‘Queen of Rock and Roll’ Tina Turner Dead at 83

Tina Turner, the powerhouse singer, incendiary reside performer and honorary “Queen of Rock ‘n’ Roll,” died Wednesday at age 83.

The singer’s household confirmed the information in an announcement. “Tina Turner, the ‘Queen of Rock ‘n’ Roll,’ has died peacefully today at the age of 83 after a long illness in her home in Kusnacht near Zurich, Switzerland,” they mentioned. “With her, the world loses a music legend and a role model.”

Born Anna Mae (*83*) on Nov. 26, 1939, in Brownsville, Tennessee, Turner launched her illustrious, six-plus-decade profession in 1957 when she began performing with Ike Turner’s Kings of Rhythm. She appeared on the tune “Boxtop” the next 12 months underneath the title “Little Ann.” Ike & Tina Turner made their recording debut in 1960 with “A Fool in Love,” which turned one of the primary R&B songs to take pleasure in crossover pop success and went platinum. The couple married in 1962.

Ike & Tina Turner scored quite a few hits all through the ’60s and ’70s (most famously a canopy of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Proud Mary”) and developed a status as a must-see reside act. But whilst their musical partnership flourished, their union was hellish away from the highlight, as Ike bodily, emotionally and financially abused Tina for years.

“He threw hot coffee in my face, giving me third-degree burns,” Turner wrote in her 2018 memoir, My Love Story. “He used my nose as a punching bag so many times that I could taste blood running down my throat when I sang. He broke my jaw. And I couldn’t remember what it was like not to have a black eye.” The singer revealed that at one level, she even tried suicide.

Turner filed for divorce from Ike in 1976, and their turbulent marriage formally got here to an finish in March 1978. But the singer’s issues had been removed from over. Ike despatched his “stooges” to harass and intimidate Tina whereas the divorce proceedings had been underway, and he managed all of the couple’s contracts and cash, forcing Tina and their 4 sons to depend on meals stamps. Ike additionally owned all of the publishing rights to their music, leaving Tina with no supply of earnings.

“My relationship with Ike was doomed the day he figured out I was going to be his moneymaker,” she wrote in My Love Story. “He needed to control me, economically and psychologically, so I could never leave him.”

Watch Tina Turner Perform “Proud Mary” at Wembley Stadium in 2000

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Turner’s profession consequently declined for a number of years following the divorce, however she rebounded together with her 1984 solo album Private Dancer, which went five-times platinum and spawned the No. 1 hit “What’s Love Got to Do With It.” But Turner didn’t see it as a comeback album. “Tina had never arrived,” the singer mentioned within the 2021 HBO documentary Tina. “It was Tina’s debut.”

The singer’s resurgence continued the next 12 months when she starred alongside Mel Gibson in Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome and scored a No. 2 hit with “We Don’t Need Another Hero (Thunderdome).” Her subsequent album, 1986’s Break Every Rule, additionally went platinum and yielded the No. 2 hit “Typical Male.” Turner continued making music over the subsequent decade, releasing her remaining studio album, Twenty Four Seven, in 1999. She retired at the tip of 2000’s Twenty Four Seven Tour, however she mounted one more comeback in 2008, performing alongside Beyonce at that 12 months’s Grammys and launching the Tina!: fiftieth Anniversary Tour. She formally retired from the stage, this time for good, following the profitable trek’s conclusion in 2009.

Turner acquired a slew of accolades all through her profession, together with eight Grammy Awards, three songs enshrined within the Grammy Hall of Fame and a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. She acquired the Kennedy Center Honors in 2005 alongside Tony Bennett, Suzanne Farrell, Julie Harris and Robert Redford. Turner additionally holds the excellence of being one of three girls (together with Carole King and Stevie Nicks) inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame twice — first in 1991 as one-half of Ike & Tina Turner, and in 2021 as a solo artist.

In Tina, the singer additional mirrored on her outstanding profession and her dream “to be the first Black rock ‘n’ roll singer to pack places like the [Rolling] Stones.” “Look what I have done in this lifetime with this body,” she mentioned. “I’m a girl from a cotton field. I pulled myself above what was not taught to me.”