Turner, Tina (1938—)

Grammy-winning singer who, after years in a now famously abusive personal and professional relationship, went on to become one of the biggest rock 'n' roll stars of the 1980s and 1990s. Born Anna Mae Bullock on November 26, 1938, in Nut Bush, Tennessee; eldest daughter of Richard Bullock and Zelma Bullock; married musician Ike Turner (separated 1976, divorced 1978); companion of Erwin Bach (an EMI record company executive) for many years; children: (Raymond) Craig Turner; (with Ike Turner) Ronald Renelle Turner.

After meeting Ike Turner, began performing professionally while attending high school in St. Louis, Missouri; became the featured singer of the Ike and Tina Turner Revue; band reached its peak of popularity when it opened for the Rolling Stones during a U.S. tour (1969); appeared in film version of The Who's rock opera Tommy (1974); husband's abusive treatment led her to abandon both Turner and his band (1976); refused all compensation as part of their divorce; rebuilt career performing six nights a week in small nightclubs; after meeting an Australian manager who promoted her, won three Grammies for album Private Dancer (1984), and had soon far eclipsed whatever fame she had achieved previously with Turner's band; inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (1991); went on tour which earned nearly $25 million (1997).

The congregation of Spring Hill Baptist Church never expected that Richard and Zelma Bullock 's eldest daughter would be such an addition to the choir. But little Anna Mae's voice, they said, was surely something to hear, rising clear and strong against the voices of the much older teens who made up the rest of the group. "She had a good voice, even then, oh, yes," Zelma once said of the daughter whom the world would come to know as Tina Turner. "She were somethin', all right."

Back then, however, the chances for a ten-year-old black girl from rural Tennessee didn't seem to extend much beyond the carefully tilled fields of Nut Bush, Tennessee, where Anna Mae Bullock was born on November 26, 1938. Nut Bush was little more than a crossroads, hidden away in the western part of the state and a long way from Knoxville or Memphis or Nashville. Her father Richard worked as a farm overseer for the most prominent white family in the area, spending his days supervising a large workforce of other African-Americans and his nights brawling with his wife Zelma. With their parents' frequent disputes the talk of Nut Bush, Anna Mae and her older sister Alline Bullock (Selico) sought comfort in each other's company and in the homes of various relatives. Then, too, there was the comforting domesticity surrounding the white family for whom her father worked. "There was segregation, of course," Turner once said, recalling early years marked by a polite separation from whites. "I don't know how it was for others, but for me, I remember the white people as being friendly then. There was a kind of harmony there." Music was another linchpin holding together a fragile childhood. Fifty years later, Turner still remembered a man named Mr. Bootsy, who would appear at picnics with his trombone and a drummer to play, and the joy of taking the lead in the most rousing numbers performed by the church choir.

With the coming of World War II, Richard took a higher-paying job at the government's new weapons development plant at Oak Ridge, near Knoxville, where he and Zelma moved. Anna Mae and Alline were left behind—Anna Mae with her paternal grandparents and Alline with Zelma's family—with only short visits to Knoxville, where Zelma was astonished to find that customers in some of the shops she frequented would offer Anna Mae money for singing to them. War's end brought her parents back home, but the family's reunion proved short-lived when Zelma deserted Richard unannounced and disappeared. "That's when it really hit me how much I loved my mother," Turner said years later, "and how much I hated her, too. I guess I was learning just how close love and hate can be." Richard's second marriage to a widow with her own two girls did little to alleviate the sense of loss, especially after he once again placed Anna Mae and Alline with relatives and gradually withdrew from their lives.

Anna Mae finally left Nut Bush and environs for good while she was still in high school and Zelma, who had settled in St. Louis after leaving her husband, sent for her daughters. Now, the rhythm and blues Turner had heard on the radio back in Tennessee became more of an influence. While country and western had been the norm back in Tennessee, East St. Louis, across the Mississippi River from its more straitlaced sister city, sported a number of all-night blues bars providing a tempting glimpse of another world to a teenaged country girl. When Anna Mae arrived in St. Louis, her older sister Alline was already working as a waitress at a St. Louis nightclub to supplement Zelma's income as a maid and traveling across the river after work to a decidedly less sophisticated place called the Manhattan Club. Anna Mae soon tagged along to hear the band everyone said was the best R&B group in the South, The Kings of Rhythm, led by a mesmerizing guitarist named Ike Turner. "There was something about him," Tina explained years later. "He got up on stage and picked up his guitar. And that joint started rocking. And I was just sitting there, amazed. I almost went into a trance just watching him."

