Tumult!, page 3
She also had to contend with growing up amid rumors that, aside from being unwanted because they were unhappy, she was also not really even her father’s child at all and that, prior to her arrival, her father’s sister Martha Mae and her husband had been living with her parents. The whispers went that Martha was playing around with another man and that Anna Mae was actually that man’s child, not Richard’s. Then, when she arrived, looking quite different from her very darkskinned sister Alline (her self-description in memory was of a “red kid,” fair skinned and fair-haired), the surrounding community, who were “church people,” never cared much for her either.
The only thing she could really count on growing up was the love of her older sister, even though she was so different temperamentally from Anna Mae, Alline being more quiet and deliberate, while Anna Mae was wild to the core, right from the start. In the end, she was always left to her own solitary devices, always busy, running, moving, and doing things: tempestuous from the word go, feeling somewhat like a complete outsider (which she definitely was spirit-wise) and merely going off, almost happily secluded, on her own. Is it any wonder, then, that given the unpleasant energy field she found herself growing up in, she might be vulnerable enough to be compromised in her own toxic domestic tangle later on?
And this fateful upcoming turn of events would occur really before even being fully grown up at all, a teenager, meeting a man eight years her senior, a man with a band playing live music, but one who also had a dark side. The difference between her parents’ tangle of course and her own would be that in hers, she also had a rare opportunity to use her natural gifts in a liberating way: to sing, sing, sing. When it came to her hardship-riddled childhood, however, she always took a characteristically sunny attitude about it all.
“I didn’t dwell on it,” she told Rolling Stone’s Loder in 1986. “I had my own thing going, my own world. I had to make my own way. I had to go out into the world and become strong, to discover my mission in life.” Mission accomplished, I think it’s fair to say.
Turner would be just as typically blunt and emphatic thirty-two years later when talking to Deborah Davis and Dominik Wichmann, the authors who helped her curate her mature memories in My Love Story: “My struggle began at birth, when I entered the world as Anna Mae Bullock. Ever since then I have spent my entire life fighting my way through a climate of bad karma. There was a shadow hanging over my earliest years, cast by someone more absent than present, my mother.” The question of how it felt to be an unwanted child and, even more remarkably, how that child prevailed in spite of the many strikes against her forms the basic structure of her character, her later persona, and her life’s convoluted narrative in general.
Indeed, this woman’s earliest childhood memory was of her parents fighting, an interpersonal dynamic that simply had to have embedded itself into her psyche with a stubborn tenacity. The supreme irony is that she subsequently stumbled into exactly the same kind of loveless and threatening relationship herself. And yet this same curious combination of her private strength and personal vulnerability was also somehow captured publicly later on in her frequently revealing songs of love and loss, for all the world to share her suffering.
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Even if children find a way of living in their own world in order to survive adversity—especially the preternaturally talented ones prior to sharing their talents with the rest of us—the bigger world outside continues spinning its wheels unabated. Having been born into conflict and trauma, the larger world also continued to mirror Anna Mae’s strife-ridden family life, with whole countries standing in for parental collisions. Just as two months before she was born Europe slid into armed conflict, two years after she arrived the entire world was consumed in a war more terrifying than any before it.
In December 1941, Japan’s unexpected attack on Hawaii prompted a swift and consequential response, dragging the whole planet into a destructive binge of nationalist fervor that ironically also impacted the Bullock family personally. A sudden wartime employment boom associated with military industry and defense pants materialized, one especially helpful for formerly struggling black citizens looking for work, when a new army site opened in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, near Knoxville.
Both the prospect of fresh jobs and a cherished chance to escape from Nutbush appealed to Richard and Zelma Bullock, who oddly enough decided not to escape separately but to go together and leave their already neglected family behind. Government jobs obviously appealed to them more than farmwork ever had, and even though they hated each other, both seemed to resent, if not actually hate, their offspring almost as much, none of whom were ever really desired or especially cared for.
