Tina Turner biography

The singer and actress is American-born. In the early 1960s, she became famous with her partner, Ike Turner. Tina began her solo career in 1978, after she separated from Ike. Three Grammys were awarded to her debut solo album, Private Dancer (1984). A Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction followed in 1991.

Anna Mae Bullock was born Tina Turner. She performed under the stage name "Little Ann" before Ike Turner gave her the moniker "Tina Turner" in 1960. According to reports, Ike trademarked the name so that another singer could perform under the name if Bullock left the band.

Tina Turner was born in Brownsville, Tennessee, on November 26, 1939. Her parents were sharecroppers, Floyd and Zelma Bullock. Turner then went to live with her maternal grandmother in Nutbush, Tennessee, after they separated in the early 1950s. At the age of 16, she moved to St. Louis, Missouri, where she eventually began her music career.

She immersed herself in St. Louis' rhythm-and-blues scene when she was a teenager. During a performance by his band, the Kings of Rhythm, in 1956, she met Ike Turner and soon became part of his group. Until the mid-1970s, the ensemble toured as the Ike and Tina Turner Revue.

Her first solo record, "Nutbush City Limits" (1973), was co-written with Ike Turner. Turner's first solo release was Private Dancer. The album won three Grammys, including record of the year for "What's Love Got to Do with It.".

A five-decade career saw Tina Turner gain fame as a rhythm-and-blues, soul, and rock singer.

The Turner family worked in the field of sharecropping. After moving to St. Louis, Missouri, she became involved in the local rhythm-and-blues scene. During a 1956 performance by Ike Turner's band, the Kings of Rhythm, she met him and soon became a member of the group. With her electric stage presence, she quickly became the show's main attraction. Known for its live performances, the Ike and Tina Turner Revue struggled to find success on the recording front. After "A Fool in Love" hit the pop charts in 1960, a string of hit singles followed. Tina and Ike were married in 1962, although the exact date has been subject to some speculation (during the couple's divorce proceedings in 1977, Ike claimed that the two had never been legally married). While Phil Spector's album River Deep-Mountain High (1966) was a hit in Europe and arguably one of the finest examples of his "wall of sound" production style, it did not do well in the United States. Tina and Ike's final hits as a couple were "Proud Mary" (1971) and "Nutbush City Limits" (1973). After years of physical abuse and infidelity, Tina divorced Ike in 1978.

In 1984, she released her debut solo album, Private Dancer, following guest appearances on other artists' albums. The single became Turner's signature song, selling more than 20 million copies worldwide and winning three Grammy Awards, including record of the year and best female vocal performance. Following her musical success, she starred in the 1985 film Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome. In addition to Break Every Rule (1986), Foreign Affair (1989), and Wildest Dreams (1996), later albums were also released. All the Best, her greatest hits album, was released in 2004. She also appeared on other artists' albums, including Herbie Hancock's River: The Joni Letters (2007), a Grammy-winning tribute to Joni Mitchell.

After living in Switzerland for a number of years, Turner became a Swiss citizen in 2013 and shortly thereafter applied to renounce her American citizenship. She wrote the autobiographies I, Tina (1986; written with Kurt Loder and adapted in 1993 as the film What’s Love Got to Do with It) and My Love Story (2018) as well as the self-help book Happiness Becomes You: A Guide to Changing Your Life for Good (2020; written with Taro Gold and Regula Curti). Ike and Tina were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1991. In addition to receiving a Kennedy Center Honor (2005), Tina was given a Grammy Award for lifetime achievement in 2018. That year Tina, a jukebox musical based on her life and directed by Phyllida Lloyd, opened in London’s West End. The musical debuted on Broadway in 2019. Two years later Turner was later the focus of the documentary Tina. In 2021 she was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a solo performer.

African American popular music in the United States during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s is called soul music. According to some, soul is simply a new name for rhythm and blues. New generations of artists have profoundly reinterpreted the sounds of the rhythm-and-blues pioneers of the 1950s, such as Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Bo Diddley, Sam Cooke, and Ray Charles, whose music found popularity among whites and evolved into rock and roll.

Rock and roll, exemplified by Elvis Presley, may be seen as a white interpretation of rhythm and blues, while soul is a return to African American music's roots-gospel and blues. The style is characterized by ferocious vocal intensity, use of church-rooted command-and-response, and extravagant melisma. If in the 1950s Charles was the first to secularize pure gospel songs, that transformation realized its full flowering in the work of Aretha Franklin, the “Queen of Soul,” who, after six years of notable work on Columbia Records, began her glorious reign in 1967 with her first hits for Atlantic Records—“I Never Loved a Man (the Way I Love You)” and “Respect.” Before Franklin, though, soul music had exploded largely through the work of Southern artists such as James Brown and Southern-oriented labels such as Stax/Volt.

