Turner started his career in the 1950s.
Tina Turner, the US-born singer who left a tough farming community and abusive relationship to become one of the top recording artists of all time, died on Wednesday at the age of 83.
His representative said he died after a long illness at his home in Kusnacht, near Zurich, Switzerland.
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 chart-topping 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 around New York City with her spiky blonde hair. Roamed the streets of the city, wearing a cropped jean jacket, mini skirt and stiletto heels.
With her taste for musical experimentation and clear-worded ballads, Turner fit perfectly with the pop landscape of the 1980s, in which music fans valued electronically produced sounds and embraced hippie-era idealism. used to despise
Sometimes nicknamed the “Queen of Rock ‘n’ Roll”, Turner won six of her eight Grammy Awards in the 1980s. The decade saw him chart a dozen songs in the Top 40, including “Typical Male,” “The Best,” “Private Dancer” and “Better Be Good to Me.” His 1988 show in Rio de Janeiro attracted 180,000 people, one of the largest concerts for a solo artist.
By then, Turner had been estranged from her marriage to guitarist Ike Turner for a decade.
The superstar was coming out about abuse from her ex-husband during their marital and musical partnership in the 1960s and 1970s. She described a bruised eye, split lip, broken jaw and other injuries that repeatedly sent her to the emergency room.
“Tina’s story is not one of victimization but one of incredible triumph,” singer Janet Jackson wrote of Turner in an issue of Rolling Stone, which ranked Turner number 63 on its list of the Top 100 Artists of All Time.
Jackson said, “She has turned herself into an international sensation – a beautiful powerhouse.”
In 1985, Turner gave his reputation as a survivor a fictional twist. He played the ruthless leader of an outpost in a nuclear wasteland, starring opposite Mel Gibson in the third installment of the Mad Max franchise, “Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome”.
Most of Turner’s hit songs were written by others, but she brought them to life with a voice that New York Times music critic Jon Pareles called “one of the more peculiar instruments in pop”.
Pareles wrote in a 1987 concert review, “It is three-scale, with a nasal lower register, a squeal, a mid-range cut and a higher register so distinctly pronounced that it sounds like a falsetto.” Is.”
‘One-Horse Town’
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 one-horse town” Was.
According to the singer’s 2018 memoir “My Love Story”, her father worked as an overseer on a farm and her mother left the family when the singer was 11 years old. As a teenager, she moved to St. Louis to be reunited with her mother.
Ike Turner, whose 1951 song “Rocket 88” is often called the first rock and roll record, discovered him at age 17 when he grabbed a mic to sing at his club show in St. Louis in 1957.
The band leader later recorded a hit song with his protégé, “A Fool in Love”, and gave her the stage name Tina Turner, before marrying in Tijuana, Mexico.
Tina practiced her strong voice and vigorous dance routines as lead singer in an ensemble called the Ike and Tina Turner Revue. She collaborated with members of rock royalty in the 1960s and 1970s, including The Who and Phil Spector, and appeared on the cover of issue two of Rolling Stone magazine in 1967.
Ike and Tina Turner bounced between record labels, with much of their commercial success due to a relentless touring schedule. Their biggest hit was a cover of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Proud Mary”.
Turner left her husband at a tour stop in Dallas one night in 1976 after he pushed her during a car ride and, according to her memoir, she hit back. Their divorce was finalized in 1978.
The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inducted Ike and Tina Turner in 1991, calling them “one of the most formidable live acts in history”. Ike Turner died in 2007.
europe bound
After leaving her husband, Turner spent several years struggling to regain the limelight, releasing solo albums and singles that flopped and getting booed at corporate conventions.
In 1980, she met new manager Roger Davies, an Australian music executive who managed her for three decades. This led to a No. 1 single – “What’s Love Got to Do With It” – and then in 1984 his album “Private Dancer” took him to the top of the charts.
“Private Dancer” became Turner’s biggest album, a cornerstone of a career that saw her sell over 200 million records in total.
In 1985, Turner met German music executive Erwin Bach, who became her long-term partner, and in 1988 she moved to London, beginning a decade-long residency in Europe. They released two studio albums in the 1990s, which sold particularly well in Europe, recorded the theme song for the 1995 Bond film “Goldeneye”, and staged a successful world tour in 2008 and 2009.
After that, she retired from show business. She married Bach, renounced her American citizenship, and became a Swiss citizen.
He faced several health problems after retiring and suffered a family tragedy in 2018 when his eldest son, Craig, took his own life in Los Angeles at the age of 59. His younger son Ronnie died in December 2022.
Even years after his retirement, his name continues to attract audiences. The musical stage show “Tina: The Tina Turner Musical”, with Adrienne Warren initially acting and singing the star’s life story, hit first in London’s West End in 2018 and later on Broadway, and is still running. And in 2021 HBO released a documentary “Tina” about her life.
He is survived by two sons, Bach and Ike who he adopted.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)