Alline was sent to live with the Native side of the family, while Anna Mae, much to her dismay, was sent to stay with “Mama” Roxanna and Alex Bullock, her father’s stern religious parents, the dour deacon and deaconess of the Woodlawn Missionary Baptist Church. It would turn her off conventional deity worship for the rest of her life, perhaps even starting her on a search for her own spiritual alternatives. But the gospel music she encountered in the sacred church setting, now that was a different story: the fiery music provoked by faith was something she could easily relate to wholeheartedly.
I’m fond of identifying certain artists by a seemingly paradoxical epithet, gospel funk. Aaron Cohen, music historian and author of a history of soul music titled Move On Up, tends to agree with me that this certainly mysterious category in music is nonetheless real and tangible: the notion that sacred music underwent significant stylistic innovations but remained at its root a boisterous expression of fervor merely shifted from faith into funk.
“There definitely is such a thing as gospel funk—check out the two Numero Group compilations under the Good God! title (although these compiled records are from after Tina Turner’s ascent). At this stage, I’m not sure that Tina Turner deviated too far afield from her contemporaries or influences in terms of translating the beat and repertoire from gospel into R&B, simply by changing the lyrics up, of course.”
True enough, he’s referring to the alteration of “Lord” into “Lover.” That recursive shift from gospel to soul also involves a shift in attention, in some extreme cases even transposing Lord into Ike. But in her formative years, it was always and significantly the sacred vibe that moved her. Apart from hearing popular music on her mother’s radio and attending those communal picnics, her first live musical influences were sacred ones, as emphasized in her Woman in Rock Rolling Stone entry identifying her influences: “Well it was a church person in the early days, Mahalia Jackson, and Rosetta Tharpe. These spiritual and very strong voices who I knew were figures in the black race, recognized and respected. But I must admit I’ve always covered the songs of males. I haven’t really listened to that much women’s music.”
In Joe Smith’s book Off the Record, stressing how little to no vocal training she’s had, she referenced singing some of the McGuire Sisters songs she listened to as a young girl when she was so often broken-hearted, already apparently singing the blues. It was second nature to her, as natural as speaking: “It makes me remember just how long I have really been singing.”
James Porter, Chicago-based music archivist and author of Wild in the Streets: Tales from Rock and Roll’s Negro Leagues, a forthcoming book on black rock music from Northwestern University Press, spoke eloquently to me about Tina Turner’s place in the pantheon of both great black rockers in general and exemplary black female pop artists in particular. Sharing my belief that she carried forward a considerable amount of gospel fury into her propulsive funk vibe, he also emphasized that she was always basically a practitioner of soul music, no matter how far afield her musical tastes diverged.
“Yes, Tina can still be considered a soul singer. I certainly think so. During all the style changes she went through, she never quite lost that churchy R&B feel. She may have embellished it with more rawness or sophistication, depending on the circumstances, but the soul feel was always at the core of it all with her.”
The young Anna Mae was asked to join the local church choir once her community discovered how easily she vocalized, and at the age of nine or ten, she was especially fond of doing the upbeat fast-tempo hymns, quite ready, it seemed, to be a tiny star and howl about heaven even then. Her sister observed her dancing so furiously to gospel tunes that her knickers would fall to her feet without her even realizing it. Always prepared to deliver drama, she also used to come home from the movies and act out scenes for her family, stretched out on the floor to demonstrate how starlets died on celluloid. Melodrama seemed to appeal to her nature.
By the time she was thirteen, she became an accidental orphan of sorts by virtue of desertion, her parents sharing both their strong disdain for each other as well as lacking the emotional wherewithal to care for their offspring. She made a little extra money by working for a friendly neighborhood family (i.e., people who actually loved each other), Guy and Connie Henderson, as a maid, once ironically telling McCall’s magazine, “I went to work for a nice white family as a maid. I was like their younger daughter. A lot of my training in being a woman—except for cooking—was from the Hendersons. I learned to take care of their baby, so when I had mine, I already knew everything.”
