Tina Turner Passes Away

[Charon]

Tina Turner dead at 83
Tina Turner was known for her songs such as 'Proud Mary' and 'I Don't Wanna Lose You'
By Lauryn Overhultz | Fox News
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Queen of rock and roll Tina Turner dead at 83
Tina Turner has died at 83.

The Queen of Rock ‘n’ Roll's death was announced on Instagram Wednesday. Turner died Tuesday, after a long illness in her home in Küsnacht near Zurich, Switzerland, according to her manager. She became a Swiss citizen a decade ago.

"It is with great sadness that we announce the passing of Tina Turner," the statement on social media said. "With her music and her boundless passion for life, she enchanted millions of fans around the world and inspired the stars of tomorrow. Today we say goodbye to a dear friend who leaves us all her greatest work: her music. All our heartfelt compassion goes out to her family. Tina, we will miss you dearly."

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A LOOK AT TINA TURNER'S EMPIRE

Tina Turner on stage
Tina Turner has died after a long illness. (Getty Images)

Tina Turner
Tina Turner was known as the Queen of Rock ‘n’ Roll. (Getty Images)

With admirers ranging from Beyoncé to Mick Jagger, Turner was one of the world's most successful entertainers, known for a core of pop, rock and rhythm and blues favorites: "Proud Mary," "Nutbush City Limits," "River Deep, Mountain High," and the hits she had in the '80s, among them "What's Love Got to Do with It," "We Don't Need Another Hero" and a cover of Al Green's "Let's Stay Together."

Throughout her career, Turner sold more than 150 million records. She earned 11 Grammys and was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1991. She was inducted again and honored for her solo career in 2005.

Turner launched her career in 1960 with the release of "A Fool in Love." The song hit No. 2 on the Hot R&B Sides chart and No. 27 on the Billboard Hot 100.

Besides singing, Turner also has dabbled in acting. She landed her first role in 1975 with "Tommy" and would later appear in "Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome" alongside Mel Gibson.

Tuna Turner on stage
Tina Turner performing in Belgium on April 16, 1985. (Photo by Gie Knaeps/Getty Images)

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Tina Turner performing
Tina Turner has won 11 Grammys. (Getty Images)

Turner's music career began alongside Ike Turner – her first husband. The musician was only 17 years old when she met him. She eventually left Ike in 1976. She first spoke about the abuse she suffered behind closed doors in an article published by People magazine in 1981. Turner described the abuse as "torture" and claimed she was "living a life of death."

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Tina and Ike Turner
Tina Turner met Ike Turner when she was 17 years old. (Getty Images)

A few years later she released a book.

Turner tied the knot with German music producer Erwin Bach in a lavish ceremony at their home on Lake Zurich in Switzerland on July 4, 2013, after dating for 27 years. Oprah Winfrey and Bryan Adams were on hand to witness the "Proud Mary" singer walk down the aisle wearing a green taffeta and black silk tulle Giorgio Armani dress, which was adorned with Swarovski crystals.

Tina Turner and her husband
Tina Turner and Erwin Bach began dating in 1986. (Getty Images)

Turner told Winfrey it was "love at first sight" when she met Bach, who was assigned to pick her up from the airport before a concert some 35-plus years ago.

She explained in her documentary: "He had the prettiest face. You could not miss it. It was like saying, 'Where did he come from?' He was really that good-looking. My heart went 'bu-bum.' It means that a soul has met. My hands were shaking."

Tina Turner and Erwin Bach at an event
Tina Turner and Erwin Bach married in 2013. (Getty Images)

"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.’"

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[Charon]

[Charon]

[IceWizard]

TINA TURNER, THE raspy-voiced fireball who overcame domestic abuse and industry ambivalence to
emerge as one of rock and soul’s brassiest, most rousing and most inspirational performers,
died Wednesday at age 83.

“Tina Turner, the ‘Queen of Rock & Roll’ has died peacefully today at the age of 83 after a long illness
in her home in Küsnacht near Zurich, Switzerland,” her family said in a statement Wednesday.
“With her, the world loses a music legend and a role model.”

