UNITED STATES: The American-born singer Tina Turner, who left an abusive relationship and a hardscrabble farming community to become one of the top recording artists of all time, passed away on Wednesday at the age of 83.
After a long illness, she died peacefully in her home in Küsnacht, near Zurich, Switzerland, her representative stated. Turner started her career in the 1950s, at the dawn of rock ‘n’ roll, and emerged as an MTV superstar.
In the music video for her chart-topping song “What’s Love Got to Do with It,” in which she referred to love as a “second-hand emotion,” Turner embodied 1980s fashion as she walked through the streets of New York City with her spiky blond hair in a cropped jean jacket, mini skirt, and stiletto heels.
With her taste for musical experimentation and plainly written ballads, Turner suited a 1980s pop scene where music lovers prized electronically created sounds and rejected hippie-era idealism perfectly.
Turner, who was referred to as the “Queen of Rock ‘n’ Roll,” received six of her eight Grammy nominations in the 1980s. Twelve of her tracks, including “Typical Male,” “The Best,” “Private Dancer,” and “Better Be Good to Me,” reached the Top 40 throughout that decade. 180,000 people attended her performance in Rio de Janeiro in 1988, which is still one of the biggest concert crowds for a single musician.
By then, Turner had been divorced from guitarist Ike Turner for ten years.
The celebrity was open about the abuse she endured from her ex-husband throughout their musical collaboration and marriage in the 1960s and 1970s. She detailed many injuries that frequently sent her to the emergency room, including bruised eyes, smashed lips, a broken jaw, and other wounds.
In a Rolling Stone article that ranked Turner No. 63 among the top 100 artists of all time, singer Janet Jackson said of Turner: “Tina’s story is not one of victimhood but one of incredible triumph. She’s transformed herself into an international sensation—an elegant powerhouse.”
In 1985, Turner gave a fictitious spin to her reputation as a survivor. In “Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome,” the third entry in the Mad Max franchise, she co-starred with Mel Gibson as the brutal head of an outpost in a radioactive wasteland.
Turner’s voice, which New York Times music critic Jon Pareles called “one of the more peculiar instruments in pop,” brought life to the songs even though they were not her original compositions.
Bryan Adams, a Canadian musician who collaborated with Turner on the 1985 single “It’s Only Love,” lamented Turner’s passing, saying “The world just lost one hell of a powerhouse of a woman.”
President of the United States Joe Biden referred to Turner as a “once-in-a-generation talent” and said that her “personal strength was remarkable.”
“Overcoming adversity, and even abuse, she built a career for the ages and a life and legacy that were entirely hers,” Biden stated.
A quiet little old community, a one-horse town
Turner was born Anna Mae Bullock on November 26, 1939, in the little village of Nutbush, Tennessee, which she referred to as a “quiet little old community, a one-horse town” in her 1973 song “Nutbush City Limits.”
According to the singer’s 2018 memoir, “My Love Story,” her mother left the family when she was 11, and her father worked as an overseer on a farm. She followed her mother to St. Louis when she was a teen.
Ike Turner found her when she was 17 years old, when she took the stage to sing at his club performance in St. Louis in 1957.
Before the two got married in Tijuana, Mexico, the bandleader gave his protégé Tina Turner’s stage name, and they later collaborated on the hit song “A Fool in Love.”
In an ensemble called the Ike and Tina Turner Revue, Tina used her powerful voice as the lead vocalist and laboriously trained dance moves. She worked with legendary musicians from the 1960s and 1970s, including The Who and Phil Spector, and she was featured on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine’s second issue in 1967.
Ike and Tina Turner switched record labels frequently and credited their financial success in large part to an exhausting travelling schedule. Their version of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Proud Mary” became their biggest success.
Turner reportedly left her husband one night in 1976 while on a tour stop in Dallas after he beat her, and she retaliated, according to her memoir. In 1978, the divorce was legally finalised.
Ike and Tina Turner were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1991 and were hailed as “one of the most formidable live acts in history.” Turner passed away in 2007.
Struggle to regain the limelight
After divorcing her husband, Turner struggled for years to regain the limelight, putting out unsuccessful solo albums and singles and performing at business conferences.
In 1980, she first met her subsequent manager, Roger Davies, an Australian music executive who managed her for the next three decades. “What’s Love Got to Do with It?” became her first solo No. 1, and in 1984, her album “Private Dancer” helped her reach the top of the charts.
As the pinnacle of a career in which she sold more than 200 million records overall, “Private Dancer” went on to become Turner’s biggest album.
Turner started her decades-long residence in Europe in 1988, when she moved to London after meeting German music entrepreneur Erwin Bach in 1985. In the 1990s, she sang the title song for the 1995 James Bond film “GoldenEye,” published two studio albums that did well, particularly in Europe, and went on a successful global tour in 2008 and 2009.
She then left the entertainment industry. She gave up her American citizenship when she married Bach, gaining Swiss citizenship instead.
After retiring, she battled with a variety of health issues, and in 2018, she experienced a personal tragedy when her eldest son, Craig, committed suicide in Los Angeles at the age of 59. Ronnie, her younger son, passed away in December 2022.
Years after she retired, her name still draws crowds. The musical theatre production “TINA: The Tina Turner Musical,” which stars Adrienne Warren in the lead role and sings the star’s life story, debuted in London’s West End in 2018 and later transferred to Broadway. It is still in production. And “Tina,” an HBO documentary on her life, was released in 2021.
Bach and the two sons of Ike that she adopted are her surviving family members.
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