The parental separation lasted through to Anna Mae’s formative educational period at the Flagg Grove Elementary School up to the ninth grade, the same period during which she started singing in the church choir at Nutbush’s Spring Hill Baptist Church. Family trauma continued to accelerate when her mother suddenly disappeared for a time, finally seeking liberation from her abusive father. The future echoes in reverse are hard not to note here, with Anna Mae herself eventually having later to flee precisely the same kind of emotionally terrorizing dynamic as the one that had sired her.
As kind to her as the Hendersons were, they couldn’t quite teach her everything of course, such as how not to be with the completely wrong man. It strikes me that, like most cunning abusers, her future husband would quickly learn how to take advantage of and capitalize on her obvious childhood abandonment issues and use her extreme isolated vulnerability to his greatest advantage.
Shockingly, this would only be three years later, remember, when she naively wandered into what was known as “The Hole” neighborhood of East St. Louis with her older sister as an unwitting guide to the nightlife. Thus, the next seismic shift for the self-professed tomboy country girl occurred at sixteen when her grandmother died and Anna Mae was sent to the city to supposedly warmly reunite with her sister and wayward mother.
And in St. Louis, a large urban center with equally vast music and entertainment districts that must have seemed like another planet compared to Nutbush, there was yet another shock awaiting her: the young girl’s fateful encounter with Ike Turner. This was the extremely unpleasant man who would loom so large in her life story and create both a nightmare of domestic déjà vu while also weirdly providing an enlivening entry into her true calling in that life.
And here’s one of the strangest twists to the Tina saga. While it’s true that Ike was probably a psychopath—or at the very least a misogynistic sociopath—it’s equally true that without him, his music, and his initial sixteen-yearlong professional relationship, there would be no Tina. No one in the world may ever have known what would have become of Anna Mae Bullock if Turner hadn’t stepped into her field of karma at just the right moment to nudge it ever so slightly a few degrees closer to the direction of her dreams.
My own theory is that Anna Mae not only still exists but has actually always been right in front of our faces and ears impersonating Tina Turner. And what a masterful impression she’s given us of an ultimately soaring creative creature, a sheer wild pagan goddess let loose on all our senses at once. And if Tina can accurately be described as the hardest-working woman in show business (let’s borrow that title for a moment from James Brown)—and I think we’ll all agree she can—then it’s just as clear that Ike was the meanest man in show business.
But still, Ike’s admittedly bizarre legacy also includes the inexplicable fact that he gave us Tina, something for which we all need to be eternally grateful. Hell, I suspect even she is grateful, in some paradoxical way, since she knows what it meant for her to be given a rare chance to stand in the spotlight she so strongly desired. Once again, chance is the fool’s name for fate.
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Apart from his obvious musical and arranging and band-leading skills, and they were considerable, I will maintain that it was for his special genius as a talent scout that he was sent to earth and for which he should be justly remembered. Izear Luster “Ike” Turner Jr. lived from November 5, 1931, to December 12, 2007, and the man had one of the strangest lives imaginable—almost a strange as Tina’s, if a lot less inspiring. He began playing guitar and piano at the age of eight and would have been considered a creative prodigy if he hadn’t been nuts. But even if he was nuts, his powers of invention were prodigious, just as prodigious as his later bad appetites would be.
Quite rightly described by Mojo magazine’s editor Phil Alexander as “the cornerstone of modern-day rock and roll,” Turner was born in Clarksdale, Mississippi, to Beatrice Cushenbury, a seamstress, and Isaiah (or Izear) Luster Turner, a Baptist minister. Turner often related a story about his father having been set on and beaten by a white mob (which he claimed to have witnessed), leaving him an invalid for three years before succumbing to his injuries, though, like most Ike stories, it might need to be taken with a pound of salt.