Starting with her performances with her ex-husband Ike, Turner injected an uninhibited, volcanic
stage presence into pop. Even with choreographed backup singers — both with Ike and during her
own career — Turner never seemed reined in. Her influence on rock, R&B, and soul singing and
performance was also immeasurable. Her delivery influenced everyone from Mick Jagger to
Mary J. Blige, and her high-energy stage presence (topped with an array of gravity-defying wigs)
was passed down to Janet Jackson and Beyoncé. Turner’s message — one that resounded with
generations of women — was that she could hold her own onstage against any man.

But Turner’s other legacy was more personal and involved a far more complex man. During her
time with Ike — a demanding and often drug-addled bandleader and guitarist — Turner was often
beaten and humiliated. Her subsequent rebirth, starting with her massively popular, Grammy-winning
1984 makeover Private Dancer, made her a symbol of survival and renewal.

Born Anna Mae Bullock on Nov. 26, 1939, Turner grew up in Nutbush, Tennessee, a rural and
unincorporated area in Haywood County chronicled in her song “Nutbush City Limits.” According to
Turner, her family were “well-to-do farmers” who lived well off the business of sharecropping. Still,
Turner and her older sister Ruby Aillene dealt with abandonment issues when their parents left to
work elsewhere.

“My mother and father didn’t love each other, so they were always fighting,” Turner recalled in a
1986 Rolling Stone interview. Her mother first left when Tina was 10 to live in St. Louis; her father
left three years later. Turner relocated to Brownsville, Tennessee, to live with her grandmother.

After high school, she began working as a nurse’s aide in hopes of entering that profession. Frequently,
Turner and her sister would head to nightclubs in St. Louis and East St. Louis, where she first saw Ike
Turner perform as the bandleader of Kings of Rhythm. The 18-year-old became enamored with the
guitarist eight years her senior and the group’s music, and one night, the drummer passed Turner the
microphone while she was in the audience. Ike then invited Tina to be the group’s guest vocalist and
instructed her on voice control and performance. As “Little Ann,” she sang alongside Carlson Oliver
on Ike Turner’s “Box Top,” which was her first studio recording.

In 1958, the same year that “Box Top” was released, Turner gave birth to her first child, Raymond Craig,
with Raymond Hill, the Kings of Rhythm’s saxophonist. Soon after, Tina moved in with Ike to help raise
the musician’s two sons after he had broken up with their mother. A sexual relationship ensued, even
though Turner told RS in 1984 that she wasn’t initially attracted to him: “I liked him as a brother,”
she said. “I didn’t want a relationship. But it just sort of grew on me.” Inspired by the movie serial
Sheena, Queen of the Jungle, Turner changed her stage name per Ike’s request.






In 1960, Ike and Tina Turner released their debut single, “A Fool in Love.” It was an immediate success,
reaching the Top 30 on the Billboard Hot 100. The next year, they released another hit single,
“It’s Gonna Work Out Fine,” which led to their first Grammy nomination for Best Rock and Roll
Performance. The Ike and Tina Turner Revue maintained a rigorous touring schedule as part of the
chitlin circuit in the early Sixties and became noted for the quality of their spectacle and diverse
crowds they could reach in the South.

“The success and the fear came almost hand in hand,” Turner told RS, specifically noting Ike’s fear of
losing her following “A Fool in Love.” Ike continued to sleep with other women, and Tina was aware that
his songs were often about his other sexual relationships. She refused to travel and sing his songs at
one point; the first time she did so, he began beating her with his shoe stretcher. Yet she stayed with
him: “I felt very loyal to Ike, and I didn’t want to hurt him,” she told RS in 1984. “I knew if I left there’d
be no one to sing, so I was caught up in guilt. I mean, sometimes, after he beat me up, I’d end up
feeling sorry for him. I’d be sitting there all bruised and torn and feeling sorry for him.
I was just … brainwashed? Maybe I was brainwashed.” The two married in 1962 in Tijuana;
it was Ike’s sixth marriage.






In 1966, the Turners partook in a now-legendary rock TV show, The TNT Show, whose musical director
was producer Phil Spector. After signing the duo to his label, Spector produced what he considered his
masterpiece, “River Deep – Mountain High,” putting Tina through countless vocal takes. The song wasn’t
the blockbuster many assumed it would be, but it opened up other doors for Ike and Tina.