Ike—born Izear Luster Turner and seven years older than Anna Mae—had grown up in Clarksdale, Mississippi, still considered a shrine of blues music by aficionados. His childhood had been considerably less comfortable than Anna Mae's. As a young boy, he had seen his father, a minister, fatally beaten by white thugs; and he had spent so much time playing pool when he should have been in high school that he never graduated. But his love of music and a talent for banging out rhythm and blues on the piano were his saviors. By the time he met Anna Mae Bullock, Ike had had his own radio show in Clarksdale, toured with a swing band called the Tophatters just after the war, and then formed The Kings of Rhythm when the Tophatters finally broke up. The band had gone through several permutations after recording with only moderate success when Ike stepped onto the stage at the Manhattan Club that night. He had already gone through two piano-playing wives as band members and was living in a vast, three-story brick house in East St. Louis that had earned the title "House of Thrills" from the blues demimonde, for the hard partying and womanizing that characterized the place. (Ike's nickname was The Weasel.)

"Each of the guys must have had ten girl-friends apiece," Turner said later, "and Ike had twenty. [But] there was tons of talent on that stage. I wanted to get up there so bad." And she

did, one night when her sister refused a microphone handed to her and Ike happened to be alone on the stage during a break, playing a B.B. King tune that Anna Mae recognized. Before long (and despite her mother's furious reaction and demands that she study to become a nurse), Turner had become the band's permanent girl singer, introduced by Ike as "Little Ann"—a diminutive title belying a voice that one band member said "could peel the wallpaper off the back wall of the room." Another compared her voice to that of the great blues queen Bessie smith , cranked up to the higher energies of rhythm and blues. Ike, for his part, began to think that his discovery might provide the key to a larger audience and more lucrative gigs. Before long, "Little Ann" had become one of the many women inhabiting "The House of Thrills"; and although her relationship with Ike was strictly business at this point, she soon found herself pregnant by the band's saxophone player. Graduating from high school in the spring of 1958, Turner gave birth to a son in August of that year and moved with the child, named Raymond Craig, into a cheap apartment in a dilapidated section of St. Louis. She worked at a hospital as a maternity assistant by day, and sang with the band by night, to make ends meet. "I had to have the two jobs to take care of Craig," she later remembered. "I was a really good mother, I think—got him all the vitamins, the best clothes; made sure the baby sitter was one that would really care for him. And I was becoming my own little young woman, too." But the strain of nearly constant work proved too much. Soon, she had moved back into Ike's house with Craig, Ike promising to increase her salary to $25 a week—a generous offer considering Ike was at the moment being accused of involvement in a $20,000 robbery of a St. Louis bank. (He received a suspended sentence after a trial.)

I stood up for my life.

—Tina Turner, after her divorce from Ike Turner

"Little Ann" appeared on her first record with Ike's band in 1958, singing lead on a novelty song that got slight airplay; but there was little doubt that in live performances, it was Ike's new girl singer that was attracting the crowds. Before long, Ike and Anna Mae had become lovers; and by 1960, she was pregnant. The philandering Ike, however, had resumed a long-standing relationship with another woman, sending Anna Mae back into her own apartment in St. Louis; but that did not stop him from asking her to sing the lead on a demo for a new single, "A Fool in Love," which he had originally planned to record with a male singer who backed out at the last minute. The demo found its way to New York City and Henry "Juggy" Murray, one of the few African-Americans of the time to own a record label, which Murray had named Sue, after his mother. Murray soon arrived in St. Louis to sign Ike with a $25,000 advance. "That's where I met this Anna Mae Bullock," Juggy later recalled. "She was around—actually, she was wherever Ike wanted her to be. Along with his forty other women." It was Juggy's opinion that Little Ann's vocal on "A Fool in Love" was what made the song; and it was his further opinion that Ike would never break out of St. Louis without making Little Ann the star of his band. Ike must have been listening, for when "A Fool in Love" was released nationally during the summer of 1960, it was credited not to Ike Turner and The Kings of Rhythm but to "Ike and Tina Turner." (Ike thought the name "Tina" was sexier than Ann, and the formality of marriage did not occur to him before he bestowed his last name on his new star.) The gritty, unsophisticated track, with Tina's wailing vocals backed up by three other girl singers, quickly moved off the R&B charts and onto white pop charts, then still dominated by much more prim acts like Connie Francis and Brenda Lee .

