of the 1960s.
Ike and Tina opened for the Rolling Stones in 1969, “Proud Mary,” a Cleerance Clearwater Revival cover that became a smash hit in 1971 and earned them a Grammy. On shows from the ’70s, energetic Tina Turner dons opulent wigs, short, glitzy dresses she dances well in, and rubs the mic stand in a way that makes viewers dizzy – part of her image was the (straight male) fantasy of insatiability. Even if her personal life with drug-addicted, abusive Ike was already hell.
But then, shortly after “Nutbush”, Tina had accumulated enough self-confidence and physical and psychological injuries to break free: In 1976, with 36 cents in her pocket (Ike was Turner’s treasurer), she fled from her husband, filed for divorce and went her own way musically and privately since 1978. The two never met again.
In 1981 she was the opening act for the Rolling Stones again – this time as a solo artist, she twisted the wigs even higher, and had the biggest success of her career in 1983 with the studio album “Private Dancer” – including the mega hit “What’s love got to do with it”. “Tina – What’s love got to do with it” was also the name of a biopic about her in 1993, which was based on her autobiography, in which she had described years of violence. Musicals and other feature films and documentaries followed later.
Tina Turner has been a symbol of female self-empowerment since the 90s – the fact that as a Black woman, a victim of violence and abuse, she not only survived the systematic oppression, but triumphed over it, and thus depicted the entire social development from the beginning of pop music to the present day an icon of the century. A happy one: She moved to Switzerland in 1994 and most recently lived with her German husband in a picturesque, huge villa with its own access to the lake. She died there after a long illness. It’s true what Alicias Keys wrote on Instagram: “What a warrior!”