Tina Turner: Proud Mary keep on burning

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When I was still at high school in Pretoria in the late 1970s, our favourite haunt was a mall in Arcadia called Sterland. It was anchored by a huge movie theatre that was part of the Ster Kinekor group. But the centre also had an ice rink, where we would go to rent skates and have fun, taking slidey steps and occasionally breaking out into something vaguely akin to actually skating. 

I was a terrible skater, but the experience of cold ice and the hilarity of falling over, dragging your friends down with you, was just irresistible. At the end of each skating session, they would clear the ice and only allow people who could actually skate to participate in what was called the “speed sessions”. 

And what song, do you think, they would choose to really get people really moving in that frantic glide with snapping heels that denotes the sweep of dangerous escape? The song was almost inevitable: Tina Turner’s Nutbush City Limits. And those real skaters would flash around the rink with elegance and poise, straining against momentum and gravity as they delivered the essence of delirious freedom. 

And so Tina Turner became an icon for me, an out-of-place white kid struggling to escape the confines of a conservative city and a structured life. I could almost see Tina standing at the city limits of her hometown Nutbush, looking into the potential of the future that lay just beyond. There was something about the pulsating, rhythmic relentlessness of the song that speaks so emphatically about movement.  

To say that Nutbush, Tennessee, is a small town in the middle of nowhere doesn’t really do justice to small towns or, for that matter, anywhere. It’s a tiny town somewhere between Memphis and Nashville. The closest real town is Brownsville, where Anna Mae Bullock and her sister were sent to live with their grandmother when she was 11. Her father was a farmworker.

Her grandmother was Christian and conservative but — and this is the thing about the American South — there was always singing at the Baptist church, and she was part of that. The expression and passion of her future performances were born, I would guess, in the spiritual confines and release of that church. She was a cheerleader at school, and that too showed up later in life, in her sexy flauntiness. We are our past in ways we don’t anticipate.

People come to see Tina Turner’s Hollywood Walk of Fame Star on Wednesday, May 24, 2023 after the music legend died at 83. (Photo by Sarah Reingewirtz/MediaNews Group/Los Angeles Daily News via Getty Images)

Anna met her future husband, Ike Turner, at a nightclub where he was performing with his band, The Kings of Rhythm. There is a deep irony about Ike. The Kings of Rhythm were an established R&B band at the time, and Ike offered Tina, whom he named, a route out waaay past the city limits of Nutbush. And yet, their relationship was also famously a different kind of cage. He was classically abusive: jealous of her ability, unrelentingly vacillating between his deep love and violent hatred. He became yet another jail from which to break free.

In some ways, this is all too visible in her early songs. The lyrics of Nutbush City Limits are actually quite respectful about the tiny town, but full of hints about its claustrophobic nature: “A church house, gin house, a schoolhouse, outhouse,” the song begins, with notable contrasts of venue embedded with implied meaning. But there was nothing subtle about the near desperation of rhythm. It was all about confines and escape.

People will argue about this, but her best song (she was writing the songs, and Ike was “producing” them — in other words, taking the credit) of the period was River Deep, Mountain High, a “Phil Spector song”. The mountain and the river, contrasting images, are brought together in the immensity of love. 

But the song also contains, in the context of that abusive relationship, one of the saddest peons to love as a cage you can imagine:

 “ … when you were a young boy, 

Did you have a puppy? 

That always followed you ’round, ’round, ’round

‘Round, ’round, ’round

Well, I’m gonna be as faithful as that puppy

And no, I ain’t never gonna let you down.”

Well, as it happens she did let him down, as he had let her down. We, as the beneficiaries of her later career, can all be thankful she kept moving and somehow found her own path. 

In his tribute to Turner after her death on Thursday, former president Barack Obama called her “the Queen of Rock”, as everybody does, but he also called her “raw”. I know what he means: there was something terribly chafed and inflamed about her, down to the raspy vocal delivery. Yet to me, she was never only about that; she was a consummate, gifted, polished and skilled performer. 

Throughout my high school years, she was always there, that irresistible rhythm our soundtrack. And then at university, she suddenly came back, all shimmery with those legs-to-there and that hair. Amazingly, her fabulous vocal delivery, with the characteristic, very controlled hoarse scream had never been more powerful. 

What I didn’t realise at the time was the struggle it took to break back in. I suspect the music industry just couldn’t get its head around someone over 40 presenting as a rock goddess. But there she was, belting it out, with conviction and character and gobs of sex appeal.