Motown's sound, which emerged in the 1960s, qualifies as soul music as well. The Motown label produced artists with genuine gospel grit, as well as its lighter, more pop-oriented artists such as the Supremes ("Do You Love Me" [1962]), Marvin Gaye ("Can I Get a Witness" [1963]), and Stevie Wonder ("Uptight [Everything's Alright]" [1966]). In order to sell to white teens, Motown packaged its acts as clean-cut and acceptable. African American artists became more politically aware as the civil rights movement gained momentum. They rooted their music in personal expression, culminating in Brown's "Say It Loud-I'm Black and I'm Proud" (1968).

Stax/Volt Records was founded on an unshakeable foundation of straight-up soul in Memphis, Tennessee. The blues shouters of the Deep South, such as Otis Redding, Sam and Dave, and Isaac Hayes, screamed, shouted, begged, stomped, and cried. Wexler, who had produced Solomon Burke's "Just Out of Reach" in 1961, began recording Franklin and Wilson Pickett in Fame Studios in Florence, Alabama, where the arrangements were largely spontaneous and sparse-strong horn lines supported by a rhythm section focusing on boiling funk.

Wexler was followed by other artists and producers. Clarence Carter's "Tell Mama", one of the decade's enduring soul anthems, was written by Etta James in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, during 1967. James' earth-shaking delivery and no-holds-barred attitude made the song one of the decade's most enduring soul anthems. In 1966, Percy Sledge's supersmooth "When a Man Loves a Woman" (1966) became the first Southern soul song to top the charts.

In the 1960s, Detroit was not the only center of soul music. Especially in "Keep On Pushing" (1964) and "People Get Ready" (1965), Curtis Mayfield's Impressions brought a sense of social conscience to the movement of soul music. The conservative soul label Motown also began releasing issue-oriented records by the end of the decade, especially with Norman Whitfield's dynamic productions for the Temptations ("Cloud Nine" [1968]) and Edwin Starr ("War" [1970]). As well as in New Orleans, Louisiana, soul blossomed in Art Neville's group the Meters, a group known for its ultrafunkiness. Aretha Franklin and Donny Hathaway produced smoldering soul hits for Atlantic Records in New York City; Wonder and the Jackson 5 made some of the era's finest soul records in Los Angeles; and Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff virtually reinvented the genre with the O'Jays and Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes in Philadelphia.

In American popular culture, soul became an integral part of the grammar. Those three virtues-direct emotional delivery, ethnic pride, and respect for its own artistic sources-live on as dynamic and dramatic influences on musicians around the globe. Soul's power and personality were absorbed to varying degrees by disco, funk, and hip-hop, styles that owe their existence to soul.

Pop music refers to any commercially oriented music that is intended to be enjoyed by a large audience, generally in literate, technologically advanced societies dominated by urban cultures. In contrast to traditional folk music, popular music is written by known individuals, typically professionals, and does not develop through oral transmission.

From medieval minstrel songs and troubadour songs to fine-art music originally intended for a small elite audience, popular music was any form that gained mass appeal. Following the Industrial Revolution, folk music began to disappear, and the popular music of the Victorian era and the early 20th century was dominated by music halls and vaudevilles, with the upper reaches dominated by waltzes and operettas. Stephen Foster's compositions were performed in minstrel shows in the United States. In the 1890s, Tin Pan Alley became the first popular song-publishing industry, and over the next half century, lyricism was combined with European operetta to create a new type of play, the musical. A blend of African rhythms and European harmonic structures evolved out of ragtime in the 1890s, resulting in jazz.

Technological advances led to increased music audiences. As the home's primary source of music by 1930, phonograph records had replaced sheet music. It was possible to adapt more-intimate vocal techniques to the commercial market because of the microphone. In rural areas, radio broadcasts helped disseminate new styles, such as country music. Following World War II, American popular music dominated the world.

After the migration of African Americans to northern cities in the 1950s, blues elements were merged with the rhythms of jazz to form rhythm and blues. Pioneers such as Elvis Presley brought together rhythm and blues with country music and other influences to develop rock and roll (see rock music). Beatles and other British rock groups became internationally popular and influential in the 1960s. Motown, a company that created rock and soul music, quickly became the sound track for young people throughout the world, especially the sophisticated but hook-laden variety of the latter. Rock and its variants have defined the history of pop in the 21st century, including disco, heavy metal, funk, punk, hip-hop, and increasingly pop-oriented world music.