The newly christened Tina Turner had serious doubts about the song and her future with Ike. "I really didn't want to sing it—I didn't care for all that 'hey, hey, hey' stuff," Tina said; and Ike's miserly offer to pay her rent (keeping everything else the band made for himself) had little appeal for her. "I knew it could never work out between us," she later said. "So when he got the record deal, I went to talk with him. I told him I didn't want to get involved any further with him. And that was the first time he beat me up." Ike made sure there were no public appearances until her swollen face had returned to normal; and Tina, the mother of one child, about to give birth to a second, and terrified of Ike's angry fists, saw few alternatives to staying with him. "Singing with Ike was how I made my living," she said. "What was I going to do? I had to keep going forward."

Now six months' pregnant, Tina traveled with the band to Cincinnati, the first stop on a tour of the Eastern states, wearing a sack dress with plenty of chiffon to disguise her condition. The band opened in Cincinnati as the Ike and Tina Turner Revue; and within weeks was playing the Apollo in New York (where Tina electrified the crowd by jumping off the stage during one number) and appearing on Dick Clark's nationally broadcast "American Bandstand." Traveling west, the Revue played Las Vegas and had arrived in Los Angeles in October 1960 when Tina went into labor and gave birth to a second son whom she named Ronald Renelle. It didn't take long for Ike's common-law wife to notice the resemblance between the child and Ike, and even less time for her to pack up and leave for good. Ike gathered up his two children from the now defunct marriage, added Tina's first son and their own newborn, and set up house in Los Angeles. It was, Tina later said, a "shameful period" for her. "The whole thing was a public scandal, really embarrassing."

Although the Revue's releases during the next year brought the band an even wider, and increasingly white, audience, its backstage conflicts only worsened. Ike fired and hired band members at dizzying speed and kept Tina and the three backup girl singers (now called the Ikettes) in constant confusion, once docking the girls 25% of their pay after one performance because they hadn't looked happy enough on stage. Nor did the relationship between Tina and Ike improve. "In that first year of touring, fear moved into our relationship, and never left it," Tina said. While her extravagant wigs, flouncing costumes and earthy dance moves on stage packed houses from coast to coast, no one in the audience knew that Ike's physical abuse sometimes left her mouth so swollen that it was difficult for her to sing. She soon learned that the only way to avoid being beaten was to remain outwardly quiescent, even when Ike spirited her off to Mexico for a quick wedding in Tijuana as his affairs, many with whoever was the latest Ikette, multiplied. Then, too, there was the band's grueling tour schedule, with up to eight months of the year spent on the road, frustrated by the lack of a solid hit to follow up "A Fool in Love."

In 1965, the band's manager began weeks of delicate negotiations between Ike and teen-pop producer Phil Spector, who had made millions over the past five years with his famous "wall of sound" arrangements backing acts like Darlene Love , the Ronettes and the Righteous Brothers. Spector, who had seen the Turner Revue in Los Angeles, was looking for a girl singer who could handle a new song he'd co-written, "River Deep, Mountain High." Ike collected a reported $25,000 from Spector for the use of Tina's voice, along with Spector's agreement to promote the song as by "Ike and Tina Turner," and a reciprocal promise from Ike that he would stay away from all recording sessions for the number. "I loved that song," Turner later said of what became her most famous recording to date. "It wasn't just R&B, it had melody, it had structure." And it was the melody Spector wanted her to emphasize, not the vocal gymnastics Ike demanded. "He just wanted me to sing the song. It was my voice he liked, not the screaming." The 12-hour recording session at which Tina laid down the final vocals for the number, alone in the studio with just Spector, an engineer and management representatives, is still remembered with a sense of awe. "They go over it and over it and over it," the Turner Revue's manager Bob Krasnow remembered nearly 30 years later, "and Tina can't quite get it. Finally, she says, 'OK, Phil, one more time.' And she … gave a performance that … I mean, your hair was standing on end. It was like the whole room exploded. I'll never forget that as long as I live, man."

