![]() ![]() Through the early 1960s Ike and Tina Turner had a string of R&B hits and toured extensively. And sometimes after he beat me up, I ended up feeling sorry for him.’ I felt very loyal to Ike and I didn’t want to hurt him. ‘I felt obligated to stay there and I was afraid. He was also addicted and paranoid, and he gave her no financial independence.Īnd yet she couldn’t bring herself to leave him. Ike was unfaithful, controlling, violent and abusive. ![]() In those days a promise was a promise.’īefore too long Tina realised she was in a toxic relationship. ‘I promised him that I wouldn’t leave him. She accepted the name change and they got married. Perhaps this was the first indication that he had a sinister, controlling side. And then on Monday morning I was headed for school.’Īnna Mae had undoubted star quality, and Ike subsequently recast his outfit as the Ike and Tina Turner Revue – without consulting her. ‘I was playing these two roles… Rings all over my fingers and bareback shoes with seams in my stockings. He immediately recognised her talent and enlisted her to his band. Why he treats you like he do, when he's such a good man.’ĭuring the intermission in one of Ike’s concerts, Anna Mae grabbed the microphone and sang. You know you love him, you can't understand. Sometimes you're happy, and sometimes you're sad. You've got to face it to live in this world. You're just a fool, you know you're in love. Won't somebody please, please tell me what's wrong? That track was carelessly credited to Jackie Brenston and his Delta Cats, and so began Ike’s lifelong sense of injustice. Louis, where in 1956 she met Ike Turner, a talented musician whose 1951 recording ‘Rocket 88’ is considered by many to have been the first rock’n’roll song. ‘I didn’t think that I would actually achieve because first I wasn’t pretty, and I didn’t have the clothes, and I didn’t have the means.’Īt 16 Anna Mae rejoined her mother in St. Anna Mae, feeling unloved and isolated, was cared for by her strict grandmother. Two years later he moved to Detroit with another woman. Louis in order to escape her violent husband. When she was 11 Anna Mae’s mother left without warning for St. ‘When you’re in the South there’s nothing happening except the church, the piano, the preacher.’ She discovered she had a remarkable voice. As a child she started singing in the choir at her local Baptist church. And when I walked out, I walked and I didn’t look back.’Īnna Mae Bullock was born in 1939 into a sharecropping family in rural Tennessee. I went through basic torture… I was living a life of death. ‘My ex-husband was a physically violent man. She teaches us a good deal about survival and strength of character. Above all she had to overcome a wretched, abusive relationship. She had to prevail over poverty, racism, sexism and ageism. I always wanted to make myself a better person, because I was not educated. Resplendent in red split skirts and sparkling silver mini-dresses rejoicing in denim jumpsuits and leather leotards glorying in knee-high boots, big belts and big hair - with a beaming smile and a full-throated roar, she celebrates what it is to be alive. She is both spiritual and sensual tenacious and triumphant. She clenches her fists and claps her hands implores us, pleads with us. She twists, jives and kicks her long legs to one side. Turner shakes and shimmies, struts and stomps. 'My legacy is that I stayed on course… from the beginning to the end, because I believed in something inside of me.’ Both were compelling commemorations of her luminous talent and indomitable spirit. ![]() And so I watched ‘ Tina’ the documentary (2021, directed by Daniel Lindsay and TJ Martin) and ‘ Tina’ the musical (2018, directed by Phylidda Lloyd, at the Aldwych Theatre, London). The death at the age of 83 of the legendary singer Tina Turner earlier this year prompted me to look back on her life and work. 'Physical strength in a woman - that’s what I am.’
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