Tina Turner 1939-2023

American-Swiss singer Tina Turner, known as "the queen of rock and roll", has died at her home in Küsnacht, Switzerland at the age of 83, after a long illness.  She had previously suffered from intestinal cancer, had a stroke, and had kidney transplant surgery.

Anna Mae Bullock was born in Brownsville, Tennessee to Floyd Bullock and the former Zelma Currie, the youngest of their three daughters.  The family lived in the unincorporated community of Nutbush, where Floyd worked as a sharecropper overseer.  During World War II, Floyd and Zelma moved to Knoxville to work at a defense factory, leaving their daughters with their paternal grandparents.  The family was later reunited in Knoxville but afterwards moved back to Nutbush.  The three girls eventually lived with their maternal grandmother in Brownsville after their parents separated.  Anna moved in with her mother in St. Louis after the grandmother died, and graduated from Sumner High School.

In 1957, Anna Bullock met guitarist/singer/band leader Ike Turner at a club in East St. Louis, Illinois and eventually starting singing for his band, the Kings of Rhythm.  In 1960, she sang the lead vocal on his song A Fool In Love, because the intended singer Art Lassiter didn't show up for the recording session.  At the suggestion of a local St. Louis disc jockey, the recording was sent to Juggy Murray, the president of Sun Records.  Murray bought the recording and urged Turner to make Bullock the star of his show.  He responded by changing Bullock's first name to Tina and then adding his own last name, the combination of which he trademarked.

During the early 1960s, Ike Turner combined the Kings of Rhythm and a set of female backing vocalists/dancers known as the Ikettes to create the Ike & Tina Turner Revue.  The band toured constantly during the mid-1960s and bounced around between labels.  Eventually, producer Phil Spector signed them to his Phillies label, for which they recorded the song River Deep - Mountain High.  The band continued changing labels and touring, including opening for the Rolling Stones in 1969.  In 1971, they had their biggest hit with a cover of Creedence Clearwater Revival's Proud Mary.  In 1973, they had another big hit with her original song Nutbush City Limits.

Bullock and Turner were married in 1962 and separated in 1976, their divorce being finalized in 1978.  During the mid-1970s, as Tina Turner, she launched her solo career and went on to have hits such as What's Love Got To Do With It?, Private Dancer, Better Be Good To Me, Simply The Best and Back Where You Started, to name a few of them.  In 1986, she met German music executive Erwin Bach, and after a long romance, married him in 2013.  That year, she applied for and received Swiss citizenship.

According to her autobiography I, Tina, she was introduced to Buddhism in 1973, and eventually converted.  She had two biological sons, Raymond Craig, whose father was Kings of Rhythm saxophonist Raymond Hill, and Ronald Turner, whose father was Ike Turner.  Craig was found dead of an apparent suicide in 2018.  Ronald died of complications from colon cancer in 2022.  Through Ronald, Tina Turner had two grandchildren, by whom she is survived.

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Here's a small sampling of Tina Turner's music.  In 1971, the Ike & Tina Turner Review performed Proud Mary on Italian TV.

In a video showing only Ike and Tina, they perform Nutbush City Limits.  Bob Seger covered this one, and if you listen closely to both versions, you'll hear that he messes up a few of the lyrics.

Tina Turner released her last solo studio album Twenty Four Seven in 1999 and afterwards retired from the recording business.  This is its title song.