But because of Spector's deteriorating relationship with recording and broadcast executives, and the reported $20,000 he had spent on musicians and studio time to produce the record, "Mountain Deep" was not well received and reached only to No. 86 on the pop charts. It marked the effective end to Spector's reign as the music industry's wunderkind. Tina herself was of the opinion that the record "was too black for the pop stations, and too pop for the black stations"; but it provided an inkling of the kind of work she could do away from Ike's influence and would prove important to her later solo career. And, while the record sank into oblivion in America, it was wildly popular in Britain and soon brought an invitation from the Rolling Stones for the Revue to accompany them on a British tour in 1966, beginning at London's Royal Albert Hall. "There's no point in having some jerk band on before you," Mick Jagger pointed out. "You have to have somebody that'll make you top what they do. And Ike and Tina Turner certainly did that job admirably." The tour—raucous, exhausting and exhilarating all at once—was a huge success and, for Tina, another indication that she was good enough as a performer to survive without Ike.

In later years, Tina would characterize the times following the first Stones tour as "rock bottom." The Revue went without a hit during all of 1967, Ike using cocaine, a string of temporary "Ikettes," and what Tina came to call "a good whammin'" to deal with his frustration. By 1968, her trips to the emergency room of a hospital near the couple's south Los Angeles home had become so frequent that she was on a first-name basis with most of the staff. The four sons, too, were terrified of their father's unpredictable mood swings. "If Ike was home," one member of the Ike Turner organization later wrote, "the kids had to literally tiptoe through the house or he would explode." One night as she was packing to leave for a gig, Turner decided to take 50 Valium and, as she later put it, "die on stage." Found nearly unconscious in her dressing room just before the show and rushed to a hospital, she recovered, only to be forced back to work just days later by an angry Ike who accused her of trying to sabotage his career. "That's when I started to hate Ike Turner," she said.

Life with Ike remained a torment even when the Revue's 1969 version of the Otis Redding song "I've Been Loving You Too Long" became their first record to make it onto the pop charts in three years. But close observers noticed that the album from which the single was taken carried a producing credit for Tina and a song she herself had written, "I Am a Motherless Child," a sharp departure from the straight rhythm and blues numbers preferred by Ike. Its rock-tinged flavor was the first sign of Turner's increasing fascination with the fusion of white rock 'n' roll and black R&B she had heard firsthand during the Rolling Stones tour in England. The Stones' "Honky Tonk Woman" and the Beatles' "Come Together," she said, were inspirations for her. "Those bands were interpreting black music to begin with," she later said. "They touched on R&B, in a way, but it wasn't obvious. It wasn't the same old thing." As if to confirm her opinion, an invitation came from the Stones for the Revue to join their 1969 "Gimme Shelter" tour, along with blues legend B.B. King. The tour's date in Oakland is still considered by some the best rock concert in history, and not just because of the Stones. "In the context of today's show business, Tina Turner must be the most sensational female performer on stage," exclaimed Rolling Stone. "She comes on like a hurricane. Jagger ought to get a medal for courage in following … Tina Turner." Audiences were especially mesmerized by Turner's blatantly erotic rendition of "I've Been Loving You Too Long"—captured on film for the Stones documentary of the tour—during which Rolling Stone reported that she used the microphone "as if it were a high-tension erogenous zone" and The New York Times labeled her ministrations to that instrument as outright pornographic. "It's like acting," Tina protested. "I'm sure a lot of actors don't feel very comfortable with some of their parts, and I am an actress." The tour was the biggest thing to happen to the Revue in more than a decade, exposing the group to the Stones' millions of white fans and leading to a lucrative contract with United Artists. The result was several pop chart hits like "Got to Take You Higher" and "Bold Soul Sister." It would prove to be the band's peak, but the cost to Turner was a lengthy hospital stay after she was diagnosed with tuberculosis and forced into a long hospital convalescence.

Back on the road in 1970, Tina convinced Ike to let her record a version of John Fogerty's "Proud Mary," a big hit for Fogerty's band Creedence Clearwater Revival. The Revue's version proved to be the band's biggest hit when it reached No. 4 on the pop charts. "We made that song our own," Tina said, rather generously as it turned out, since only she was singled out for her first Grammy for Best R&B Vocal. By now, the Revue was making so much money that Ike built and opened his own luxurious, state-ofthe-art recording studio in Los Angeles, Bolic Sound, complete with a labyrinth of private "harem rooms," as Ike called them, a screening room and a full kitchen and dining room. But the band's increased exposure brought a cover story in Rolling Stone, in October 1971, detailing Ike's cocaine addiction and his abusive treatment of Tina and other women. Turner publicly denied involvement with any drug stronger than caffeine, and privately expressed horror at what was happening to Ike and the band. "They'd be walking around snorting and yapping, with that white stuff all over their faces, rocking back and forth," she said later. "They looked so silly, and they thought they were so cool." She would only come to the studio when Ike asked her to record, often bringing one of her sons as a reason for the band to behave itself and an excuse for leaving as soon as she had done what was required.

