Tina Turner, ‘Queen of Rock ‘n’ Roll’ whose triumphant career made her world-famous, dies at 83

More popular in England at the time than in the US, she recorded a raspy version of Let’s Stay Together at EMI’s Abbey Road studios in London. By the end of 1983, Let’s Stay Together was a hit throughout Europe and on the verge of breaking in the states. An A&R man at Capitol Records, John Carter, urged the label to sign her up and make an album. Among the material presented was a reflective pop-reggae ballad co-written by Terry Britten and Graham Lyle and initially dismissed by Tina as “wimpy.”

“I just thought it was some old pop song, and I didn’t like it,” she later said of What’s Love Got To Do With It.

Turner’s Private Dancer album came out in May 1984, sold more than eight million copies and featured several hit singles, including the title song and Better Be Good To Me. It won four Grammys, among them record of the year for What’s Love Got to Do With It, the song that came to define the clear-eyed image of her post-Ike years.

“People look at me now and think what a hot life I must have lived – ha!” she wrote in her memoir.

Even with Ike, it was hard to mistake her for a romantic. Her voice was never “pretty,” and love songs were never her specialty, in part because she had little experience to draw from. She was born in Nutbush, Tennessee in 1939 and would say she received “no love” from either her mother or father. After her parents separated, she moved often around Tennessee and Missouri, living with various relatives. She was outgoing, loved to sing and as a teenager would check out the blues clubs in St Louis, where one of the top draws was Ike Turner and his Kings of Rhythm. Tina didn’t care much for his looks the first time she saw him, at the Club Manhattan.

“Then he got up onstage and picked up his guitar,” she wrote in her memoir. “He hit one note, and I thought, ‘Jesus, listen to this guy play.'”

Tina soon made her move. During intermission at an Ike Turner show at the nearby Club D’Lisa, Ike was alone on stage, playing a blues melody on the keyboards. Tina recognized the song, B.B. King’s You Know I Love You, grabbed a microphone and sang along. As Tina remembered, a stunned Ike called out “Giirrlll!!” and demanded to know what else she could perform. Over her mother’s objections, she agreed to join his group. He changed her first name to Tina, inspired by the comic book heroine Sheena, Queen of the Jungle, and changed her last name by marrying her, in 1962.

In rare moments of leniency from Ike, Tina did enjoy success on her own. She added a roaring lead vocal to Phil Spector’s titanic production of River Deep, Mountain High, a flop in the U.S. when released in 1966, but a hit overseas and eventually a standard. She was also featured as the Acid Queen in the 1975 film version of the Who’s rock opera Tommy. More recent film work included Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome” and a cameo in What’s Love Got To Do With It.

Turner had two sons: Craig, with saxophonist Raymond Hill; and Ronald, with Ike Turner. (Craig Turner was found dead in 2018 of an apparent suicide). In a memoir published later in 2018, Tina Turner: My Love Story, she revealed that she had received a kidney transplant from her second husband, former EMI record executive Erwin Bach.

Turner’s life seemed an argument against marriage, but her life with Bach was a love story the younger Tina would not have believed possible. They met in the mid-1980s, when she flew to Germany for record promotion and he picked her up at the airport. He was more than a decade younger than her – “the prettiest face,” she said of him in the HBO documentary – and the attraction was mutual. She wed Bach in 2013, exchanging vows at a civil ceremony in Switzerland.

“It’s that happiness that people talk about,” Turner told the press at the time, “when you wish for nothing, when you can finally take a deep breath and say, ‘Everything is good.'”