In 1969, they opened for the Rolling Stones on the band’s U.S. tour, then went on to have a crossover
hit with a cover of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Proud Mary” that, thanks to Tina, went from
smoldering to souped-up; it won a Grammy for Best R&B Vocal Performance by a Group. In 1975,
Tina appeared as the Acid Queen in Ken Russell’s grandiose film version of the Who’s Tommy.

Amid it all, though, the Turners’ marriage began to unravel as Ike grew more abusive and more addicted
to cocaine. Tina had previously attempted to leave him multiple times, and in 1968 was so desperate
to part ways with her abusive husband that she attempted suicide. After what she would call
“one last bit or real violence,” Tina fled — literally, to a Ramada Inn in Dallas, where the couple was
playing — and asked her friend, actress Ann-Margret, for airfare to Los Angeles. Tina stayed with her
Tommy co-star as Ike went looking for her; the couple would divorce in 1976.

“I didn’t even know how to get money,” she said later. “Ike didn’t think I’d be able to find a house,
but I did. He sent over the kids, and money for my first rent because he thought I’d have to come
back when that ran out. We slept on the floor the first night. I rented furniture. I had some Blue Chip
stamps that I had the kids bring, and I got dishes.”

Turner also credited her introduction to Buddhism for giving her the strength to leave.
“I never stopped praying … that was my tool,” Turner told Rolling Stone in 1986. “Psychologically,
I was protecting myself, which is why I didn’t do drugs and didn’t drink. I had to stay in control.
So I just kept searching, spiritually, for the answer.”

Despite her recognizable voice and musical accomplishments with her ex-husband, Turner struggled
to establish herself as a solo artist. Her first solo records, starting with 1974’s pre-breakup Tina Turns
the Country On!, failed to spawn any hits, and she took to the road for eight years to help pay off the
debt she incurred from a canceled tour with Ike and an IRS lien.

To maintain a profile in a business that seemed to want nothing more to do with her, she played cheesy
lounge gigs and appeared on variety shows and game shows like Hollywood Squares. In a shocking
story recounted in the Tina doc, one attempt at a new record deal in the Eighties almost collapsed
when a higher-up at the company referred to her with a racial epithet.

Turner’s comeback began in 1982, when Heaven 17, the British synth-pop band, recruited her for a
remake of the Temptations’ “Ball of Confusion.” The song led to a new record deal for Turner with Capitol.
Turner’s manager Roger Davies then suggested that she and Heaven 17’s Martyn Ware cut a remake of
Al Green’s “Let’s Stay Together,” which hit the Top 30 in the U.S. With that, and the support of her friend
David Bowie, Turner began recording her Capitol debut, Private Dancer.

Reflecting the way she and Davies wanted to integrate synthesizers and more contemporary production
touches, they cut songs like “What’s Love Got to Do With It” by British songwriter Terry Brittan. Although
Turner disliked the demo of the song, she later said she was urged to make it “a bit rougher,
a bit more sharp around the edges.”







With that, she reclaimed the song, which spent three weeks at No. 1, became an MTV staple, and rebooted
Turner’s career in a way that rarely happened for Sixties veterans on her level. By refusing to sound retro
and showcasing her voice in a way that hadn’t been done in at least a decade, Private Dancer introduced
Turner (and her MTV-perfect wigs, stiletto heels, and fishnet stockings) to a new, younger audience.
“What’s Love Got to Do with It” walked away with four Grammys (including two for Turner, for
Pop Vocal Performance, Female and Rock Vocal Performance, Female). In another sign of her
determination, Turner performed the song live during the telecast despite having the flu.

The triumph of Private Dancer was only the beginning of Turner’s relaunch into pop culture. The following
year, she starred as the villainous Auntie Entity alongside Mel Gibson in
Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome — which included another hit, “We Don’t Need Another Hero (Thunderdome)” —
partook in the all-star “We Are the World” session, and commanded the stage at Live Aid alongside
Mick Jagger. (Thanks to it all, she later wrote, she had “enough money to pay off all those debts I had.”)
In 1986, her first memoir, I, Tina, co-written with then-RS writer Kurt Loder, was published and became
a bestseller. “One of the Living,” another song she cut for the Mad Max movie, won a
Best Female Rock Performance Grammy in 1985.






