Tina Turner, a pioneer of rock ‘n’ roll who rose to fame as a pop icon in the 1980s, has died at the age of 83.
Her health had declined recently; she received a diagnosis of intestinal cancer in 2016 and underwent kidney transplantation in 2017.
Mick Jagger said that Turner’s high-kicking, energizing live performances served as inspiration for his stage character because of how she confirmed and accentuated Black women’s early role in rock’n’roll.
After spending two decades making music with her controlling husband Ike Turner, she went it alone and, after a few false starts, with the release of the album Private Dancer, became one of the key pop idols of the 1980s.
In a statement on Wednesday night, her publicist Bernard Doherty said: “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. With her, the world loses a music legend and a role model.”
In 2018, scholar Daphne A Brooks wrote for the Guardian: “Turner’s musical character has always been a charged combination of mystery as well as light, melancholy mixed with a ferocious vitality that often flirted with danger.”
“My relationship with Ike was doomed the day he figured out I was going to be his moneymaker,” Turner wrote in her 2018 biography My Love Story. “He needed to control me, economically and psychologically, so I could never leave him.”
Tina Turner was born Anna Mae Bullock, the youngest child of Floyd Richard Bullock and his wife Zelma Priscilla on November 26, 1939, in Brownsville, Tennessee.
She subsequently remembers picking cotton with her family as a young child while they resided in the surrounding rural unincorporated village of Nutbush, Tennessee, where her father worked as an overseer of the sharecroppers at Poindexter Farm on Highway 180.
Dr. Henry Louis Gates revealed her ancestral DNA test estimates, which were primarily African, about 33% European, and only 1% Native American when she took part in the PBS documentary African American Lives 2 alongside him. She had previously thought that she had a sizable Native American background.
The youngest child of Floyd Richard Bullock and Zelma Priscilla Bullock, Tina Turner was born Anna Mae Bullock on November 26, 1939, in Brownsville, Tennessee.
Her father was a sharecropper supervisor at Poindexter Farm on Highway 180, and the family lived in the nearby rural, unincorporated village of Nutbush, Tennessee. She subsequently recounted harvesting cotton with her family as a little child.
Her genealogy DNA test results, which showed that she was primarily African, roughly 33% European, and only 1% Native American, were shared by Dr Henry Louis Gates when she took part in the PBS documentary African American Lives 2 with him. She had always thought she was a big bit Native American.
