Tina Turner, the growling songstress whose explosive presence left an indelible mark on 20th-century rock, electrified fans with five decades of hit records — first with husband Ike Turner, then as a wildly successful solo act.
The Black eight-time Grammy winner, who has died at the age of 83, lit up the stage from the 1960s, and won a new generation of fans in a stunning comeback after escaping her violent marriage — making her popular music’s ultimate survivor.
Abandoned by her parents, she emerged from Tennessee’s cotton fields to become the impassioned “Queen of Rock and Roll” who, according to music lore, taught Rolling Stones frontman Mick Jagger how to dance.
After snowballing into a global phenomenon, the singer of “Nutbush City Limits” and “The Best” lived her final years in Switzerland with husband Erwin Bach, a former record label executive who was her romantic partner for three decades before they tied the knot in 2013.
Her early career, originally as a soul and R&B siren, was a roller coaster for Turner, who admitted attempting suicide at the height of Ike’s physical and emotional abuse.
Tina fled Ike in 1976, dashing across a highway to escape during a concert tour. Her divorce was finalized in 1978, and she was left with nothing but her stage name.
But the rock star dream still gnawed at her.
“How can I fill stadiums?” Turner wondered, in comments played during her 2021 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction.
“I wanted it. I wanted to do what Jagger and all the other guys at the time was doing.”
Those dreams were fulfilled, and then some, when she struck crossover gold with her 1984 album “Private Dancer,” whose Grammy-winning smash single “What’s Love Got to Do With It” propelled her to superstardom at age 44.
Four years later, she set the record for largest paying attendance of a performance by a solo artist when her Rio concert crowd topped 180,000.
As a Black woman who embraced rock over 1950s doo-wop and 1960s Motown, Turner was a double outsider. But she wrote — and then rewrote — the rule book for women in the genre.
“A Black woman owning the stage all by herself: that’s the dream right there,” singer and rapper Lizzo said of Turner.
Turner sold more than 100 million records worldwide, according to Billboard, and paved the way for bold performers like Janet Jackson, Madonna and Beyonce.
“I never in my life saw a woman so powerful, so fearless, so fabulous,” Beyonce told Turner from the Kennedy Center stage in a 2005 Tina tribute. “And those legs!”
– ‘Pain in your heart’ –
Anna Mae Bullock was born on November 26, 1939, in Brownsville, Tennessee.
She and her sister grew up in a family of modest means but conditions worsened when they were abandoned by their father, and then their mother.
When the grandmother who helped raise them died, Anna Mae moved in with relatives in St. Louis, Missouri at age 16.
There she met Ike Turner, a guitarist and bandleader eight years her senior…
