Tina Turner Obituary: The Woman Who Taught Mick Jagger To Dance

With her soulful hits and commanding stage presence, Tina Turner secured her status as the ‘Queen of Rock ‘n’ Roll’ with a back catalog of powerful hits that showcased her boundless energy and raw vocals.

And she achieved her international stardom despite a harsh upbringing in a Tennessee farming community and abusive relationships, both with her father and with guitarist Ike Turner.

Her unique talents, which won her 12 Grammy awards and sold 200 million albums worldwide, would inspire some of today’s most successful artists, including Beyoncé and Rihanna.

And she also took credit for teaching Rolling Stones frontman Mick Jagger how to dance – revealing to the Daily Mail in 2017 that she taught him the Pony back in the ’60s.

Turner died peacefully after a long illness at her home in Küsnacht near Zurich, Switzerland, her representative said.

Turner began her career in the 1950s during the early years of rock and roll and developed into an MTV phenomenon.

In the video for her song “What’s Love Got to Do with It,” in which she called love a “second-hand emotion,” Turner epitomized 1980s style as she walked the streets of New York City with her spiky blonde hair. wearing a short denim jacket, miniskirt and stiletto heels.

With her penchant for musical experimentation and bluntly worded ballads, Turner fit perfectly into an 1980s pop landscape in which music fans valued electronically produced sounds and scorned hippie-era idealism.

Sometimes referred to as the “Queen of Rock ‘n’ Roll,” Turner won six of her eight Grammy Awards in the 1980s. In the decade, she landed a dozen songs in the Top 40, including “Typical Male,” “The Best,” “Private Dancer,” and “Better Be Good to Me.” Her 1988 Rio de Janeiro show drew 180,000 people, which remains one of the largest concert attendances for a single artist.

By this time, Turner had been free from her marriage to guitarist Ike Turner for ten years.

The superstar has been candid about the abuse she suffered from her former husband during their marital and musical partnership in the 1960s and 1970s. She described bruised eyes, busted lips, a broken jaw, and other injuries that repeatedly took her to the emergency room.

“Tina’s story isn’t about victimization, it’s about incredible triumph,” singer Janet Jackson wrote of Turner in a Rolling Stone issue that ranked Turner No. 63 on a list of the 100 Greatest Artists of All Time.

“She’s transformed herself into an international sensation — an elegant powerhouse,” Jackson said.

In 1985, Turner gave a fictional twist to her reputation as a survivor. Playing the ruthless leader of a nuclear wasteland outpost, she starred opposite Mel Gibson in the third installment in the Mad Max franchise, ‘Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome’.

Most of Turner’s hit songs were written by others, but she enlivened them with a voice that New York Times music critic Jon Pareles called “one of the more idiosyncratic instruments in pop.”

“It has three levels, with a nasally low register, a screeching, cutting midrange, and a high register so startlingly clear it sounds like a falsetto,” wrote Pareles in a 1987 concert review.

‘CITY WITH A HORSE’

She was born Anna Mae Bullock on November 26, 1939, in the rural Tennessee community of Nutbush, which she described in her 1973 song “Nutbush City Limits” as a “quiet little old community, a town with one horse.”

Her father worked as an overseer on a farm and her mother left the family when the singer was 11 years old, according to the singer’s 2018 memoir, “My Love Story.” As a teenager, she moved to St. Louis to rejoin her mother.

Ike Turner, whose 1951 song “Rocket 88” is often referred to as the first rock ‘n’ roll record, discovered her at age 17 when she grabbed the mic to sing at his club show in St. Louis in 1957.

The bandleader later recorded a hit song, “A Fool In Love,” with his protege and gave her the stage name Tina Turner, before the two got married in Tijuana, Mexico.

Tina used her strong voice and vigorously rehearsed dance routines as the lead singer in an ensemble called the Ike and Tina Turner Revue. She worked with members of rock royalty, including The Who and Phil Spector, in the 1960s and 1970s and appeared on the cover of issue two of Rolling Stone magazine in 1967.

Ike and Tina Turner bounced between record labels, thanks much of their commercial success to a relentless touring schedule. Their biggest hit was a cover of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s ‘Proud Mary’.

Turner left her husband one night in 1976 during a tour stop in Dallas, after he hit her during a car ride and she hit back, according to her memoir. Their divorce was finalized in 1978.

The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inducted Ike and Tina Turner in 1991, calling them “one of the most formidable live acts in history.” Ike Turner passed away in 2007.

EUROPE BONDED

After leaving her husband, Turner struggled for years to regain the limelight, releasing solo albums and singles that flopped and performing at company conferences.

In 1980 she met new manager Roger Davies, an Australian music executive who guided her for three decades. That led to a solo No. 1 – ‘What’s Love Got to Do With It’ – and in 1984 her album ‘Private Dancer’ propelled her to the top of the charts.

‘Private Dancer’ became Turner’s biggest album, the culmination of a career in which she sold more than 200 million records in total.

In 1985 Turner met German music director Erwin Bach, who became her long-term partner, and in 1988 she moved to London where she began a decades-long residency in Europe. She released two studio albums in the 1990s that sold well, especially in Europe, recorded the theme song for the 1995 Bond film ‘GoldenEye’ and organized a successful world tour in 2008 and 2009.

After that, she retired from show business. She married Bach, renounced her US citizenship and became a citizen of Switzerland.

She struggled with a number of health issues after her retirement and in 2018, she faced a family tragedy when her eldest son, Craig, took his own life in Los Angeles at the age of 59. Her youngest son Ronnie died in December 2022.

Her name continues to attract audiences years after her retirement. The musical show ‘TINA: The Tina Turner Musical’, in which Adrienne Warren initially acted and sang the life story of the star, was a hit in London’s West End in 2018 and later on Broadway, and is still running. And in 2021, HBO released a documentary about her life, ‘Tina’.

She is survived by Bach and two of Ike’s sons whom she adopted.