Blues historian Ted Drozdowski is on record as saying that Isaiah died in an industrial accident. Either way, it led to his mother remarrying to a man named Philip Reeves, a violent alcoholic with whom Ike often argued and fought physically, going so far as to knock his stepfather out with a piece of wood and fleeing to Memphis. Eventually, later in life, they reconciled, presumably when both had exhausted all of their mutual rage. The scenario does, however, allow us to speculate on the psychic impact of such a domestic environment on young Ike Jr., and we don’t have to be Freud to wonder about his personal history when it comes to sexual experiences and often the merging of the two contradictory impulses: to love and to destroy.
He has recounted how he was “introduced” to sex at the age of six by a middle-aged lady called Miss Boozie. When walking past her house on his way to school, he would be invited in to feed her chickens and then be taken to bed by her, a practice that continued for several years. He claimed not to have been traumatized by these encounters, observing wryly to Celebrity Café that “today they would call it child molesting, to me I was just having fun,” as described to Dominick Miserandino for a Hall of Famer profile piece. Apparently a favorite of questionably adjusted ladies, he also seems to have been raped twice by other women before he was twelve.
At the tender age of eight, he began to hang out at the local Clarksdale radio station, WROX, one of the few stations known to employ a black deejay, an unusual character known as Early Wright. Another deejay, John Frisella, decided to put the hang-about kid to work spinning platters, which Ike described as “the beginning of his thing with music.” Before long, he was left alone to play records on his own while the adult deejay went across the street for a coffee and a smoke. Freedom of expression and low impulse control loomed large in his saga right from the beginning.
After this rather odd initiation, a few years later, while still a tender teen, he was offered the formal job of deejay for the later afternoon shift by the station manager, a job that meant he had instant and personal access to all new record releases before anyone else saw or heard them. He was known even in this early phase as someone devoted to a wide-ranging diversity in musical styles, often juxtaposing surprising combinations of songs (such as boogie mixed with rockabilly) in a form that today may be called mashups. No name existed for it at all back then, of course.
On a fateful visit to his friend Ernest Lane’s house, he happened to come on the legendary Pinetop Perkins playing piano on his chum’s father’s instrument, something that seemed to have catalyzed an already burgeoning love of and voracious curiosity about music. He also seemed gifted with guile even as a kid, persuading his mother to pay for piano lessons, but instead of taking them, he spent the money at pool halls and went to his pal Ernest’s house to watch and listen to Pinetop playing alone in an audience of two. There are, of course, worse ways to learn about music than by absorbing it at the knee of a boogie-woogie legend.
He then taught himself to play guitar by listening to old blues records, and at some point in the 1940s, he moved into the Clarksdale Riverside Hotel, run by an amiable lady who didn’t rape him but did expose him to myriad touring musicians who stayed there. Among the stars who passed through the hotel he shared with them on the road were giants such as blues king Sonny Boy Williamson II and jazz titan Duke Ellington, with whom he would play music when they were touring through town. Again, there are worse ways to learn about the magic of rhythm than by hanging around and drinking with Duke.
Demonstrating the same kind of supernatural maturity (music-wise, not emotionally) as other young, gifted history makers, such as Lennon and McCartney, Jagger and Richards, and others, all of whom started playing together while only about sixteen, while still in high school (something he never paid much attention to), he joined a local rhythm ensemble, as they were then known, called the Tophatters, which included a few of his youthful friends: Raymond Hill, Eugene Fox, and Clayton Love. Turner, who could not read music, learned his parts by listening to records at home and then re-creating his parts live on the stage. The audacious kid had guts galore.
The Tophatters was a very large band, half of which wanted to play jazz while the other half wanted to play blues and boogie music, so they split in two: one group called itself the Dukes of Swing and the other, Turner’s portion, called themselves the Kings of Rhythm, a band name that Turner maintained throughout the rest of his lengthy career. This precocious career at one formative stage included blues great BB King hearing them play and recommending them to the legendary Sam Phillips at Sun Studio (recording home of Elvis Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis, among others).