Ike's behavior grew worse as the band's fortunes declined during 1972, with none of its recordings breaking into the top 100 on the charts. Tina didn't dare point out that the band's only recent hits had been numbers outside its usual R&B repertoire, numbers like "Proud Mary" that she had convinced Ike to record. Now 34, sharing her children's terror of Ike Turner and watching the only life she had known disintegrate, Tina looked for solace and reassurance. It was at this point that she began to find comfort in a form of Buddhism taught her by a white friend whom she admired for having the courage to marry a black musician at a time when interracial marriages were rare. "Now I could feel the power deep inside me, stirring up after all these years," Turner said of her daily practice of chanting and meditation. She did not consider it a coincidence, therefore, when early in 1974 she received an offer from record and film producer Robert Stigwood to appear in a film of The Who's rock opera Tommy, to be directed by Ken Russell. She was offered the role of the Acid Queen, joining a cast including The Who, Elton John, Ann-Margret , and Eric Clapton. Ike grudgingly agreed to let Tina travel alone to London for the filming, and to stay on afterward to join Ann-Margret in a television special, later shown in the United States, in which she performed "Proud Mary" and "Honky Tonk Woman" for the first time in public without Ike. By now, Ike rarely ventured outside the studio, paralyzed by cocaine used in such quantities that one visitor claimed it had gotten inside the equipment and ruined the sound. More and more musicians refused to work with Ike. Nothing the Revue recorded from 1974 on proved successful, with 1975's "Baby Get It On" barely making it to No. 88.

But even when Turner's patience finally ran out, she at first could only find the courage to leave Ike for short periods—a few days here, two weeks there—before allowing herself to be dragged back to face his verbal and physical abuse. Ike knew the end was near, however, even if he still failed to understand why. "It just didn't make sense to him when all of a sudden his own wife says 'You can't treat me like that,'" a friend reported. "He was saying … that this was the way guys were. He just didn't get it." The end finally came in 1976, when Turner walked out during a tour stop in Dallas, after Ike had beaten her so severely she could barely talk, much less sing. Sneaking out of their room after Ike finally fell into a stuporous sleep, the front of her white dress covered in blood, she sought refuge in a nearby hotel with 38 cents and a credit card in her pocket, then called the band's attorney to come and rescue her.

Ike refused to provide money unless she returned, so for months afterward Tina Turner—who just a year before had been one of rock 'n' roll's most famous performers, who had toured twice with the Rolling Stones and who had appeared in a major feature film—was forced to live with generous friends and earn a living cleaning their houses. "It was the only way I could repay these people," she later said. "I didn't miss what you call the trappings of stardom at all. Because I finally had my freedom." Divorce proceedings stretched out over the next year and became so mired in wrangling over money that Turner eventually told her attorney to get a divorce agreement in place even if she received nothing from Ike in compensation. "She just gave it all away, over my objections," her lawyer said. "Tina walked out with what was on her back, essentially. But she said, 'My life's more important.'"

The divorce became final in March 1978 as Turner set about rebuilding a career from scratch. Again, friends she had made in the business during her years with Ike came to her rescue, helping her assemble a band and put together an act that she took on the road to small nightclubs and cabarets on the West Coast and Canada. Despite her name, the act failed to attract audiences of any size. An album released in 1978 was unsuccessful, and a contract she had signed with a financially troubled United Artists was not renewed. By 1979, Turner owed a reported $20,000 to her band's backers, along with $100,000 in back taxes to the IRS from her earnings during the Revue years. She desperately needed a break; and it finally came from, of all people, Olivia Newton-John , the Australian pop star of the late 1970s and early 1980s, fresh from her starring film role opposite John Travolta in the movie version of Grease. Confessing to a lifelong admiration for Tina Turner's music, Newton-John invited her to appear on a television special in November 1978 and introduced Turner to a fellow Australian named Roger Davies.

