Tina Turner

Anna Mae Bullock was born on the twenty-sixth of November 1939 at Brownsville, Tennessee, the youngest of three daughters of Floyd Richard Bullock — an overseer at the Poindexter plantation outside Nutbush — and Zelma Priscilla Currie Bullock. Her parents separated when she was eleven; she was raised by her maternal grandmother at Nutbush. She moved to St. Louis at sixteen at the close of high school. She met Ike Turner at the Manhattan Club at East St. Louis in 1957 and joined his Kings of Rhythm as a backing vocalist the same year.

She emerged as the lead singer of the renamed Ike and Tina Turner Revue in 1960. The Revue recorded the 1960 single "A Fool in Love" — a number-two R&B hit — and across the following sixteen years produced the body of work — "It's Gonna Work Out Fine" (1961), "River Deep — Mountain High" (1966), "Proud Mary" (1971), "Nutbush City Limits" (1973) — that established Tina Turner as the most powerful female vocalist of the chitlin-circuit R&B tradition. The body of work was conducted across a domestic situation that was — as Turner would across her later autobiographies document in detail — one of sustained physical abuse from Ike Turner.

She left the Ike and Tina Turner marriage with thirty-six cents and a Mobil gasoline credit card on the fourth of July 1976. She supported herself for the next seven years through Las Vegas cabaret residencies. She signed with Capitol Records in 1983 — at forty-three, with no previous solo recording career — and produced the single "What's Love Got to Do with It" of May 1984 and the album Private Dancer of June 1984. The album sold twelve million copies, occupied the Billboard 200 for forty-two weeks, and was the largest commercial comeback in popular-music history at the time. It won her three of her eight Grammy Awards in February 1985.

She toured continuously across the following two decades — the 1988 Tina Turner Break Every Rule World Tour drew an estimated three million audience members across the twenty-five countries on the itinerary — and starred in the 1985 film Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome opposite Mel Gibson.

She received the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2018, the Kennedy Center Honors in 2005, and was inducted twice into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame — first as half of Ike and Tina Turner in 1991 and individually in 2021.

She died of natural causes at Küsnacht near Zurich on the twenty-fourth of May 2023, at eighty-three.

She is honored here as the Queen of Rock 'n' Roll.