Turner had first gone public about her troubled marriage to Ike in a People magazine interview in 1981,
but I, Tina, delved deeper. The result was not just a bestselling memoir — which, arguably, set the template
for other rock stars to pen theirs — but a book that gave hope to survivors of domestic abuse, and Turner
herself helped ensure that domestic violence was addressed in the culture at large.

“I don’t want to depend on a man to give me money,” she told RS in 1986. “I don’t want to be afraid
anymore. I used to think I had to get married to help me get the things I wanted in life. When I realized
I could get those things for myself, by myself, I began to like that feeling. I feel if I can secure myself,
I wouldn’t have to depend on a man; we would only share love.”






1989 brought another multiplatinum album, Foreign Affair, and with it another huge hit, a rendition of
Bonnie Tyler’s “The Best.” For Turner, the decade that followed served as an ongoing validation for her
career. I, Tina was turned into a 1993 movie, What’s Love Got to Do with It, starring Angela Bassett in
the title role and Laurence Fishburne as Ike. “I Don’t Wanna Fight,” a new song included on that film’s
soundtrack, became Turner’s last Top 10 hit. She went on to win additional Grammys, for
“Better Be Good to Me,” a live album, and for her participation in Herbie Hancock’s 2007 Joni Mitchell
tribute album, River: The Joni Letters, on which Turner sang Mitchell’s “Edith and the Kingpin.” 

In 1999, Turner released what would be her final album, Twenty Four Seven, partly produced by the
same team who worked on Cher’s “Believe.” The album didn’t achieve the commercial success of the
records that preceded it, but the accolades and recognition continued. In 2005, Turner, along with
Tony Bennett, Robert Redford and others, was awarded a Kennedy Center Honor by then-president
George W. Bush, with Beyonce celebrating Turner with a rendition of “Proud Mary.”






Between 2008 and 2009, she embarked on a 50th anniversary tour. (The tour was preceded by a joint
performance by Turner and Beyoncé at the 2008 Grammys, where they joined forces on “Proud Mary.”)
Tina, a musical based on her life, premiered in London in 2018 and on Broadway the following year.
Adrienne Warren, in the title role, won a Tony in 2020 for Best Performance by a Leading Actress in a Musical.

As Turner herself would later say, though, the ongoing retelling of her life story and time with Ike—in
movies, musicals and documentaries—also came with a price. As much as her troubles inspired others,
she constantly had to relive them and was always asked about Ike, even after his death in 2007.
“He did get me started and he was good to me at the beginning,” she said in the Tina doc.
“So I have some good thoughts. Maybe it was a good thing that I met him. That, I don’t know.”

In 1986, Turner met German music executive Erwin Bach; the two became a couple soon after. The
couple first lived in Germany before moving to Switzerland. In recent years, she suffered a stroke
three weeks after their wedding in 2013, then developed intestinal cancer. In light of possible kidney
failure, Bach donated a kidney to his wife in 2017. “I wondered if anyone would think that Erwin’s
living donation was transactional in some way,” she wrote in her 2018 memoir My Love Story.
“Incredibly, considering how long we had been together, there were still people who wanted to
believe that Erwin married me for my money and fame.”

Reflecting on how she connected to an audience, Turner said to RS in 1986, “My songs are a little
bit of everybody’s lives who are watching me. You gotta sing what they can relate to. And there are
some raunchy people out there. The world is not perfect. And all of that is in my performance…
That’s why I prefer acting to singing, because with acting you are forgiven for playing a certain role.
When you play that same role every night, people think that you are it. They don’t think you’re acting.
That is the scar of what I’ve given myself with my career. And I’ve accepted that.”


Loved by Millions

Today, We lost another Treasure

[Charon]

[happyvibe]

I shed tears in the street when I read the news. All I kept thinking, was simply the best. What an icon. Her music lives on forever ❤️

[TrayGold]

So sad. She is and always will be the rock and roll queen.

[Charon]

[Bubba Gamps]

Nobody could perform Proud Mary like Tina Turner. I get goose bumps every time I watch the video when the tempo of the song speeds up. She will always be remembered as one of the true legends of in the early days of Rock N Roll. Her music will live in infamy.