Tina Turner, Simply The Best

Yesterday, when I heard we lost Tina Turner, I had to pause and reflect. The only thought this simple wordsmith could come up with was “Wow”. Since I am a writer I knew I had to express my feelings the only way I know how, in writing. I hope you bear with this simple man’s memorial to an extraordinary lady.

The statement from her publicist said that Tina Turner died “after a long period of illness” at the age of 83. Turner detailed health issues she had dealt with in her 2018 memoir, “Tina Turner: My Love Story” including intestinal cancer, a stroke, and kidney failure. She received a donated kidney from her second husband Erwin Bach in 2017 which saved her life at the time.

Turner was famous for a career that covered sixty years both as a soloist and a member of the duo Ike & Tina Turner with her first husband, Ike Turner. Tina Turner was inducted into the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame twice, in 1991 for the duo and then in 2021 as a solo artist.

Frequently on the U.S. pop and R&B charts during the 1960s and 70s, Ike & Tina Turner produced a rock and soul high-energy sound due to Tina’s gravely voice and sultry lyrics. Aside from one of the duo’s most well-known songs, “River Deep, Mountain High” Tina Turner made other people’s songs sound even better.

One such song was the duo’s cover of the Creedence Clearwater song, “Proud Mary”, which became Tina’s signature song during this period. Even today most people will attribute the song to Tina, making the Creedence version seem somehow unusual. “Proud Mary” is Tina Turner’s most iconic and signature song because she poured everything into it from her rough and raspy vocals to her dancing.

“Proud Mary” was the duo’s biggest hit, earning Tina her first Grammy Award for best R&B performance by a duo. Tina Turner would go on to win a total of eight Grammys over her six-decade career, including best female rock vocal performance three years in a row in the 80s.

Rolling Stone’s Ben Fong-Torres wrote in 1971, “Someone once called Tina ‘the female Mick Jagger,’” “In fact, to be more accurate, one should call Mick Jagger ‘the male Tina Turner.’” Needless to say, when Jagger and Turner paired up for the Jacksons’ “State of Shock” at Live Aid in 1985, the combination was nothing less than explosive.

Mick Jagger would say in an Instagram statement, “I’m so saddened by the passing of my wonderful friend Tina Turner. She was truly an enormously talented performer and singer. She was inspiring, warm, funny, and generous. She helped me so much when I was young and I will never forget her.”

Tina Turner was born Anna Mae Bullock on November 26, 1939, in rural Nutbush, Tennessee. Tina had a distant relationship with both her parents while growing up. In her 2018 memoir, Tina Turner: My Love Story, Tina Turner describes being 4 or 5 years old and being paid by the salesgirls, on shopping trips, to sing the radio hits she memorized and performing with her cousins in pretend stage shows. She would go on to practice her performance skills by singing at picnics with Mr. Bootsy Whitelaw, a regionally famous trombonist.

At 16, Turner moved to St. Louis to live with her mother. She began going to the famed East St. Louis Club Manhattan where she saw Ike Turner & The Kings of Rhythm for the first time. In 1957, after she impressed Ike Turner with an impromptu performance of B.B. King’s “You Know I Love You” she joined the band. Not long after joining the band, Ike Turner realized her talent and renamed the group the Ike and Tina Turner Revue.

Ike Turner renamed Anna Mae Bullock Tina Turner and went so far as to trademark the name “Tina Turner” In case she left the band he would be able to easily add another “Tina Turner”. This was obviously only one of several miscalculations that would plague him.

By Tina’s own account, Ike was extremely cruel to her, both personally and professionally. “Looking back, I realize that my relationship with Ike was doomed the day he figured out that I was going to be his meal ticket, his moneymaker,” Turner wrote in My Love Story. Tina was a last-minute replacement to sing “A Fool in Love”, the duo’s first hit song in 1960, which impressed the group’s record label so much they told Ike to include Tina as lead vocals.

Mentally and physically abused, penniless Tina Turner left Ike in 1976 when they were on tour in Dallas. “I walked out without anything and had to make it on my own for my family and everyone so I just went back to work for myself,” she said during a 2017 appearance on The Jonathan Ross Show.

To start over and pay the debt incurred as a result of the canceled appearances of the duo Turner earned money by appearing in TV shows such as Hollywood Squares, Donny & Marie, and The Sonny & Cher Show. During this time Turner also appeared in cabaret-style concerts and produced two albums that didn’t chart.

However, in 1984 Tina Turner would be launched into superstardom and never again be anything less. Turner achieved mainstream success with her album “Private Dancer” which contained her first solo number-one hit “What’s Love Got to Do With It.” “Private Dancer” went on to win the Grammy Awards for Record of the Year and best female pop vocal performance.

As the 1980s progressed, Turner also co-starred in the 1985 film Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome which also contained her hit “We Don’t Need Another Hero (Thunderdome)” and her Grammy-winning “One of the Living”. Tina Turner also performed at the first-ever MTV Music Awards in 1984. The following year she won Best Video for “What’s Love Got to Do With It.”

The 90s continued Turner’s commercial success with the 1993 biopic, “What’s Love Got to Do With It” based on her 1986 autobiography, I, Tina. The movie starred Laurence Fishburne as Ike Turner and Angela Bassett as Tina, with both actors nominated for Oscars.

In 1995 Tina Turner moved to Switzerland and began to wind down her workload in the late 90s and 00s to then retire after her critically acclaimed 50th Anniversary Tour in 2009. Turner did, however, work closely on “Tina: The Tina Turner Musical”, which opened on Broadway in the fall of 2019.

A notable event happened at the 2008 Grammy Awards when she performed an amazing version of “Proud Mary” with Beyonce’ because it seemed at the time Tina was passing the torch to the next generation of musicians. The performance also confirmed Tina Turner still possessed all the talent she always had.

In Conclusion

Thank you, Tina Turner. You are Simply The Best