Davies had seen Turner perform with the Revue in Australia before he had relocated to Los Angeles, and now traveled up to San Francisco to see her singing at the sedate, chandelier-laden ballroom of the venerable Fairmont Hotel. "She had so much energy, she blew me away," Davies later said, although he thought her act was still caught in the Revue mold and needed a good deal of polishing. "I mean, she did 'Disco Inferno' with smoke bombs, and the two male dancers ripped part of her dress away. It was bizarre." It was Davies' feeling that Turner's act should go further in the direction she had tried to push the Revue—that is, more toward rock and away from disco-themed rhythm and blues, the extravagant wigs, the silver lamé dresses. By the beginning of 1981, Davies had convinced Turner to fire her old band and the dress-rending dancers, and replace them with a simple, four-man group consisting of piano, guitar, drums and bass. Davies then proceeded to promote Turner by staging a comeback show at New York's Ritz, then the city's most popular night spot, and packed the audience with her friends and admirers from the old days. When the Rolling Stones played Los Angeles soon afterward, Davies made sure to bring Turner backstage for a reunion, the result of which was Tina's third tour with the Stones, during which she famously performed a duet of "Honky Tonk Woman" with Mick Jagger. After she made a second appearance at the Ritz, Capitol offered Turner a contract, under which she recorded in London her version of an earlier Al Green hit, "Let's Stay Together." With a lush string arrangement backing up Turner's sophisticated delivery, the record became an instant dance-club hit and sent Tina back into the studio to record her first album in nearly five years. It would include one of the biggest single releases of the mid-1980s, a song she initially didn't want to record because, she said, it was "too wimpy."

"I just thought it was some old pop song," she later said of "What's Love Got to Do With It," "and I didn't like it. I had just never thought of singing pop." Discovering that the song had been written especially for her by British composer Terry Britten, Turner relented after Britten responded to her complaint that the song wasn't "rough enough" by picking up an electric guitar and instantly producing an earthier sound for the tune. Davies brought Turner another number for the album he wanted to assemble for her, a song Dire Straits had left off their Love Over Gold album after deciding it was more suitable for a female vocalist. It was called "Private Dancer" and would lend its name to the album that rocketed up the charts on its release in 1984, led on the singles charts by "What's Love Got to Do With It." Turner's voice, said the Los Angeles Times, could "melt vinyl," while Rolling Stone awarded the album four stars. When "What's Love" hit No. 1, the magazine gave Turner an extensive cover story. Appearances on talk shows, a national "Private Dancer" tour, and even another movie role in George Miller's film Mad Max—Beyond Thunderdome (for which Turner also performed the film's title song, "We Don't Need Another Hero"), soon followed. At the 1984 Grammy Awards, fresh from a triumphant European tour, Tina was awarded Best Female Pop Vocal for "What's Love," while her work on the album Better Be Good to Me earned Best Female Rock Vocal and "What's Love" was named Best Record of the Year. Her rehabilitation was complete, detailed in the 1993 feature film What's Love Got to Do With It?, starring Angela Bassett , based on her autobiography I, Tina.

The inspiration and faith Turner found in her Buddhist practice during her most difficult years still informs her life. In 1991, she generously agreed to appear in public with Ike Turner for the first time in 20 years, when the two were inducted into the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame; and despite those years with the Revue and her refusal to open for the new band Ike put together after 18 months in jail on drug-related charges, Turner still credits Ike with giving her a start in the music business. The price may have been high, but it brought with it a valuable lesson. "Sometimes, you've got to let everything go, purge yourself," Turner has said, "because you'll find when you're free, your true creativity, your true self comes out."

sources:

Armani, Eddy. The Real T. London: Blake, 1998.

Bigelow, Barbara, ed. Contemporary Black Biography. Detroit, MI: Gale Research, 1994.

Turner, Tina, with Kurt Loder. I, Tina: My Life Story. NY: William Morrow, 1986.

Welch, Chris. Take You Higher: The Tina Turner Experience. London: W.H. Allen, 1986.

related media:

What's Love Got to Do With It (118-min. film), based on the book I, Tina, starring Angela Bassett as Tina Turner and Laurence Fishburne as Ike, screenplay by Kate Lanier , directed by Brian Gibson, produced by Touchstone, 1993.

Norman Powers , writer-producer, Chelsea Lane Productions, New York, New York